Behind the Haunting Sound of Alan Wake 2 – huge interview with the audio team at Remedy!

Remedy Entertainment’s newest game Alan Wake 2 is the highly anticipated and well received follow up to Alan Wake. With 13 years between the two games, so much has changed in terms of technology and the quality of entertainment in general, be it games, films, or TV series, and this had a powerful impact on the game’s sound.

Additionally, Alan Wake 2 is a survival horror game, so the sound team could lean into the darker aspects of the original game and build on that in twisted and terrifying ways.

Here, the Alan Wake 2 sound team – Audio Director Richard Lapington, Principal Audio Designer Tazio Schiesari, Composer Petri Alanko, Senior Audio Designer Thomas Holmes, Senior Audio Designer Gulli Gunnarson, Senior Dialogue Designer Taneli Suoranta, Senior Dialogue Designer Arthur Tisseront, and Technical Audio Designer Henry Scott – talk about taking this game into the horror realm. They discuss the aesthetic influence of series like Twin Peaks, True Detective, Stranger Things, and Archive 81, and using new technologies like Dolby Atmos and Sony’s 3D audio and features of Audio Kinetic’s Wwise middleware. They talk about creating new music, from the game’s score to diegetic music for Coffee World and more. They also share how they recorded and processed vocals for the ‘Taken’ and the ‘Fade Outs,’ how they handcrafted the immersive rain sounds, how they used physics audio (such as the player accidentally knocking bottles off of a table) as a natural and systematic way of creating horror tropes, how they handled the Angel Lamp, reality rewrites, teleporting, and other sound designed elements. Plus, they talk about dividing the game aspect and live-action aspects between different teams, and so much more!

Alan Wake 2 — Launch Trailer

It’s been 13 years since the first Alan Wake game. How have changes in technology helped you achieve what you wanted to do creatively with Alan Wake 2?

Richard Lapington (RL): This is an interesting question as it’s difficult to compare audio for games 13 years apart. In general, you can’t compare the Xbox 360 and PS3 days to now. The sheer quantity and granularity of sounds we can now playback, along with increased processing power and real-time effects available, makes it easier to sculpt the sound you want. But this is also a double-edged sword. These big games have become increasingly more complex to make, requiring more time and expertise.

These big games have become increasingly more complex to make, requiring more time and expertise.

At Remedy, because of the type of games we make, we try to approach the audio of each game uniquely, looking at what the game style requires. After this, we see what knowledge we can apply that we’ve learned from previous titles. Also, we try to take into consideration anything ‘new’ that could service the game well. This time around we looked pretty deeply into Dolby Atmos and Sony’s 3D audio.

 

How does the sound of Alan Wake 2 compare to / differ from the sound of the first game?

RL: 13 years for a sequel is quite a long time. So when planning out the audio, there were quite a few things to consider. First, the genre and ratings were different. Alan Wake 2 is a horror title with a mature rating. Considering that the media landscape has also changed – with streaming services hosting a plethora of high-quality TV shows (e.g., True Detective didn’t exist in 2010) – both game and TV audiences have matured in the last 13 years, which means you can take more risks with the audio.

There are elements that we wanted to pay homage to from the original game…But at the same time, we were thinking of modernizing the sound, too.

There are elements that we wanted to pay homage to from the original game, for example, the enemy voices, some of the music choices, and the sounds of a small town in the Pacific Northwest. But at the same time, we were thinking of modernizing the sound, too.

AW2 is a slower, more mature title and the visuals are stunning. The details in the world and the depth of the sound/music/VO design are reflective of this. With the game being slower-paced and more open than the original, the audioscape takes on a bigger role in driving the player forward, and the details in the audio have greater importance.

Tazio Schiesari (T. Schiesari): A hiatus of 13 years, a new perspective, and a new genre also implied that even though we held on to some concepts and some signature sound choices, none of the assets from the original game were going to be maintained. So for AW2, everything has been designed anew from the ground up.

With the new focus on psychological horror, we knew early on that we wanted to give more weight and detail to the characters. This meant spending a lot of time working on the player character movements and their breathing, as well as updating the combat system to a closer and bolder level, making it feel more visceral and desperate.

