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It’s hard to summarize what an experience you’re in for withAlan Wake 2. The game takes the essence of its 2010 predecessor and runs it through Alan’s reality-altering typewriter to deliver some of the most complex and astounding narrative, survival horror, andmusic and sound design elementsyou’ll see in gaming. And once again, the ending is thought-provoking.
Although you’ll seesome familiar characters popping up in Bright Falls, Alan Wake 2 is also different in that it’s all now connected to Control, and Alan Wake and Saga Anderson are co-protagonists involved in this extradimensional conflict. There’s tons of story content in between all the Taken combat, all leading to this ending here.
Updated on June 23, 2025, by Dennis Moiseyev:Alan Wake 2’s New Game Plus mode, also known as The Final Draft, is officially out and has a different ending than the one you obtain in your initial playthrough. And in addition to the alternate ending cutscene, New Game Plus has one more significant story surprise in store for one of the later Return chapters, which all warrants further discussion.
Major story spoilers for the ending of Alan Wake 2 are discussed below.
Does Alan Wake 2 Have Multiple Endings?
There are indeed now two different endings for Alan Wake 2 available.
Alan Wake 2’s New Game Plus, or The Final Draft, has in store a new alternate ending that expands on the one you receive in the original story.
However, although it may seem like it, this does not mean the game has branching paths that result in multiple endings in a single playthrough.You must beat the standard version and The Final Draft mode to get both separately.
While Alan Wake 2 allows you toalternate between characters Saga Anderson and Alan Wakeat your own pace throughout the gameplay,their storylines ultimately converge into one linear pathtoward the end,no matter what orderyou completethe Return and Initiation chapters.
The original ending to Alan Wake 2’s standard story also has an additional post-credits scene, so stick around and speed up or skip those credits.
What Chapter Initiates The Ending?
The point of no return in Alan Wake 2 comes in the latter part of Return 6 - Scratch. Once Scratch escapes his cell at Bright Falls Sheriff’s Station and kills Jaakko Koskela, you’ll engage in a brief boss battle outside with the Dark Presencepowering FBC containment array generators to banish him.
Afterward, you’ll have to speak with agents Kiran Estevez and Alex Casey in Tim Breaker’s office.Your next objective will be to devise a plan to get Scratch.
This involvesgoing through the dialogue conversations with Casey and Estevez and consulting Saga’s Mind Placefor any Case Board and Profiling Desk updates to draw the correct conclusion with all the information and build up the plan.
When you’re ready to reveal your plan to Estevez, you’ll get a prompt to save and a message stating that this is the beginning of the end of the game.
So be sure to find all the collectibles and visit all the areas you can up to this point, especially findinga few hidden plot points like the identity of Mayor Setter.
For the best experience and narrative flow,catch up and complete all of Alan’s Initiation chapters up to Zane’s Film before starting Return 6to get the smoothest transition into the end of the game.
Otherwise, you’ll be set back from reaching the end of Return 7 and be sent back to the Dark Place to finish Alan’s remaining chapters.
Don’t miss out on the opportunity tospeak to Ilmo Koskela at the station. He won’t be too far from the agents, remaining in the nearby hallway by his deceased brother.
This conversation will revealanother shocking twistabout the origins of the Cult of the Tree, their goals, and that they’re not the evil, twisted group you suspected.
What Happens In The Final Chapters?
Before the discussion of the ending scene can even begin,it’s helpful to understand what happens in the chapters Initiation 9, Return 7, Return 8, and Return 9.The plot twists start coming in one after another, and things take a very interesting and mind-bending turn building up to the final scene.
Initiation 9 - Gone
Initiation 9 marks Alan’s final visit to the Parliament Tower apartmentin the Dark Place. To enter it, you first need to complete a small puzzle inside the studio with your Angel Lamp to arrive at the basement andcollect Alice’s photos of the light switch and a Bullet of Light to place at the plaza statue outside Parliament Tower.
What you discover at the apartment is one last bittersweet photo exhibit from Alice,revealing that she took her own life. This revelation triggers a live-action sequence where Alan barges through a spiral door into the Writer’s Room and shoots who he believes to be Scratch working on the manuscript of Return…
Only to then realize it’s all been a loop this entire time, and what he’s only accomplished iskilling a previous version of himself trying to fix the manuscript. And he also comes to terms with the fact thathe’s been the one haunting Alice, not Scratch.
Return 7 - Summoning
Return 7 is called Summoning, and it’s all about putting the plan into action and using the art of live music, quickly put together by the Anderson Brothers, as a ritualto summon Scratch to Cauldron Lake to trap him in a containment cageusing special state-of-the-art FBC light beams.
