How Remedy Created Alan Wake 2's Horrifying Game Over Screen

28.10.2023 - 14:07 / ign.com / Saga Anderson / Sam Lake / Alan Wake

A good game over screen doesn’t just serve as a notice that you need to start over. In the survival horror genre, a well-crafted, properly terrifying game over screen should serve as a deterrent, ensuring you stay alive the next time to avoid seeing the bloody words ‘Game Over’ appear on your screen. And sometimes, like in Alan Wake 2, they could be so terrifying you never want to die again.

If you’ve played the game, you know exactly what I’m talking about, and IGN got a chance to speak with Alan Wake 2 creative director Sam Lake to discuss how Remedy created this terrifying game over screen.

Alan Wake 2 is finally here to pick up the writer’s story 13 years later. Unlike the first game which was more of a supernatural action-thriller, Remedy has gone full survival horror for the sequel, with an emphasis on ‘horror’.

Remedy’s horror game is effectively split into two sections where you play as either FBI profiler Saga Anderson or the unfortunate mystery novelist Alan Wake. It’s in the Wake sections specifically that Remedy’s spooky game over screen appears. If Alan Wake is to die, the screen will flash horrifying images of Wake, played in live-action by the Finnish actor Ilka Villi, lying bloody on the ground, his head looking like it’s been caved in.

Lake says the process of creating the game over screen for Alan Wake was built on top of their experience with working on live-action set pieces for Control and Quantum Break. But the creative process was still largely trial-and-error. “It felt like we needed to show the horror in between when you die, we need to make it disturbing,” Lake says. “We had already kind of discovered that this is how we do horror flashes and that's suitable for it, but then we wanted to create just really striking violent imagery for it.”

The entire sequence was shot on a film set says Lake, with Alan Wake’s leading man, Ilka Villi, “lying on the ground… we had our makeup artists come in and kind of create a disturbing, violent vision of him all bloody and kind of having suffered a violent death.”

The team at Remedy learned a lot of new tricks since they released the first Alan Wake game. With games like Quantum Break and Control under their belts, the studio has become one of the most cinematically inclined game studios currently working in the industry, mixing live-action footage in with their games to create a visually distinct experience that blurs the lines between mediums. And it’s this eye for the movies that led to such a memorable, and bloody game over screen. However, in this case, mixing the live action footage with the game actually made the horror less intense.

Lake reveals, “What we also then discovered fast, that if we want to do this more as an aggressive flash