With the new focus on psychological horror, we knew early on that we wanted to give more weight and detail to the characters.

In addition, we wanted to recreate a state of hyper-awareness through sound. Often when we are in a heightened state, we notice the quiet details in our surroundings much more because we are scanning it for potential danger.

These choices meant a wider dynamic range and a lot of extra manual detail work but it paid off in the end.

Petri Alanko (PA): For the transition from Alan Wake to Alan Wake 2 music-wise, what separates these two games is the use of instrumentation; in Alan Wake, only string instruments were allowed with occasional accompaniment and flavor from electronic sources.

Whereas with AW2, a much wider variety of blended and mutilated orchestral colors were used. For instance, Saga’s world relies on a more concrete soundscape, while in the Dark Place, the tuning and overtones add to the sense of suffering from all sorts of ‘pressure’ and ‘gravity.’ A lot of elements were created by feeding elements through metal/clangorous impulse responses, or using tone transfer AI methods using a seed batch material of our own, drawn from Apprehension Engine and Marvin.

 

The Alan Wake games have a Twin Peaks-vibe to them. How did you support that sound aesthetic and the dynamics associated with TV shows? Were there other shows that influenced or inspired your sound work on Alan Wake 2?

RL: For references, TV definitely influenced the game’s audio design. Twin Peaks is, of course, one of the core influences, mainly in that quirky, bold sound design.

…the sound team and I wanted to modernize the sound of the game and bring it into a different space.

But the sound team and I wanted to modernize the sound of the game and bring it into a different space. This led us to shows like True Detective for its use of music and pacing, Stranger Things for the depiction of two opposing worlds, The Last of Us (both games and TV) for its character foley and use of space in audio.

For me, Archive 81 was a huge inspiration, specifically the tone of its world, the pacing of the scenes, the use of voice and music, and also the lack of sound. There is something subconsciously evocative and real about the show that really clicked with me. During development, I’d often go back and listen to parts of the show to remind myself how it feels and try to compare it to AW2 to see if it was hitting that same nerve.

 

Music is also an effective way to change the tone and mood of the game. How did you handle the music throughout the game – technically and creatively – to most efficiently achieve the feeling you wanted to elicit from the player?

RL: The game has a lot of music, and compared to previous games I’ve worked on, this is by far the most curated, complex, and intertwined with the narrative. There are custom end-of-chapter tracks, the songs on the radio, the fictional heavy metal band Old Gods Of Asgard, Ahti’s song “Yötön Yö,” the diegetic music of Coffee World, and, of course, the musical. That’s before we even get to the game score.

The custom songs were planned from the very beginning and Sam [Lake, Creative Director] was heavily involved with writing pretty much all of the tracks, especially on the lyrics side, to ensure all the narrative hangs together. To say it was easy would be lying, but because the ideas were planted early we managed to pull it together pretty successfully.

The game score though was a different beast. We approached the music from the same stylistic basis as the other sounds in the game while trying to pay homage to the original game.

The base approach was to blur the lines between world sound and music, and have the music swell in and out of the ambience.

Petri set the main styles and timbre for the two different stories/worlds through the cinematics and then that music was adapted to suit the gameplay. The Dark Place took a while to find the right feel for the space as well as Alan’s story.

The cinematics were scored to underline the narrative; we took a different approach for the gameplay. We put together a team of three with two music scripters and a music editor to help adapt Petri’s music to the dynamic gameflow. The base approach was to blur the lines between world sound and music, and have the music swell in and out of the ambience. This approach fits the horror genre well.

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The music was placed in a way to sometimes inform and sometimes misdirect the player, and also change the feel of a scene without making it too obvious.

The music system itself went through quite a few different variations, but we settled on a relatively simple design using triggers and playing either long single stems or loops. The simpler design made it easier to concisely control the feel we wanted from each scene.
This was quite a change from what we did in Control, which was a highly reactive music system, but it just suited the game feel better.

PA: In general, the basic idea was to keep the ‘normal’ Washington State and the Dark Place sonically distant from each other, only to start blending or bleeding some signature elements from the Dark Place as the communication between Alan and Saga begins to form.

The more they are in connection, the more unified the instrumentation becomes, until they eventually entwine around each other.

