In addition to scaring Alan Wake 2 players, Remedy used this signature horror trick for technical reasons…

Remedy has managed to make our hair stand on end with Alan Wake 2. The title keeps a good number of users in constant terror with both its creepy environment and the series of jumpscares that appear during the adventure. This last feature has become such a recurring element in the experience that it has already annoyed some people. Moreover, Remedy released a post-release patch to reduce some of these scares. And now, the developers have looked back on it, emphasizing its usefulness beyond horror.

Alan Wake 2 director Kyle Rowley addressed the issue in an interview with GamesRadar+. “It’s difficult,” he replied when asked about the balance of introducing jumpscares without going overboard. “I feel like we kind of overdid it a little bit looking back.” Remedy had a very specific vision in mind when it came to incorporating jumpscares:

“Thematically, story-wise, they’re meant to be like a psychological attack on the character who’s receiving them.”

However, jumpscare had an alternative benefit beyond scaring: it transformed the environment surrounding the user. “We do use them just for technical reasons as well, from a mission flow and level design and gameplay design perspective,” continues Rowley. “We had these two reasons, and they kind of served slightly different purposes. But for a player, it came across basically as a jump scare no matter how we utilized it, whether it was through this story narrative reason or for gameplay reasons.”

The Lake House, the new DLC for Alan Wake 2, doesn’t rely so heavily on jumpscares

Yesterday, October 22, Remedy launched Alan Wake 2’s The Lake House expansion. Well, are we still going to see a lot of jumpscares in the DLC? A little less, if everything is true. Without going into spoilery details, the director said: “For this one, we’ve tried to make sure that we utilize them – and maybe in a slightly more reduced manner – but they are still a key part of our way of getting across the mental state of characters and the way the supernatural works and the way the psychological elements of the game works.” So be prepared that we will still have unexpected scares: “We wanted to keep them as part of our repertoire of tools to kind of scare the player and get across some narrative beats.”

Source: GamesRadar+