Alan Wake 2’s Cliffhanger Ending, Explained

Warning: The following article explaining Alan Wake 2’s cliffhanger ending contains spoilers.

In typical Remedy fashion, Alan Wake 2 continues the franchise’s tradition of ending on a major cliffhanger. Here’s everything you need to know about Alan Wake 2‘s final moments and what they could mean for the future.

What Happens in Alan Wake 2’s Cliffhanger Ending, Explained

To briefly recap before we get into the meat and potatoes of the ending, Alan Wake 2‘s final few levels reveal that Alan and Mr. Scratch are the same person; the evil doppelganger is actually just Alan when he’s consumed by the Dark Presence. After the final boss fight against Scratch, Saga is thrown into The Dark Place when the entity escapes and possesses her partner, Agent Alex Casey. Within this shadowy realm, she struggles against her insecurities and worst fears to eventually overcome the Dark Presence and break out of the prison within which she is being kept. Eventually, she’s contacted by a mysterious person who tells her that she needs The Clicker to rewrite the story.

Related: How to Beat Cynthia Weaver in Alan Wake 2

Saga recovers the presumed Object of Power and transports herself to The Writer’s Room with the help of Sheriff Breaker who continues his search for Mr. Door in The Dark Place. Alan gives Saga the last few pages of the Manuscript, explaining that because Casey is one of his creations and not 100% “real” he can conclude the story with a segment detailing that Scratch can’t stay within a “fictional” person. Suddenly, the villain himself, still within Agent Casey’s body, bursts into the room. Saga uses The Clicker, severely hurting Casey and forcing Scratch to leave his body. The Dark Presence swirls around the room before once again possessing Alan. In a flash, Saga loads a special Bullet of Light and shoots Alan in the head, seemingly killing him and The Dark Presence at once. But that’s when things get interesting…

The final moments of the scene show Saga taking out her phone and calling Logan, her daughter, in the hopes that the story has been rewritten. Previously, Alan confirmed that he’d needed to write a section about Logan’s death to amplify Saga’s narrative in an effort to make her more capable of fighting against The Dark Presence. The phone rings endlessly when the screen cuts to black.

In a twist that feels very Inception, it remains unknown whether Logan actually picked up the phone. If she does, then Alan successfully rewrote the ending of Return, Scratch’s manuscript, and saved everyone who died. If Logan doesn’t answer, Alan fails to tweak the conclusion, meaning Saga remains a part of the story and must continue struggling to prove that she’s not just a character in a book. It’s open-ended, with either option being possible. If Saga is still within the story, it sets the stage for Alan Wake 3 or whatever project Remedy wants to use to continue this, if you’ll excuse the pun, saga.

Of course, that’s not all. A mid-credits scene reveals that Alan’s wife, Alice, is alive and seemingly also in The Dark Place, doing her best to offer her husband help in the form of her photographs. She also reiterates that The Dark Place works in loops and that the only way out is for Alan to keep moving through it until he’s learned what he needs to in order to bring himself back to reality. With this revelation, Alan wakes up and offers up a classically Remedy line: “It’s not a loop, it’s a spiral.”

What Alan Wake 2’s Ending Means

The meaning of that final line is known only to Sam Lake and the rest of the writers who contributed to Alan Wake 2. Beyond teasing the future of the story, it’s also a fun callback to the first game which concluded with the phrase, “It’s not a lake, it’s an ocean.” The best we can do is speculate as to what it means with most assuming that Alan’s sudden epiphany indicates that he’s not stuck in a time loop and that The Dark Place does indeed have a tangible conclusion. The only way to reach it is to go deeper and deeper until he eventually finds the end. When that will be remains unknown; it could be explored in one of Alan Wake 2‘s DLCs or in a future game.

Related: Alan Wake 2 Hides a Major Control Reference in the Early Game

The other major tease is that Alice is alive. Alan Wake 2 suggests that Alan’s wife killed herself because she couldn’t handle her grief. Instead, the star photographer faked her death in an effort to push Alan over the edge and provide him with the rage and negative emotion he needed to push himself out of The Dark Place. It’s implied that it’s Alice who contacts Saga about The Clicker but that’s yet to be confirmed. Alice also mentioned that she’s going to keep working on providing Alan with the images he needs to escape The Dark Place. This suggests that she’ll be a key player in future Alan Wake titles, which will be a welcome change given that she’s largely been a damsel in distress for most of the franchise.

What thing that’s clear is that Alan Wake’s story has yet to conclude. Remedy clearly still has plenty of ideas they want to explore so let’s just hope the next installment doesn’t take 13 years.