The more they are in connection, the more unified the instrumentation becomes, until they eventually entwine around each other. It all depends on the progress of the game.

At some point, say, the moment of Alan’s catharsis, his tone of music is suddenly surprisingly somber, normal, yet profoundly resolute. The moment where this happens is after a driving scene, heading back to Bright Falls. Here, we hear the original AW theme notes as Alan exits his car; Wake finds his strength. The scene emotionally resembles a scene from AW, where Alan decides to sacrifice himself and dive off a cliff into the lake. The same stubborn, “I’ll handle this” mental state kicks in, and he enters the haze surrounding the town center. This again, of course, turns the tone of the music upside down.

 

The enemies are aggressive and hard to kill. How did you use sound to reinforce the anxiety-inducing feelings of these encounters?

Taneli Suoranta (T. Suoranta): The one really interesting thing about enemies is the writing and world-building around them. Rather than having basic types of lines, like “Grenade!” or “She’s over there!,” the lines of the ‘Taken’ in Washington State come from The Manuscripts and the Dark Place.

Shadowy enemies known as ‘Fade Outs’ are a kind of manifestation of Wake’s nightmares stuck on a loop. These lines evolve throughout the game as the story proceeds and differ between enemy types and hubs.

For Washington State’s ‘Taken,’ the idea of barks being quotes from the Manuscripts was already in the original Alan Wake. For this sequel, we wanted to evolve this working concept, but tie it more to the gameplay and animation. So these sets of Manuscript lines were recorded many times with different levels of intensity and drive. So even though the ‘Taken’ is textually saying the same “Top 100 American Small Towns” or “Coffee World is all smiles” lines during various occasions in the gameplay, it has a different feeling and meaning in the performance if the enemy is in ambient, hunting, or engaged state.

The contrast between the semantics of the line and the intent in the performance makes it way creepy and makes it greater than the sum of its parts.

We had an amazing cast of actors who enjoyed this crazy and challenging way of doing this. And what could be scarier than someone shouting “Thornton’s shitty pastrami sandwich” while strangling you? The contrast between the semantics of the line and the intent in the performance makes it way creepy and makes it greater than the sum of its parts.

Arthur Tisseront (AT): We also decided to adapt the enemy’s vocal processing from the original game in a way that better fits the direction of AW2.

In the first game, the enemies were super heavily ring-modulated and super aggressive-sounding, with crazy pitch shifting happening all the time. This fit the aggressive gameplay of the first game but would have felt out of place in the more slow-paced horror atmosphere of AW2.

We tried to keep the spirit of the original, using ring modulation and pitch shifting as the primary effects, but kept the processing as more of an enhancement to the acting rather than an all-encompassing vocal effect, letting the human performances of these characters shine through.

Bosses also have unique variants of this processing. Cynthia, for example, was made to sound like she was underwater, as the Manuscript pages describe.

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T. Schiesari: At a certain point of development, it was decided that ‘Fade Outs’ would have been played by an actor from the RCU (Remedy Connected Universe), but their voices and faces needed to be twisted and blurred.

With a voice that iconic, I decided to strip away the resonances that make the voice so recognizable, which also helped convey that ‘Fade Outs’ are not physical entities as they don’t have a voice box or a chest cavity (or anything else, really).

The next stage of sound processing was to run it through an inverted impulse response to get that lead-in effect. This is often done in two offline steps but we needed to keep complexity low to be able to easily localize the voices for different languages at a later stage. I ended up making a patch in Melda MXXX that took care of this live in one go.

The next stage of sound processing was to run it through an inverted impulse response to get that lead-in effect.

Finally, the resulting voices were run through a whole set of modulating effects that made the voices shift and drift, making them feel more gaseous-like which mirrored their cool visual aesthetic.

Once ‘Fade Outs’ are unshielded, we chose to drop the whisper style of voice and instead accentuated the more aggressive performance with distortion and harmonic enhancers while still slightly changing his timber with formant and pitch to prevent the player from realizing who they’re actually fighting.

T. Suoranta: With the ‘Fade Outs’ in the Dark Place, we wanted to build a feeling of Wake’s worst nightmares stuck on a loop. “I’m lost in the dark” and “I just want to sleep” kind of lines keep pounding Wake’s ears and haunting his mind; he’s not able to escape these thoughts in the Dark Place.

