File.00: Synopsis

Alan Wake (2010)

The protagonist, bestselling thriller novelist Alan Wake, had fallen into a severe writer’s block lasting over two years. For a restorative retreat, he and his wife, Alice, visit the rural town of Bright Falls, Washington, staying in a cabin on a small island situated in Cauldron Lake. However, a supernatural evil entity known as the “Dark Presence” lurked at the bottom of the lake.

The Dark Presence drags Alice into the depths of the lake, and Alan dives in after her in an attempt to save her. When Alan next wakes up, he is inside a crashed car, one week later. He has completely lost his memories of the intervening week.

Stepping out of the car, Alan begins to collect scattered manuscript pages of a new novel he has no memory of writing, titled Departure. Horrifyingly, the supernatural events detailed in the manuscript begin to manifest into reality one after another, and townspeople possessed by the Dark Presence—known as the “Taken”—attack him. Wielding light (such as a flashlight) as a weapon, Alan is forced to fight to rewrite the ending of his own story and rescue Alice.

As he investigates, Alan learns of Thomas Zane, a poet who was similarly ensnared by the darkness of Cauldron Lake in the 1970s. Zane had previously sacrificed himself and his lover to contain the Dark Presence, and had written a narrative failsafe—a Deus ex Machina-like item—called the “Clicker” into his manuscript for Alan, who he foresaw would appear in the future.

To defeat the Dark Presence (which had taken the form of Barbara Jagger) using the power of the story, Alan uses the Clicker left by Zane to drive light into his own heart. However, Alan realizes an absolute rule of creation: “a good story requires balance (a price to pay).” In a horror novel, a happy ending where no one is sacrificed simply cannot exist.

Ultimately, as the price for bringing Alice back safely to the real world, Alan writes an ending that imprisons himself in the “Dark Place,” an otherworldly dimension at the bottom of Cauldron Lake. While Alice awakens in the real world, Alan, trapped in the Dark Place, leaves behind the cryptic words, “It’s not a lake, it’s an ocean,” suggesting that this supernatural threat extends far beyond a mere lake, bringing the story to a close.

Alan Wake 2 (2023)

The year is 2023, 13 years after the previous installment. The narrative unfolds through the intersecting perspectives of two protagonists: Saga Anderson, an FBI agent investigating a series of ritualistic murders in Bright Falls, and Alan Wake, who has been trapped in the Dark Place for 13 years, continuously writing the escape stories Initiation and Return while fighting off madness.

Saga, alongside her partner Alex Casey, proceeds with the investigation into a cult known as the “Cult of the Tree,” but soon “manuscript pages written by Alan” begin manifesting into reality around her. Even more terrifying, as a result of reality being rewritten, it is now established that Saga’s daughter, Logan, died in a drowning accident several years prior. To reclaim her beloved daughter and her own reality, Saga steps into the heart of the supernatural phenomena.

Meanwhile, Alan in the Dark Place has been repeating a loop of rewriting his manuscript for escape within a nightmarish space modeled after the streets of New York. Believing that his evil doppelgänger, “Mr. Scratch,” is writing the story Return to bring ruin to the real world, Alan scrambles to stop him.

However, a cruel truth is revealed in the middle of the story. There was no separate monster named Scratch; his true identity was “Alan himself, possessed by the Dark Presence due to the despair and madness of repeated loops.” Alan had been driving himself into a corner, unconsciously writing a destructive story. Furthermore, it becomes clear that the “Cult of the Tree” Saga was pursuing was not a cult attempting to summon the Dark Presence, but was actually a vigilante group operating to protect the town from the Dark Presence (and Scratch).

Utilizing her supernatural abilities (discerning the truth within her mental space, the “Mind Place”), Saga reaches the Dark Place. There, she is guided by Alice Wake, who was rescued in the previous game and later willingly returned to the Dark Place to save Alan. Alice conveys that what Alan is experiencing is not an inescapable “loop,” but rather a “spiral” steadily leading toward an exit.

Saga and Alan join forces and write a new ending to the altered story, Return. Saga shoots the “Bullet of Light” left by Alice into Alan’s (Scratch’s) head, completely and physically purging the Dark Presence from within him.

In the final moments of the story, Alan appears to have met his death, only to awaken once more. Saga’s daughter, Logan, safely answers the phone, suggesting that reality has been properly restored. Alan finally and completely understands that the structure surrounding him is “not a loop, it’s a spiral,” awakening as the “Master of Two Worlds” who has overcome the Dark Presence. It was the moment they finally broke free from a 13-year spiral of endless terror and self-destruction.