Does Alan Wake 2 make a case for the connected universe in videogames?

The first announcement of a ‘Remedy Connected Universe’ arrived just as its biggest precedent was in full swing. A few months before Control’s release, Avengers: Endgame had managed to pay off a decade’s worth of interconnected storytelling in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, breaking box-office records in the process. Naturally, given how Hollywood operates, every film studio with a faintly applicable property on its roster was trying to get in on the action. Warner Bros launched efforts with its own superheroes in the DC Extended Universe, while also smashing Godzilla and King Kong together to form the terribly named MonsterVerse.

In videogames, though, this approach has been a lot rarer. Plenty of developers have snuck Easter-egg nods and winks into their catalogues, of course, and there’s no shortage of spinoffs from long-running series. But few have attempted to tell a story with shared characters and plot points that necessitate (or at least heavily encourage) following each instalment to get the whole picture. It’s not hard to imagine why this might be the case, given the lengthy production cycles generally required: there’s a reason that the Rusty Lake games, of which there have been 16 since 2015, is the clearest exception to this rule.