All of this whispering becomes like a walla in the world until it turns shouty and aggressive in combat. The approach and technique we used to record these was very unique, but maybe I’ll let the players figure it out themselves without spoiling too much. As with all things Remedy, everything has a bit of a special meaning and a little bit of meta in it.

The ‘Taken’ have…constant underlying mumble loops that are tuned to their alertness level.

AT: One thing you’ll likely notice is that enemies in the game never stop talking. This is intentional. We wanted players to hear enemies before they saw them, building up that anticipation (and, in the Dark Place, the fear of the unknown) before an encounter.

The ‘Taken’ have specific lines as we mentioned earlier, but they also have constant underlying mumble loops that are tuned to their alertness level. We wanted players to know exactly how the enemies feel about them by ear alone. This is also a great way to communicate their position, cueing people into danger before they actually see it.

 

Alan Wake 2 is an atmospheric game – called “the studio’s most atmospheric game by far” by Inverse. How did you use sound to manipulate the mood of the game, from an unsettling vibe to a terrifying experience? (Can you share some specific examples?)

T. Schiesari: The whole audio team pushed hard to achieve this unsettling tone in the game throughout the whole development. We experimented in a few directions (even some overly complicated ones at some point!).

We wanted the sound of the game to feel grounded and intimate, and oscillate between beauty and horror. One of the goals was to reflect the unsure state of mind of the characters and try to make the player feel the same way.

We wanted the sound of the game to feel grounded and intimate, and oscillate between beauty and horror.

This is reflected in many areas of the audio. The music is much less of a constant companion here and much more of an entity that sometimes supports the player, other times playing tricks on them, or straight out abandons them.

Environment sounds also play a key role here. We tried to reproduce a lush forest environment which can mess with the player’s mind when a branch suddenly snaps behind them, a sudden gust of wind brushes trees or the whole forest goes almost completely silent for a time. The dense rain in the Dark Place, hitting all the different materials scattered around New York, can create a relaxing feeling for a moment but it also impairs the player’s ability to hear the constant threats lurking all around them.

A similar approach was used for the indoor environment. Creaking and groaning sounds blend with the twisted music tones and the abstract sound design layers.

 

What location in the game was most challenging in terms of sound? Why? What were some of your challenges in designing the sound of this area? What was the key to making the sound of this location feel ‘right’?

T. Schiesari & Gulli Gunnarson (GG): Definitely the Dark Place! Designing that was quite a rollercoaster. Before any visuals were available, the soundscape prototypes were very, very dense and otherworldly. We imagined it much more blurry and twisted.

As the visuals began to come alive, it was clear that we went overboard and that we had to go more towards the real-but-off direction rather than all-out surreal. This gave us more tools at our disposal as we could range from near silence to realism to surrealism.

As much as we all love to go full weird at Remedy, this was definitely for the best. In fact, we realized that if nothing feels real then nothing really matters, and the player would detach from the experience. So finding the right balance of semi-realistic reverbs, surreal gun tails, and appropriate environmental sounds intertwined with the more abstract and eerie elements felt more like what the game needed.

Many of us spent quite some time figuring out how the multichannel rain beds would work and sound, so we went through various iterations.

Of course, there are some moments and some sections where we took it to the extreme using a lot of that original content but that now worked because there was a wider range to play with.

Then it started raining! At first, we were a little concerned because rain can introduce a layer of noise which would have conflicted with all the sound design we had just worked on.

But we soon realized that this was a huge opportunity. Many of us spent quite some time figuring out how the multichannel rain beds would work and sound, so we went through various iterations. In my opinion, what elevated the experience further was when we started to manually place rain hitting specific objects. This was achieved using recordings of raindrops hitting actual surfaces but sometimes we had to get a little creative.

One alternative method I found particularly useful was sending tiny sound particles through impulse responses of resonating objects. This opened up even more possibilities, so much so that in the Dark Place we might have gotten carried away a little. In the outdoor areas alone, there are over 900 manually placed sound entities for this.

