Alan Wake 2’s Night Springs DLC Is Somehow Even Weirder Than The Base Game
“If you thought we were meta before, wait until you see this,” Remedy’s Thomas Puha told me at the start of a recent Alan Wake 2 DLC preview. The first expansion for one of 2023’s best games is on the way, with the Alan Wake 2 Night Springs DLC launching for all Expansion Pass owners tomorrow, June 8. It’s the first of two expansions and is split into a trio of hour-long episodes, each made to look like Night Springs, the in-universe television anthology inspired by The Twilight Zone. In a hands-off demo I attended, it quickly became obvious that Puha is correct. Somehow, despite the chaotic, ouroboros-like metanarrative that is Alan Wake 2, the DLC seems even weirder.
The premise of the DLC is players experiencing three failed attempts by Alan to escape the Dark Place before the events of Alan Wake 2, meaning exactly when they land in the 13 years he’s been trapped there is a bit unclear at this point. As Alan fought with fiction to create his own exit strategy, twisting and morphing three scripts from his time as a TV writer became his next effort, which lends itself very well to the high strangeness Remedy has leaned into more and more since 2019’s Control.
In one episode titled Number One Fan, The Waitress–who looks like Rose Marigold but who is not literally her–steps away from her shift at Nite’s Diner (an echo of the Oh, Deer Diner) to rescue her lover, the Bestselling Writer. The episode opens with a pastel pinkish filter, a saccharine monologue narrated by The Waitress, and our hero of this episode dispensing to her loyal customers both delicious coffee and “really good advice.”