How Does Alan Wake's American Nightmare Tie In To The Original Game?

Alan Wake was always a little hard to follow as far as the plot goes. Spoiler alert: we're going to talk about the end of the game and the DLC add-ons. There is darkness and Alan is trying to defeat it and get his wife back, but when he saved her he got sucked up into the darkness in order to spare his wife? Or something like that.

At the end of the first game, Alan's wife emerged from the water alive, but Alan was gone. In the first DLC, The Signal, Alan seemed to be inside the darkness, and in the end it looked like he got out, but at the expense of being gripped with some kind of insanity as he rolled around on the floor. In The Writer DLC, Alan was still in the darkness, and in the end came across himself from the end of the first DLC. He decides that is as good a time as any to start writing The Return on his typewriter, which we all assumed was meant to tease a sequel. Check out all three endings below thanks to YouTube users Theendingman, TriLink12 and xCaShMoNeYxNIK.

So, where does American Nightmare fall int he Alan Wake timeline? Oskari Häkkinen, head of franchise development for Remedy was insistent that American Nightmare is not a sequel saying, “It’s definitely not a sequel to Alan Wake. It’s a standalone spin-off experience that anyone can pick up and play.” We know that Alan is inside of an episode of Night Springs that he wrote, and I asked Häkkinen if the player would actually be playing as Alan, or if we would be playing a character in the show to which he replied, "and that's the point where I cut it off where I want to get the story in [this interview]."

Häkkinen went on to point out that opposed to the normal narration provided by Alan himself, American Nightmare would be narrated by the voice that narrated the episodes of Night Springs. He also explained that Mr. Scratch, Alan's evil doppelganger is a herald of darkness, and that he was created when Alan disappeared and that Mr. Scratch is now in pursuit of Alan's wife Alice.

Most of what Häkkinen offered only lead to additional confusion. Maybe you're not Alan Wake. Maybe you're just some throwaway character Alan created while churning out Night Springs scripts before becoming a successful author. The woman I met in the demo seemed to imply that she had met Mr. Scratch in this weird Night Springs world, but Häkkinen implied that Scratch is out in the real world causing a ruckus. In the demo, Alan heard radio broadcasts from the real world, and Barry Wheeler, his former agent, had clearly moved on since Alan's disappearance. Does that mean quite a bit of time has passed?

Time certainly hasn't stood still in the Night Springs version of Arizona, and it does seem as though this literal episode of Alan's adventure takes place after the first game. As far as the DLC is concerned though, it could be occurring simultaneously. Häkkinen was sure to point out that American Nightmare was not focused on story, and was coy about it's relation to plot of the first game. Even after the credits are rolling, we still may not know where the game takes place in the Alan Wake timeline, or if it even happened at all. Maybe it will all be a dream like Super Mario Bros. 2, and the game will end with Alan snoring in bed, wearing a stocking cap emblazoned with the letter M with the sheets pulled up to his chin. Also, he will have a mustache.