First, Saga will clear hordes of Taken before activating the Clicker and advancing to what feels likethe final boss fight in the game against Alan’s possessed form.
This chapter results in three crucial endgame twists:
The boss reveal of Alan and Scratch comes in the second half of Return 7, after the summoning ceremony and only when you complete Initiation 9, which the game will automatically transport you to do.
Return 8 - Deerfest
Alan, now Scratch-free, equips himself with all the available weapons and his flashlight and drives to Bright Falls in the darkness, arriving at an Overlap.This sends him into a daytime nightmare version of Bright Falls, where the Deerfest is in full swing.
All the citizens are wearing deer masks, and everyone is celebrating the success of Alan’s new novel, Return, even speaking about the narrative in a meta way. When he picks up a personal copy of Return to figure out the ending to try and rewrite it,the Dark Presence ends the facade of the parade and sends everyone in Bright Falls out to get Alan.
This leads toone final climactic chase sequence by the Dark Presence of the Scratch-possessed Caseyin the Valhalla Nursing Home Wellness Center, ending with Alan being rescued by none other than Rose, who lets him into the safe haven of the nursing home.
Ahti then welcomes Alan to enter thegray spiral door to Room 306(precisely the one Saga was barred from earlier in Return 5), which turns out to be the Writer’s Room where Alan has been working on Return the entire time. From there, the game transitions to Saga’s perspective in the Dark Place.
Return 9 - Come Home
In another twist,Saga isn’t immediately in the Dark Place. She’s instead become trapped inside her Mind Place, the Dark Presence manifesting inside it andpitting her against her own evil doubledubbed “Other Saga,” which is overwhelming her profiling abilities and making her believe she’s a terrible mother, partner, and detective.
After Saga fights off the darkness with her flashlight inside the Mind Place to unveil evidencethat can return the Case Board to its usual healthy crime-solving state, she is free to exit and proceed to the familiar New York streets of the Dark Place.
Here, she receives instructions from a payphone caller to go to Parliament Tower Plaza andretrieve the items Alan was asked to store in the shoebox at the statue.
This is undoubtedly Alice Wake’s voice speaking to Saga, hinting she’s still there to help things along.
Sheriff Tim Breaker will also give Saga one final manuscript piecethat will allow her to get to where she needs to go using a unique route that Mr. Door can travel through.
From that point,there’s a lot of communication between Alan and Saga about what the ending to Return needs to be, all done through profiling Alan from the Mind Place.
Finally, Saga takes the items in the shoebox (the Clicker light switch and the Bullet of Light), crosses into the Overlap, andarrives at Alan’s side in the Writer’s Room. This brings us to the final scene in the game before the credits.
How Is The Final Draft Version Of Return 9 Different?
The alternate ending in New Game Plus actually starts happening a bit before the live-action ending cutsceneand makes a significant narrative addition to Return 9.
The phone call from Alice, getting the final manuscript page on Warlin Door from Tim Breaker, and grabbing the contents of the shoebox at the statue in Parliament Tower Plaza all remain the same.
Odin and Tor Anderson reunite with Saga in the Dark Place near the fountain Overlap, which was an inexplicable absence in the original version.
After Saga is thrown into Cauldron Lake, the last you see of the Anderson Brothers is them setting off after her and venturing into the lake.Now, they’re visibly there and appear to be just hanging out when you first approach them.
Only after returning to the fountain with the items and Saga and Alan’s story idea complete can you interact with them. They have quite a bit of extra dialogue before you exit the Dark Place.
They claim to have missed Saga “the first time around” and are glad to have caught her now. Tor and Odin reluctantly claim to have buried the hatchet with Mr. Door,further alluding that the manuscript regarding his disappearance by getting struck by a lightning bolt during a fight with the brothers was accurate and that he’s Saga’s dad.
The explanation is also that they were here performing on Mr. Door’s show,which means Odin and Tor were somehow already in the Dark Place before the events of Return 7 and as their younger forms portrayed by Poets of the Fall.
Their interaction also leaves things with two more major twists. They reveal thatAhti helped create the Overlap “puddle” to help Saga get out of the Dark Place, further nodding to the theory thatAhti’s name is tied to Finnish mythology and of him being a Water God.
Tor and Odin also share that they won’t be going back with Saga and are choosing to stay in the Dark Place, but hint at a future return by saying “We’ll see each other again.”
The Ending Scene, Explained
Alan is ready with the ending to the story he and Saga both agreed on,noting that a hero has to die, and just in time before the Scratch form of Casey enters the room.
