The Lake House: Alan Wake II DLC Review
Under any other circumstance, The Lake House would sound like a nice spot for a serene summer getaway. In this case, though, it’s the setting for the second and final installment of Alan Wake II DLC, so it is naturally anything but. There’s no rest and relaxation to be found here, only another double-fisted dose of flashlights and firepower in this tightly paced two-hour tour inside the cold, concrete walls of a remote Federal Bureau of Control facility. In raw gameplay terms, The Lake House is not as eccentric a departure as Night Springs was a few months’ back, but as far as closing the book on Alan Wake II’s story and providing a bridge to the upcoming Control 2 goes, it’s yet another meta-storytelling slam dunk for the team at Remedy Entertainment.
The Story Unfolds
You might remember The Lake House from the main Alan Wake II campaign, or at the very least the exterior of its grounds since it’s found behind a locked gate in Cauldron Lake near where the murder victim is found at the start of Saga Anderson’s story. This FBC research facility was strictly off-limits to Saga, but in this new chapter we’re able to fully explore it as returning FBC Agent Kiran Estevez. I liked Estevez in the main campaign and was happy to spend some time in her shoes, but the real show-stealing performances here come from the husband and wife scientist team of Jules and Diana Marmont. Initially I was laughing out loud at the petty bickering between them that occurs in the facility’s welcome video, but their relationship evidently took a much darker turn as evidenced by the many memos and emails I pored over as I continued my engrossing investigation inside the sinister shapeshifting structure.
The facility itself is only five floors, but thanks to its proximity to the Altered World Event in Cauldron Lake and the disturbing research experiments conducted by the Marmonts, The Lake House is as consistently unsettling a space as anything from the main Alan Wake II campaign. One floor finds Estevez caught in a disorientating loop, another has shifting canvases splashed in abstract Jackson Pollock-style sprays, while another still is just a near-never-ending room of ominously clattering typewriters, like a manifestation of the infinite monkey theorem minus the tiny simian scribes. It’s a superbly constructed bit of otherworldly office space that I delighted in exploring, whether I was thumbing through the chilling pages of another Alan Wake manuscript or having conversations with a possessed painting so angry it made Vigo the Carpathian from Ghostbusters II seem like a portrait of a puppy dog.
The Lake House is absolutely blanketed in an unnerving atmosphere, but it’s perhaps a little lacking as far as puzzles go. Aside from carrying battery cubes to electrical sockets, which stimulates the eye with its orange glow but isn’t particularly taxing on the brain, there are otherwise only a handful of computer passwords to figure out using calendar dates mentioned in memos and the like. These hackneyed hacking jobs are pretty easy to deduce, and it was a little disappointing that there was nothing new here to match the mind-bending magic tricks provided by Alan’s world-altering Angel Lamp in the main campaign.
Shadow Complex
Combat against the shadow-cloaked staff of The Lake House is equally as straightforward for the most part, but it’s still extremely tense thanks to its typically claustrophobic close-quarters encounters. Estevez might be an FBC agent, but sadly she doesn’t possess the shapeshifting gun or superpowers that Jesse Faden wielded in 2019’s Control. Instead, a pistol, shotgun, and a combination of flashlight, flares, and flashbangs are at her disposal, and I burned through every last round and spare battery as I desperately tried to illuminate and exterminate each sickle-slinging flanker and sledgehammer-swinging heavy that ambushed me along the way.
Outside of its main boss fight, there’s only one new enemy type to be found in The Lake House, but it’s a doozy. The long-limbed freaks that slither out of painted canvases seem like Remedy’s towering, tie-dyed take on the Slender Man, and since they seem immune to Estevez’s attacks I was going hard on the dodge button early on to frantically try and evade their outstretched clutches. Eventually Estevez gets her hands on a grenade launcher powerful enough to turn the tables on these paint-streaked Stretch Armstrongs, but that didn’t mean that dealing with them ever became too easy – grenade ammo is scarce, the painted shadows are slim enough that they’re somewhat easy to miss, and the fact you need to charge up each shot before you fire puts some added pressure into the timing of each takedown.
The Lake House’s challenge jumped up even further in its final boss fight – whose identity was a fun surprise from a story perspective – and it brought my brief return trip to the world of Alan Wake II to a dazzling and demanding denouement. My short stay in The Lake House was brutalist in its architecture and brutalising in its action, and although it’s bittersweet that my time with Alan Wake II has officially come to an end, the tantalising story teases of what comes next in the Remedy Connected Universe has me locked and loaded for Control 2.