This extra work was serving a purpose though. The rain is a character in this story, and we wanted to make sure it was mirrored through sound. This sound density of the rain becomes part of the horror because it can be deafening when it’s heavily raining and the player must pay extra attention when listening for enemy cues that all of a sudden are much harder to pick up.

RL: For me, it was the rain. We tried so many different approaches to get it to sit right in the world and the mix. Rain affects everything in the environment: rain hitting objects, wet footsteps, rain in trees, etc. Also, hearing rain when you’re inside, under roofs when opening doors, at different intensities, etc., is such a natural sound that everyone is so used to, so re-creating it virtually and having it feel right and not intrusive was hard.

…one of the early design decisions was that the rain should sound different in the Dark Place and Washington State.

On top of that, one of the early design decisions was that the rain should sound different in the Dark Place and Washington State.

One thing that took me a little by surprise towards the end of the game (which in hindsight shouldn’t have) is that when you have a location with rain and then no rain, the game’s noise floor changes quite dramatically – the dialogue, foley, enemy sounds, even reverbs, etc. sits differently in the mix. That took a fair amount of tweaking to have it fit together.

 

The game is split into worlds: the Dark Place and Washington State. How did you approach these as aesthetics?

RL: The original game and this game share this duality, a mirroring in the narrative. The most obvious is light and dark, or Wake and Scratch. But this idea goes very deep in AW2, and it’s one of the cornerstones in the approach to the audio.

AW2 at its core is split into two worlds. The world of Saga in Washington State and the world of Alan in the Dark Place. Washington State is grounded in reality, much like the original game. We tried to make the world feel real and natural, and create a visceral impression of the real place.

The Dark Place is the opposite; it’s imaginary – like trying to remember the sound of a nightmare – a twisted impression of the real world.

The design challenge for audio was choosing which elements from each world would poke through.

When discussing this with the sound designers, we were using contrasting descriptions for the two worlds. For example, Washington State is ‘Pointed,’ ‘Natural,’ and ‘Quirky,’ whereas the Dark Place is ‘Claustrophobic,’ ‘Artificial,’ and ‘Hard to Remember.’

There are also aspects of the game where these two worlds collide and we tried to juxtapose these two designs, like one design idea invading the other. The design challenge for audio was choosing which elements from each world would poke through.

This duality and conflict was central to the audio design of the whole game, for everything from how the audio team was organized to how the weapons’ tails sounded to the music choice to how we directed the enemy voices.

Thomas Holmes (TH): One of the fundamental roles for audio in this game was to accentuate the split between Washington State and the Dark Place as much as we could. Our starting point for this was to make two different games; the environments are starkly different, but also weapons, enemies, and playable characters are different too. This meant we could sever the two sides quite cleanly and let them both develop independently. This early split deeply ingrained a unique sonic identity for each half of the game, which we continued to build on throughout the project.

For Washington State, this meant leaning into natural realism and the everyday sounds of real life. By grounding the story firmly in the real world, we wanted to provide a very normal context for the weirdness that follows. This meant that when the Dark Place starts to manifest in Saga’s world, sounds from the Dark Place sound extra weird and unnatural in the very natural surroundings of Washington State. It helped that they were coming from a different game world as far as we were concerned.

Probably the two biggest building blocks for realism in Washington State are rain and silence.

Probably the two biggest building blocks for realism in Washington State are rain and silence. In Saga’s part of the game, it rains a lot. It’s also the one thing very present in both Washington State and the Dark Place. Getting the rain to sound authentic took a very long time, and involved more iterations, team members, redesigns, and heated discussions than any other element of the audio design. As a direct result of this, it was probably also the most collaborative.

Beyond the technical challenge of making a complex and dynamic rain system was the more profound question of what role would rain play in our mix. We wanted a very tangible sound to the rain, rather than an indistinct white noise, and so in the forest, you can hear the detail of the rain hitting the leaves around you, and in the urban environments the sound of the rain slapping the asphalt. This gives a very real and tactile aspect.

By supporting the rain beds with an array of manually placed environmental rain details, we created an environment the player could move around in and feel the rain shift and change around them. This involved a huge amount of content and implementation, roofs (inside and out), gutters, drains, windows, leaks, puddles, character’s clothing – you name it and it’s probably making a sound when it rains.

