Alan Wake’s Return trailer hidden in Quantum Break

Alan Wake

I largely stuck to the beaten path for my Quantum Break hands-on last week, which it now turns out was a terrible mistake. Polygon reports that if you decide to go wandering in the game’s opening section set on a university campus, you’ll eventually stumble across a student demonstration, and a tent with a flat screen TV inside, on which a trailer for Alan Wake’s Return is playing.

The footage sounds like it’s full of the pulp horror portentousness that was the delicious signature of Remedy’s horror-flavoured game: Crashing waves… “He's been gone for five years”... Spooky forest… “We're just a speck of light floating in an endless ocean of darkness”... Detectives with torches, dead bodies, bloody knives, inevitably jazzy music.

Whether the trailer’s existence means the game is really set for a sequel remains unclear. It could equally just be a cool piece of fan service, laced throughout Quantum Break as Remedy is wont to do for its games. However, giving credence to the idea it could be an actual sequel, we learned late last month that Remedy has filed a trademark for Alan Wake’s Return. As an inveterate horror fan with a high tolerance for florid writing and Americana, I’d certainly be up for it. How about you?

Tim Clark

With over two decades covering videogames, Tim has been there from the beginning. In his case, that meant playing Elite in 'co-op' on a BBC Micro (one player uses the movement keys, the other shoots) until his parents finally caved and bought an Amstrad CPC 6128. These days, when not steering the good ship PC Gamer, Tim spends his time complaining that all Priest mains in Hearthstone are degenerates and raiding in Destiny 2. He's almost certainly doing one of these right now.