After its joyful romp through the multiversal lens of its Night Springs DLC earlier in the year, Alan Wake 2 rounds out its pair of story expansions by going back to what it does best: dialling up the horror, switching off the lights, and having all manner of shadowy ghouls lurch out of the darkness to give you a good old scare. In The Lake House, FDC agent Kiran Estevez finally takes us beyond the chain-link fence of Cauldron Lake's most secretive, walled-off area - the titular research lab where inside its brutalist, concrete depths lurks an experiment that's gone terribly, terribly wrong, and threatens to cause another catastrophic event that could spell disaster for the nearby town of Bright Falls. Alan Wake 2 DLC: The Lake House review Developer: Remedy Entertainment Publisher: Epic Games Platform: Played on PC Availability: Out now on PC ( Epic Games Store ), Xbox Series X/S , PS5 But despite taking place before the events of the main game kick off in earnest, both the setting and its new protagonist almost make The Lake House seem more like a warm-up for Remedy's Control 2 sequel than it does its Alan Wake namesake.
This three-hour excursion into the lab's dark, paint-splattered hallways is a mostly tense and spooky affair throughout, but one that feels a little bit lacking in what made Alan Wake 2 so special when it came out last year - namely, it has a lot more in common with Saga's more pedestrian side of the story than it does with Alan's reality-bending writer's b.
