#and as a game so heavy on writing i found the commentary srly lacking in this book

[koskela-knights]

The Art of Alan Wake 2 book spoilers

Making this its own post becos I'm gonna be a negative on this one :P

To be honest, the art book left more to be desired. There are surprisingly few chapters in it with 165 pages.

Foreword

Characters

Environment

Acknowledgements which is just 1 page with the team names

I have Alan Wake Illuminated (as pdf) which sort of serves as an Art book for the first game and it has about 176 pages and 8 different chapters including: unused material, casting, prototypes...

In the few chapters, there's a small intro text/commentary but besides that, not much extra commentary which I severely missed. I always love reading about the process, seeing the sketches, unused ideas, snippets of dialogue or script, etc. and I kinda hoped/wished they would give us more insights about the whole process again with this art book.

Compared to other art books I've seen and have, it remains lacking in that department.

So what's in the book? There are concept sketches about the characters and environment and some 3d renders but most of it I've already seen on ArtStation and during the live streams. Maybe those livestreams are also a reason they didn't put much commentary into the book? Still, a shame because I don't know if everyone has watched those dev streams + I would really love to know more about the design process of the NPCs. Why did they give Saga this hairstyle, why put in these character details, what made them decide to give Alan a more formal suit...? (just some random questions)

Even having a short description of all the featured characters (like those character cards they did on Insta) would've been a fun addition to give the book more body.

(And as a Koskela fan, I feared I wouldn't get more new BTS material with the art book and sadly I'm right)

Lowkey also surprised to find nothing about Yötön Yö. No script pages or photos or concept art. Again, I really wish we would've seen more about that short movie because it rightly deserves more spotlights and acknowledgement. I think in one of the live streams, they also showed the storyboard for the game? Would've loved to see that for the short movie. Show us the uncut ideas (if I believe they intended it to be even longer than the 30min we got?)

And what about the story itself? It's such a mindfuck and wild ride of a story, I think many fans would've been happy to see more insights about the story and the narrative choices. Alan Wake 1 even shines a light (pun intended) on the story and ideas that were thrown around until it became Alan Wake as we know it.

So yeah, I might've had my hopes too high up (lmao as usual when it comes to Koskela content)?

But in general, I feel they could've done more with the book, showcase more of the thought processes behind such an amazing game. Because truly, the art of this game deserves to be shown and to be elaborated on beyond brief chapter introductions on 1 page and brief descriptors.

Idk if it has to do with the company they collabed with or not? From what I've heard from someone else, the Control artbook was legit and detailed.