The darkness may conceal many things. In a horror story, most obviously, it’s where dangers lurk. And there are plenty of those here: muttering cultists, forest-stalking wolves, deadly shadows that reach out and grab you by the throat. For a certain stripe of horror movie, the dark might also be a way to disguise rough edges – cheap sets and men in rubber suits – and on occasion we can’t help but wonder if that might be one reason Alan Wake 2’s world is seen mostly by torchlight, a succession of tight illuminated circles like portholes in the centre of a mostly black screen. But then it turns up the lights and all scepticism is burned away.

Remedy might not have the budget of a firstparty production to work with here, but you’ll struggle to detect any sign of that. While we reunite with Wake in the noirish New-York hell dimension known as ‘The Dark Place’, new character Saga Anderson takes us back to Bright Falls, with its Twin Peaks blend of pine trees, mom-and-pop diners and incongruous atrocities. Both locations are crisply detailed, from the broad strokes of their vistas – a hazy treeline beyond a lake, alleyways of flickering neon – right down to details of the kind that your torch’s beam might happen to fall on for a moment, or else miss entirely. And that’s before the game starts to bend reality, revealing an inventive flair that suggests it’s the blockbusters that need to play catch-up.

Often, these moments of invention are also the game’s brightest. The standout, a set-piece that builds on both the original Alan Wake’s rock-show battle and Control’s Ashtray Maze, is dazzling in every sense of the word. One moment in the game’s climax pulls back the grey curtains that have been sitting overhead for almost the duration, managing to wring horror from how off the blue skies feel after so long in the dark. Throughout, shadowy enemies caught in the beam of your torch fizz and pop like fireworks, an effect that remains as satisfying the hundredth time as the first.