Warning: This article has some slight spoilers for the later portions of Alan Wake 2, although we tried to keep them to a minimum. It also contains spoilers for Quantum Break and Control.

If you google the term "multiverse fatigue," you'll find a whole slate of articles, social media posts, and forum discussions in which people complain about how much the idea of a "multiverse" has permeated popular culture. With superhero stories and their cinematic universes dominating movies and spreading to TV, the once-fringe, science fictional idea of multiple connected universes and alternate dimensions has become mainstream, and with its ubiquity, kind of dull.

It's into this climate that Remedy Entertainment has released Alan Wake 2, the studio's second game since it started talking about its "Remedy Connected Universe" and narratively linked the Alan Wake games to 2019's Control. And the RCU isn't just bringing Remedy's current and future games into the same world so they can overlap with one another like TV show crossover events. Control is largely about the idea of a multiverse as something to be explored, studies, and defended against, and makes a lot of gestures in the direction that Remedy's past games could be among those additional dimensions.