Alan Wake 2 is the reason I now sleep with a lamp on

I want it on record that I am not a gamer. I am a woman who owns a games console the way some people own a rowing machine: with good intentions and a thin layer of dust. So when I tell you Alan Wake 2 is the reason I have started sleeping with a lamp on, understand that it takes some doing to frighten someone whose main gaming experience is failing at a cooking simulator.

For anyone who has not come across it, Alan Wake 2 is a survival horror game about a writer trapped inside a nightmare version of his own story, and an FBI agent investigating murders that seem to be following the plot of a book that should not exist yet. That sentence makes more sense once you are playing it, and somehow less sense the longer you think about it, which is exactly the mood the whole thing is going for.

The bit where I put the controller down

There is a torch mechanic in this game. You have to shine your torch on the monsters before your other weapons will actually do anything to them, which means the game forces you to look directly at the thing chasing you for several full seconds before you are allowed to fight back. Whoever designed that deserves a stern word and also, honestly, my respect.

I played the opening hours with the sound down at first, which I do not recommend, because it turns out watching horror with no sound is somehow worse. You lose the warning and keep the dread. I turned the sound back on, made a cup of tea I never drank, and carried on with the lights up rather higher than the game intended.

There is a particular sequence in the Dark Place, the story's fractured, shifting version of a city, where the environment itself starts rearranging around you while you walk. I am not going to describe exactly what happens because it would spoil a genuinely well built moment, but I will say I paused the game, went and checked my own front door was locked, and came back. My flat is nowhere near as strange as that city. I checked anyway.

Badly played, thoroughly enjoyed

I died a lot. I want to be honest about that rather than pretend I swept through it like some sort of horror professional. I ran past enemies I was supposed to fight, hid in cupboards that offered no actual protection, and once spent a good two minutes lost in a level because I had walked in a circle without noticing. None of that took away from how good the game is. If anything, playing it badly meant I spent longer than most people in the parts designed to unsettle you, which is either the worst or the best way to experience it, depending on your nerves.

What struck me most is how much of the fear comes from atmosphere rather than jump scares. There are jump scares, and they work, but the game is patient. It lets a room sit wrong for a while before anything happens in it. That is proper horror craft, the kind of thing I usually only get from a well written ghost story, and I was not expecting a console game to manage it this well.

If you want something for the console to go with a cosy horror night in, and by cosy I mean a blanket, a torch of your own for backup, and possibly a second person in the room to make you feel braver than you are, this is the one I would point you towards this autumn. Alan Wake 2 game I am aware I have described almost none of the actual plot, which is deliberate. Go in as unprepared as I was. It is better that way, even if, like me, you end up leaving a lamp on afterwards.

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