We wanted to use the detail and authenticity of the rain audio to fully immerse the player…

Throughout the game, the rain gets heavier and more intense as the player enters areas of heightened danger. We wanted to use the detail and authenticity of the rain audio to fully immerse the player in those moments. It’s much easier to scare a player if you can take them out of their living room and put them into a rainy forest at night. The rain audio really helped us to achieve that level of immersion.

Another thing that helped with this was the decision to embrace the silence and avoid filling everything between the main story beats with sound and music. Deciding exactly what silence should sound like is one of the ultimate quests of sound design, and was a very important part of Alan Wake 2.

We knew Washington State would have a lot of silence, as any good horror experience should have. The spaces between the sounds are where a lot of the unease and dread lurk. By focusing on the quiet details in the game, we carefully built up the sound of silence through sound. This could be a branch snap or tree rustle in the forest, the sound of a floorboard creaking or rain on the window inside the buildings, or the detail of Saga’s footsteps and breathing. Essentially, we tell the player that the environment is so quiet they could hear a pin drop by letting them hear the pin drop.

Similar to the rain, this silence is achieved by a huge amount of content and systems working together to create a believable world. And just like in real life, there aren’t any truly silent moments at all. Even the moments in between the breaths, the footsteps, or the wind gusts have something audible. The real trick is getting these different parts of the game to gel together, and to sound convincing so that the player gets sucked into the world of the game. Once that happens, anything is possible.

Henry Scott (HS): There was a strong focus on making sure the smaller objects in the game felt believable, and that was used to help play a subtle role in aiding the overall atmosphere. Objects such as glass beer bottles and tin cans can make the player ask themselves, “Wait, what was that noise?” when they accidentally knock them off of a table or when their character kicks something across the ground as the player moves towards their objective. By focusing on the sounds that these objects make, physics audio acts as a natural and systematic way to create the “twig snap in the middle of the woods” trope heard in many horror films.

This proved challenging for audio because many of our 3D environment sounds that we placed near these teleporters would cut out whenever the player was moved…

There are lots of doorways and corridors in the Dark Place that take the player to different locations in seemingly illogical ways. For example, you might be walking around the streets of New York, open a door in an alleyway, travel down some stairs, open a second door, and then find yourself on the rooftops of a different building – all in one seamless transition just like walking through a dream world. This was done by having two identical staircases in both locations and then teleporting the player/character from one to the other as they traveled through them.

This proved challenging for audio because many of our 3D environment sounds that we placed near these teleporters would cut out whenever the player was moved, which broke the seamless transition effect that we were aiming for.

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In most cases, the best way to fix this was to fade out any moving 3D environment sounds as the player enters one of these “teleporting areas” and then fade them back in afterward. But in some cases, we were able to play identical sounds in both locations without any pops, clicks, or volume drops. We did this using Wwise‘s Multi-Position feature, which allows you to play the same instance of a sound in multiple positions in your game world, regardless of any randomisation added to the sound you’re trying to play.

To really make this work, we had to do a little more than flip a theoretical “turn on multi-position” switch in Wwise, but here is a simplified example describing how it worked in practice.

Let’s say the player is in a corridor in the Oceanview Hotel (a location found halfway through the game) that has a point in the middle that will teleport them to another identical corridor in the hotel. Some of the light sconces on the walls will have warm buzzing sounds coming from them. On the sconces in the first corridor, we would play the original instance of our sound effects, and then using multi-position mode, we could play an identical copy of those sound instances on the ones in the second corridor. So as the player is teleported, the sounds coming from the second set would sound identical to the first and help bolster the illusion that the player hasn’t been teleported anywhere at all.

PA: Most of that affects the music, too. This is where the duality lies within the instrumentation, as if brass instruments were dedicated to the Dark Place, and the woodwinds and strings to Washington State.

In the heart of all the craziness and insanity, something evil is lurking and creeping, staining and coloring the instrumentation beyond recognition.

