Alan Wake - Synopsis - Main Game

Main Game

Bestselling thriller writer Alan Wake, suffering from a two-year stretch of writer's block, travels with his wife Alice to the small idyllic town of Bright Falls, Washington, for a short vacation. While Alice shops for groceries, Alan goes to obtain the keys and directions to the cabin they will be staying in from its owner, Carl Stucky. At the local diner, an older woman claiming that Stucky fell ill, hands the keys to Alan instead. Alan and Alice arrive at Cauldron Lake, where their cabin sits on an island within it. As they unpack, Alan discovers Alice has set up a typewriter, hoping Alan will try writing on the vacation. Angry, Alan sets off for a brief walk alone, but races back to the cabin when he hears Alice's screams. He arrives too late as some entity drags Alice into the lake's water, and without a moment's hesitation, jumps in after her, blacking out upon impact.

Alan comes to a week later, crashed after his car went off the side of the road outside of town. As he travels back to town, Alan witnesses multiple supernatural events, such as human figures shrouded in darkness that can only be defeated with light, and an ethereal figure wearing a deep-sea diving suit. He also finds pages of a manuscript for a book titled Departure, a work Alan recognizes as his own but doesn't remember writing it; the incoherent pages foretell events that come true as the story progresses. When he meets Sheriff Sarah Breaker and reports Alice's abduction, the sheriff notes that there had not been an island in Cauldron Lake for nearly 30 years, sunk by an eruption. Alan then receives a phone call saying that his wife has been kidnapped and that the kidnapper wants to meet him. He then meets up with park ranger Rusty, who says that people have been missing in the park. After killing Rusty (who becomes a dark figure), Alan then meets the kidnapper, who then tells Alan that if he wants his wife back, he has to give him the entire manuscript for Departure. Alan becomes the primary suspect in Alice's disappearance, attracting the FBI's attention. Barry Wheeler, Alan's agent and friend, comes to Bright Falls to help Alan recount events and understand what happened.

The next night, Alan goes to meet the kidnapper again, who is sucked into then killed by a dark tornado. Alan is then taken by a man named Dr. Hartman, the man Alice wanted him to see to help with Alan's writer block. At the lodge, Alan finds out that the kidnapper was working for Hartman all along, and that they didn't have Alice. Barry later then comes to the lodge to get Alan, but the place is then ambushed by the Dark Presence. Alan and Barry escape, leaving Hartman to the darkness. The next morning, Alan and Barry are arrested by Agent Nightingale from the FBI. They are taken to the station where they meet Nightingale and the sheriff, but Nightingale is dragged outside the station by the darkness and is killed.

Alan comes to learn that Cauldron Lake is possessed by an entity called the Dark Presence, and has the ability to turn fiction into reality. The Dark Presence is trapped within the lake, but is able to exert its influence on the local area and convert humans into the darkness-possessed "Taken". The diving suit figure is the consciousness of former writer Thomas Zane, who had owned the cabin and drowned during the earthquake; Zane is attempting to prevent the Dark Presence from escaping, and has provided Alan with pages of the Departure manuscript. After one night of heavy drinking, Alan begins to recall the events of the missing week: once he dived into the lake he was taken by a woman named Barbara Jagger (who is Zane's wife), and was forced to write Departure as a means to lay the path for the Dark Presence's escape using the lake's mysterious power, but Zane was able to influence Alan's subconscious mind to write in the means for Alan's own escape and the Dark Presence's defeat.

As the Dark Presence becomes more and more powerful, ravaging Bright Falls, Alan and Barry discover several clues that point them to a hermit, Cynthia Weaver, who knows the path to "The Well-Lit Room", where a weapon against the Dark Presence can be found. They locate Weaver, having protected herself in an abandoned power plant, and she takes them to the Room, where Alan finds a simple light switch unit called "the Clicker", part of the fiction that Zane helped Alan to create. Alan leaves his allies safely behind and returns to the lake, successfully using the Clicker to destroy the Dark Presence and Jagger. Despite its defeat, Alice does not yet emerge from the lake, and Alan realizes that balance must be maintained; he willingly throws himself into the lake waters; Alice soon reappears. Within the depths of the lake, Alan finds himself in the cabin, and realizes that Departure is not yet finished, and turns back to the typewriter to continue the story and write his own means to be free of the lake. He comments to himself that "It's not a lake—it's an ocean."