After months of rumour, speculation, and leaked screenshots, Remedy Games finally, officially announced its not-a-sequel Alan Wake’s American Nightmare at the Spike TV VGAs last weekend.
The downloadable Xbox LIVE Arcade exclusive (for now, anyway) sees Alan Wake apparently trapped in Arizona in an episode of Night Springs he’d previously written, and hunting down [spoilers] from [spoilers].
“American Nightmare is made for [XBLA]. We can go wilder with the weapons and include the kind of enemies that you would never expect in the Alan Wake universe. The Night Springs setting has enabled us to try out things we wouldn’t have been able to try out in the first game,” Remedy’s head of franchise development Oskari Häkkinen told Edge.
“If there was ever a Twillight Zone episode with Alan Wake’s story themes, this would be it.”
Asked if the “hammy” voice acting in the trailer was a deliberate design decision, creative director and writer Sam Lake said it’s all a matter of “inspiration”.
“We are very conscious of our sources of inspiration and have always been very open about where we draw those from,” he explained. “Personally, I think that that’s a wonderful part of working on videogames, just looking at pop culture at large there are so many cool things out there that are very rarely consciously taken and used as a source of inspiration in games. With Max Payne it was film noir, Hong Kong action movies and a US action movies from the ‘80s and ‘90s; with Alan Wake it was obviously Stephen King and Twin Peaks and more literary sources. Here, it’s very much B movie, Tarantino and grind house.”
Remedy also recently confirmed they’ll be bringing the original Alan Wake game over to PC, two or three years after cancelling it for PC. That kind of improbable resurrection probably deserves its own episode of Night Springs.
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