But that wasn’t the only division. Very obviously, the Dark Place has a sound of its own. In the heart of all the craziness and insanity, something evil is lurking and creeping, staining and coloring the instrumentation beyond recognition. It was crucial to maintain the sources of the sounds/instruments as acoustic and dry as possible in order to destroy them (in the most pleasing way) with a surprisingly sparse amount of plugins and effects. No long process chains were needed as long as the raw material was deep enough.

In the Dark Place-related cinematics, there are the occasional soothing sounds if there’s more light. The more sinister the action – or consequences of action – the more mangled the sound becomes. A lot of harmonics and overtones were bent out of place to achieve a certain uncertainty. There’s very little ‘in tune’ in the Dark Place (and sometimes the instruments make some 8 or so octave slow bends).

In contrast, Washington State – at least in the beginning – remains mostly natural. But even there the emotions are heard from a distance; Saga must be in her most professional mood to achieve the results needed to correct the horrifying situation, thus no need for overly touching moments all the time.

 

The recurring theme of duality is also presented in the juxtaposition of light and darkness; how was that represented through sound?

T. Schiesari: It was very important to have the darkness feel like an organic element that players could believe effortlessly, just as they would when hearing in-game real elements like rain, wind, fire, etc.

So we tried to avoid it sounding too much like magic and we also stayed clear of synthetic sounds wherever possible.

The high-level concept around the sound of darkness was to make it feel chaotic, unstable, and dangerous. The next step was to keep a cohesive language across all things darkness: the shield, the ‘Fade Outs,’ the darkness barrier, the dark presence, and so on, to try to reinforce and maintain a sense of coherent believability within the world.

When it came to the sound of light, we wanted it to be quite subtle and, again, avoid it sounding too much like magic or sci-fi. One of the things that seemed to work was the idea that light particles were heavier and that they would resonate when passing through the glass of the flashlight or the bulb of a Safe Haven.

When it came to the sound of light, we wanted it to be quite subtle and…avoid it sounding too much like magic or sci-fi.

We recorded a whole bunch of glass textures with all kinds of different types of bulbs and very small debris hitting them. Something that worked surprisingly well was to use a knife sharpener to bow them. It produced a very gritty and tactile texture that we later processed in all sorts of manners to create a common palette for the different light sources.

Finally, we wanted to emphasize the moment light meets darkness. In my head, it needed to feel like a violent chemical reaction that was exponentially more impactful than the two ingredients by themselves could ever be.

I started experimenting with tonal content to recreate the original AW sound as a starting point. In the end, after a few failed attempts, what ended up sticking was stretching out recordings of screeches from birds of prey. This was then layered with the surprising screams that water beads make when pressed against a hot frying pan, which grounded the whole sound into a more realistic effect. This combination then became the grounds for other reaction-like events such as the darkness shield explosions and bullets hitting darkness.

 

How did you handle the light shifters and reality rewrite sounds – both aesthetically and technically? What were the challenges?

GG: The Angel Lamp was in working condition on the gameplay side fairly early in production, so the lamp and the feature went through a lot of iteration cycles. This was quite a difficult one to sound design, as we did not want to mimic a physically moving light source, but rather it would act like a camera cut – like something was broken or even glitching.

Early prototypes for the ‘hum’ were quite abstract – powerful, ripping, and distorted. We focused heavily on how the environment would react to the power of the lamp – things were rattling, and ambiences and rain would be pushed into distortion by the light switching progress with the world coming to a complete stop cut when the light switched. This never really felt correct. The connection between the feature and the action didn´t click.

In the end, we went back to its origin: a lightbulb that would hum and tick when turned on; it would crackle and pop when it broke or overcharged. That was a very grounded design.

A big selection of electric and electromagnetic sources, plastic wrap crunch recordings, and experimental plug-in chains contributed to the final lamp hum that made it to the release.

Tazio recorded plenty of different lightbulb handlings, which were used for both the editing and as IRs. A big selection of electric and electromagnetic sources, plastic wrap crunch recordings, and experimental plug-in chains contributed to the final lamp hum that made it to the release.

Once we had the hum nailed down, it became a lot easier to design the layers to go with it. Now we could really work with the changes in the environment to feed the world more nightmare and dreamlike content, bridging the lamp’s grounded sound design with the established reality of the Dark Place.

Each light source was then custom-made for both charging and draining. While charging typically remained safe, draining a light introduced unsettling elements that should, in some cases, even feel threatening.

