“The Lake House” DLC Is a Tightly-Paced Welcome Addition to the ‘Alan Wake 2’ Mythology [Review]

One of the things that makes Alan Wake 2 a masterpiece is its ability to juggle multiple tones. It’s a dark detective story. It’s a metafictional surrealist horror story. It’s got humor, scares, and even a full-on musical number. Remedy flexed their tonal muscles earlier this year with Alan Wake 2’s first DLC, Night Springs, giving us three separate Elseworld-style stories all with their own thematic focus. These were charming little tales, but it feels like The Lake House, the game’s second and final DLC, is the more substantial follow-up that fans of both Alan Wake and Control have been waiting for.

The story of The Lake House fills in some gaps in the main Alan Wake 2 narrative, showing how the Federal Bureau of Control ended up in Bright Falls when Alan returned. You play as the returning Agent Kieran Estevez, played by Janina Gavankar, who comes to Bright Falls to investigate an incident at titular Lake House, a research station set up by the FBC to study the strange nature of Cauldron Lake. Estevez recounts her tale to Saga Anderson, providing an excuse for her to deliver Remedy’s signature form of voiceover narration. It’s refreshing to give her character some more breathing room, as she was memorable in the base game and even more fleshed out here.

While the story is set in Bright Falls, it immediately feels like you’re back in the world of Control when you enter the Lake House. Brutalist architecture and CRT monitors fill out the space along with wonderfully weird science machines, but these halls are much darker and more intense than the Oldest House. Much like Control’s DLC AWE, this is a perfect meld of the tones of the two different games, making for something that satisfies fans of both.

Just because Agent Estevez is part of the FBC, don’t expect her to have powers like Jesse Faden; gameplay here remains the same as playing as Saga or Alan. The majority of the enemies in the game have to be dealt with using the classic combination of flashlight and firearms that you’ll be used to from the main game. Enemy encounters remain tense, forcing you to duck and weave around them while taking precise shots so you’re not wasting valuable ammo or getting hurt and expending your dwindling health kits. There are some pretty clever encounters where you’re purposefully overwhelmed, but can circumvent the fights altogether if you’re smart about getting around the arena. There’s even a new enemy type that can only be killed with a specific weapon that takes longer to charge and has extremely limited ammo, adding in some smart decision making to those encounters.

This is definitely a return to the darker side of Alan Wake’s lore, telling a story of how FBC researchers, the husband and wife duo of Jules and Diana Marmont, are trying different things to harness the energies of Cauldron Lake that transformed Alan’s writing into reality. Everything goes wrong when an experiment with paintings wreaks havoc on the facility, creating some nearly unkillable paint monsters in the process. Through the game’s well-written lore notes, you’ll learn about the dark experiments that lead to the Marmonts’ losing control of the facility.

And you’ll want to find all these lore notes, because the light they shed on the Marmonts is delightful. From their bickering introduction video that plays when you enter the Lake House, in which they each pronounce their last name a different way, to the evidence of their deteriorating relationship, they make another great addition to the cast of fantastic side characters in the Remedy Connected Universe. Their relationship is the driving force of this story, and the strength of their characters elevates the DLC as a whole.

There are five subfloors that you’ll explore in the Lake House, and they are gated with some fairly light puzzle solving. There’s a couple instances of the reality changing gimmick that Alan does with his light in the base game, but it doesn’t show up quite as much as I would have liked. To keep you locked on each floor, the elevator door vanishes and moves when you step into a new area, forcing you to find where it’s moved to, which is a particularly flavorful touch to gating the player. Much like both Control and Alan Wake, this DLC plays with shifting spaces, occasionally sending you looping through repeating sections of the facility that subtly change each time. None of the puzzle solving is too in-depth, but it keeps the approximately three hour story moving at a nice pace.

There were a few sections of the DLC that caught me up and hampered some of my enjoyment, especially near the end. When you get lower in the Lake House, one of the floors is particularly warped, and I was focusing too long on trying to figure out if there was a trick to navigating it and completely missed something that could have been signposted better. I couldn’t tell if it was something that was there from the start or if it only showed up after reality shifted around me, but either way it caused me some frustration that I don’t think was entirely my fault. The end boss fight was also a big step up in challenge from the rest of the DLC, especially if you’ve used up all your ammo for the special weapon I mentioned earlier.

The Alan Wake series has always been about tortured artists, making The Lake House a great addition to the game’s mythology. It’s a tightly-paced adventure that throws you back into the deep end of the darker corners of the Remedy Connected Universe, featuring a great new playable character and some awesome side characters, adding to what is already one of my favorite games of all time. While I’m sad this is the end of the road for Alan Wake 2, The Lake House does have some nice little teasers for what might lie ahead with Control 2, or maybe even the recently announced co-op shooter FBC: Firebreak, so I’m already getting excited to see what Remedy has in store for us next.

The Lake House DLC is available now on PC via the Epic Games Store, PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series as part of the Alan Wake 2 Deluxe Edition upgrade.