The Digital Foundry verdict on Remedy's next big game.
Earned across decades of development, Remedy Entertainment has a stellar reputation for pushing game technology to new heights. From the physics-driven mayhem of Max Payne 2 to the ray-traced brutalism of Control, and of course the volumetrics-heavy wilderness of Alan Wake, each major Remedy release has pushed visual boundaries on its host hardware. Alan Wake 2 is no exception: this is a top-flight technical treat that pushes modern systems hard, with often extraordinary visual results.
Let's be clear. Alan Wake 2 is an extremely impressive technical and artistic achievement, and a brilliant showcase for Remedy's in-house Northlight game engine. A lot of its impact comes down to the game's very high quality indirect lighting. Every environment has an excellent presentation of global illumination, with light bouncing convincingly through constrained hallways and forested outdoor areas alike.
The high quality of the character models helps a lot too. Facial detail is exquisite and skin shading looks accurate and correct across a wide range of lighting conditions. Hair seems to be card-based , but looks appropriately complex and animates reasonably well. A few cutscene moments do seem a bit uncanny though, and facial animation doesn't always match the fidelity of the facial rendering.
This brings us to the PC release and its path-traced glory. When I started tackling the PS5 code, more than anything else I wanted to know just how much console players were missing out by playing Alan Wake 2 without the game's key ray tracing features. The answer is quite a bit - but less than I expected. Reflections and shadows are obviously cleaned up enormously with path-traced lighting turned on, with pin-sharp mirror reflections across calm bodies of water and mirrors.
Quality mode upscales from 1270p to 2160p using FSR 2 balanced mode, targets 30fps and does a good job of sustaining the target - though occasionally, some areas fall just a little short. I also noticed some glitches while playing that you can check out in the video - the kind of bugginess and jank often seen on games reaching the end of their development. I expect that these issues will be sorted out in time and it's possible that some may have been addressed in the day one patch, where Remedy tells us they're aiming to cross the Ts and dot the Is in terms of polish.
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