T. Schiesari: For the ‘reality rewrites,’ we also ended up doing a few iterations as the mechanics and the visuals matured towards what they are today.

The common thread, though, was Alan typing ideas into reality. Typewriters are always a lot of fun to record so this was a great opportunity to capture the sound of the one used in the live-action scenes, which is the classic Olivetti Lettera 22.

Another interesting element of the typing sound of the sequence is that it’s sending a signal to the VFX which is modulated by the incoming audio.

The recordings that came out of that session were used amongst other things in a Soundminer Radium patch that allowed us to easily re-perform the typing later on a MIDI keyboard rather than moving .wav files on a DAW’s timeline.

Another interesting element of the typing sound of the sequence is that it’s sending a signal to the VFX which is modulated by the incoming audio.

Audio-driven visuals are something Remedy has been experimenting with since Quantum Break and that lives on here in AW2, but also in the ‘Echo Scenes,’ in the Mind Place Interviews, and in the other blended videos across the game.

It was really important for sound to support the re-written reality narrative story beats and changes by altering the soundscape of these scenes depending on the Plot Element chosen; this would be done through bespoke sound design sequences or a shift in the tone and environmental sounds of that area.

These re-writes provided multiple challenges and opportunities for sound due to all the possible combinations and intricate timings so this was a considerable undertaking and it’s something Gulli (especially!) and I worked on throughout the whole development of the game to get to sound and feel right.

 

There are visual breaks in reality that lead to live-action ‘cinematics’ in the game. What went into the sound of these breaks? And how do the live-action clips compare sonically to the gameplay world?

RL: There was a lot of live action in the game and not just in cinematics. On a studio level, there were two tracks: the game development team track and the live-action track. It was all coordinated through the directors and production. They ran in parallel and only really merged towards the end of the project.

From purely the audio side, you can split the live-action sequence into 4 main groups.

1: The scenes that need to sound like the game
2: The horror flashes (those crazy black and white flashes)
3: The ‘found footage’, TV shows, Alice videos, commercials, etc.
4: The video overlays in the game

For groups 1 and 2, we worked closely with our XDev partner RedPipe, who was also working on the game-rendered cinematics, some of the marketing materials, as well as a few other aspects in the game. The intent was to make all the different aspects of the game feel the same and blend into each other nicely.

The intent was to make all the different aspects of the game feel the same and blend into each other nicely.

On a human level, this worked by having RedPipe as part of the internal team, attending our design and feedback meetings, and having full access to our game source control so they could play and ‘borrow’ our in-game assets without having to ask. The idea was to give them enough time, agency, and freedom to fully understand the narrative and the gameplay without me or the other directors needing to write reams of detailed feedback.

Also, because they were involved in quite a few of the creative choices with the cinematics, horror flashes, and quite a few other moments in the game, there ended up being this natural cohesion between the game cinematics and the live-action sequences.

The idea was that they should feel different and stand out from the game sound as being ‘odd.’

The group 3 sequences (the TV shows, etc.), were done by El Camino here in Finland. The approach here was the opposite; they were designed in isolation. The idea was that they should feel different and stand out from the game sound as being ‘odd.’ This goes all the way down to how they are rendered. The in-game cinematics are rendered in 7.1.4 and these sequences are more traditional stereo with dialogue in the center.

The live-action overlays are a different thing entirely, which we treated more like game assets. There are loads of different uses for them, but the most interesting from an audio perspective is, for instance, in the writer’s room interviews. The opacity of the video is driven by the short-term RMS level of the dialogue.

 

What would you want players to know about the sound work on Alan Wake 2?

RL: This was a complex game with many moving parts that required a lot of communication, managing, and most importantly trust.

Aside from being thrilled with the game’s reception, the thing I’m most proud of is the whole audio team, and how they challenged themselves and collaborated in making the whole experience come to life!

 

A big thanks to Richard Lapington, Tazio Schiesari, Petri Alanko, Thomas Holmes, Gulli Gunnarson, Taneli Suoranta, Arthur Tisseront, and Henry Scott for giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the sound of Alan Wake 2 and to Jennifer Walden for the interview!

 

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