Alan wrote it so that he gets the hero’s sacrificeby Scratch leaving Casey’s body to re-enter Alan’s and finish it once and for all with Saga’s help.
The rewritten ending activates as soon as Saga presses the Clicker. When Scratch is back in Alan,Saga loads her pistol and fires the Bullet of Light straight into Alan’s head, and the Dark Presence of Scratch is instantly seen floating out behind Alan.
The glow soon leaves the bullet hole, Alan lies dead in the chair, and Casey remarks if it’s all finally over.
Logan’s Fate
The big question that remains: Is it done? Is reality back as it should be?The ultimate test is to seeif Saga’s daughter, Logan, is now alive.
Saga’s primary motivation throughout the story isto ensure her daughter stays alivewhen the rewritten reality brought on by Return makes everyone believe she’d drowned.
Saga immediately dials Logan on her phone but to no avail.Logan doesn’t answer, and the line continues ringing into the credits.
While Logan may just not have her phone at the moment or is too preoccupied with an activity to answer, it’s impossible to know whether Saga and Alan’s new ending remedied things. It’s all left up in the air inone gutting cliffhanger ending to Alan Wake 2’s narrative.
The Post-Credits Scene, Explained
The post-credits scene offers a surprise twist with Alice Wake. In one final recorded video message for her husband,Alice reveals that she’s alive.
She led Alan astray about her death to ensure he’d be led on the correct path to escaping the Dark Place. Furthermore, she states thatshe’s been traveling to the Dark Place on her own accord to help Alan (in a way confirming that she was the one talking to Saga through the payphone).
She also speaks about the haunting, revealing all her memories of the 2010 Cauldron Lake AWE returned after a visit with an organization.It’s implied to be none other than the Federal Bureau of Control and most likely inside their New York HQ, the Oldest House. It’s also evident in her emails with Barry, who confirms they were in contact with the FBC.
Alice thinks it’s time for all the destruction to end. Alan has been endlessly trying to destroy Scratch, destroying multiple versions of himself in the process, and has had Saga kill him to get to where he is now. She believes they need to move forward with a new strategy,what she calls “Ascension.”
This prompts Alan to wake up in the Writer’s Room chair alive.And, to end things on an even more perplexing and unresolved note,his final line is, “It’s not a loop — it’s a spiral.”
While ascension might sound like a job for a Dr. Casper Darling explainer presentation, it goes beyond that and involves action (more on that in the alternate ending explainer below). Even with his new set of video collectibles in New Game Plus found in the Oceanview Hotel, Dr. Casper Darling just mentions that time is not linear and moves differently in the Dark Place dimension.
The spiral on the door to the Writer’s room alluded to all of this from the start, asa spiral symbol winds out in a path that can be ascended.
Alan also confirms in the new ‘Spiral’ Writer’s Journey video that"Time is broken here" (also another nod to Quantum Break) and that time in the Dark Place “loops around and yet it goes forward. A spiral.”
It seems like what Alice is still continuing to do for Alan is working,as she’s just helped Alan once again realize something crucialthat will hopefully become clearer to us as we continue his journey. It also tells us that there’s more to come in the fight to restore the balance of reality.
New Game Plus Alternate Ending Scene, Explained
The new ending not only gives closure to the cliffhanger surrounding Logan’s fate,but also serves as a direct sequel to the original campaign.
New Game Plus even starts with an alternate intro in which Alan Wake proclaims, “This is a Spiral.”
Certain narrative content is added and changed aroundin his and Saga’s sections throughout the gameplay to convey thatthings picked off directly from where the post-credits scene left off.
Reality truly wasn’t restored in the game’s first ending and the entireNew Game Pluswasthe new “spiral” ascension course that Alan set off on after his post-credits guidance by Alice, essentially to redo it all and fix things for certain this time.
Logan is revealed to be safe and aliveafter Saga can now reach her on the line,andLogan believes what she experienced was all a nightmare. And almost all the dialogue in this ending cutscene is completely new.
This time, Alan wakes up in the chair after being shot with Saga and Casey still in the Writer’s Room acknowledging him,with Alan thanking Alice for getting him to “where he needed to be” as her face now projects out of the Bullet of Light.
However, Alice, Ahti, and the Anderson Brothers' purposes, along with the story of where things go from here, are uncertain.
There is also one final new cryptic revelation. With Scratch eliminated (hopefully for good) and Alan at last escaping from the Dark Place,Alan additionally remarks that he’s “The master of two worlds. No, the master of many worlds.”
This is a jaw-dropping reveal thatcalls back to the powers and abilities of Warlin Door and Ahti,almost as though Alan has now ultimately reached full ascension and is now on the same level as other multi-dimensional travelers.
