TapTap Game of the Year 2023 #4: Alan Wake II - the best action game of 2023

Alan Wake II starts off like a gritty detective serial, but it doesn’t take long for reality to break down completely. It whisks players along on a surreal adventure through dreams and memories that is at turns terrifying, grandiose, and hilarious. It’s the rare game that defies genre boundaries and illustrates the incredible power of video games as a new storytelling medium, one that can draw inspiration from older forms while never being constrained by them.

It’s tricky to describe any part of Alan Wake II without reducing the magic out of it, and it would be a disservice to anyone who hasn’t played it to spoil it. The game’s ability to surprise and delight me again and again was a huge part of the thrill I felt while playing through its twin narratives, which twist around each other like the double helix in a strand of DNA.

Both stories play with our ideas about memory, perception, and storytelling itself: Saga Anderson’s tale is one that we explore forensically, looking for hints and clues that together form a coherent account of what happened, while Alan Wake’s side is about experimenting with premises and settings, eventually settling in on a narrative that accounts for all the loose ends.

Alan Wake 2 offers a terrifying, warped reality in which David Lynch made Resident Evil 4

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If that all sounds a bit too abstract, don’t worry: Alan Wake II’s moment-to-moment gameplay is a technical marvel too, as well as being downright terrifying. When you’re not playing as FBI agent Saga Anderson, exploring the spooky areas around the rural Washington town of Bright Falls, you’re guiding Alan through his dark and unreliable memories of the hotels and city streets of his recurring nightmares.

This all amounts to a game that is fresh and surprising in each unfolding chapter, not simply by introducing new game mechanics (though those are there too), but by bending the rules and conventional wisdom about game narratives at every step along the way. What begins looking like an eerie police procedural quickly becomes something profoundly weirder, and once that ride leaves the station, it just keeps going.

All this is to say nothing about what a stupendous game Alan Wake II is from a production standpoint. Ray-traced lighting effects play off the rain-soaked streets of Bright Falls and deepen the sinister shadows that fill up the subway corridors. Characters are animated by fully motion captured performances, putting Alan Wake II up into the rarified air of Baldur’s Gate 3.

And then there’s some stuff you just have to see to believe.

Alan Wake II is a truly remarkable game that only Remedy could have made, and it’s a shoo-in for our list of 2023’s top ten best games.

Check out the rest of TapTap's Game of the Year 2023 picks at this link, and share your own choices in the comments or by making a post and using the tag #TapTap GOTY 2023.