13 years ago, bestselling author Alan Wake disappeared from the town of Bright Falls under mysterious circumstances. While the outside world moved on, Alan was trapped in the Dark Place, a strange dimension where Alan’s stories come to life.
Sitting before his typewriter, Alan wrote page after page as time seemed to stand still outside the window of his cabin. He conjured terrors and demons from the darkest recesses of his mind in the hopes of writing the one story that could lead to his escape from the Dark Place. Only then would Alan be able to return to the real world and reunite with his wife, Alice.
But escape never came, and after an eternity of writing, Alan lost all hope of ever returning to the life he once knew.
And then he remembered something. One of the first scripts he wrote for the show Night Springs so many years ago. A tense supernatural thriller he called “Dead of Night” about a group trapped in a nightmare world. The episode ended with them all escaping by… by…
Alan struggled to remember. His time on Night Springs was ancient history, and the Dark Place was a thief of time and memories.
The only solution was to recreate the script from memory, as many drafts as needed, until Alan remembered how the episode ended.
With every iteration, Alan saw himself with his characters, in the middle of the action. And every failed ending snapped him back to the room and the typewriter. Undeterred, Alan tried again and again until the ending came to him like a voice whispering in his mind.
Alan wrote the final draft and found himself back with his characters, standing before a wall of black fog. Looking at the fog sent chills up and down Alan’s spine, but he knew this was how the episode ended. He watched his characters pass through the wall of fog, leaving the nightmare world behind.
Alan stared down the wall, struck by a realization. The episode had ended on an ambiguous note. Did the characters return home? Did they make it back to their loved ones? Alan couldn’t remember what he had intended.
He wanted to turn back, to start again and write just one more draft. No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than he saw it. A dim light flickering to life deep within the fog.
A sign. A way home. After all this time, there it was. Right in front of him.
Alan took a deep, trembling breath and entered the fog, never taking his eyes off the light in the distance.
