Alan Wake 2: Difficulty settings, explained

At the start of your playthrough of Alan Wake 2, you’ll get the option of choosing between three difficulties. We’ve explained below the differences between the difficulty modes in Alan Wake 2 to make your decision easier.

It scales from easy to hard, but how does it affect the gameplay? Let’s dive right into what the difficulty options are in Alan Wake 2.

All difficulty settings in Alan Wake 2

In Alan Wake 2, there are three unique difficulty settings: Story, Normal, and Hard. Here’s what Remedy themselves had to say about each mode.

• Story: Combat will not pose a challenge. Focus on mystery-solving and exploration.
• Normal: A balance between mystery-solving and survival. Combat is challenging. Using items and conserving resources is required to stay alive.
• Hard: Significantly challenging combat. Leveraging items and familiarity with the game mechanics is essential for survival.

If you’re someone who has played many games, you’ll mostly understand what each of these three words mean when it comes to difficulty. But at least you know the specifics. Story mode will still have combat, but it shouldn’t prove to be a challenge. This is for anyone who prefers the puzzle and exploration aspects of games.

Related: Can you play Alan Wake 2 on the Steam Deck?

I personally chose Normal mode, just because I’m not a fan of getting super frustrated in games by struggling in Hard mode. Normal has definitely still posed a challenge during specific combat encounters. Also, I do have to be careful when using items in Normal mode, as batteries and ammo can run out fast.

You can get the gist of Hard mode. This is for players who are used to survival horror games and don’t mind a tough challenge. It seems by the wording that items are a lot scarcer in Hard mode. Challenging combat could mean the enemy has higher health, or perhaps they act smarter and more rash.

Alan Wake 2 Nightmare mode difficulty

Did you know that there’s one more secret difficulty level? In a recent post on Twitter/X, Remedy announced that New Game Plus arrives alongside the launch of Alan Wake 2. Not only that, but in New Game Plus mode, you can choose to play at Nightmare difficulty.

At this point in time, we don’t have information on how difficult Nightmare mode is. But the word itself sounds scary, so you can expect the items to be even tougher to find, and enemies to be extremely hard to beat.

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Alan Wake 2 is available on the Epic Games Store, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.