LogInTherefore, despite jump scares still being a necessary part, The Lake House DLC uses them “in a slightly more reduced manner.”
Remedy
Despite Remedy Entertainment’s Alan Wake 2 receiving favorable reviews from players, its bit reliance on jump scares, a cheap and lazy method seen by many to frighten players in horror games, has, to some extent, lowered the overall experience.
The studio might agree with this, too, as Game director Kyle Rowley recently talked to Games Radar+ and admitted that the developers might have “overdid it a little bit” when looking back at the game a year after its release. He explained the necessity of having some jump scares in the game:
"Thematically, story-wise, they're meant to be like a psychological attack on the character who's receiving them. Especially in the base game, you know, where you're getting introduced to Overlap Guardians, whether that's Nightingale or Cynthia, they're meant to be this kind of mental assault."
In addition to the thematic reason, there is also another aspect that leads to the existence of jump scares: technical reasons.
"We do use them just for technical reasons as well, from a mission flow and level design and gameplay design perspective. We had these two reasons, and they kind of were serving slightly different purposes. But for a player, it came across basically as a jump scare no matter how we utilized it, whether it was through this story narrative reason or for gameplay reasons."
Remedy
With that in mind, the developers made some adjustments, like “in a slightly more reduced manner,” as the director said, on the Alan Wake 2: The Lake House DLC, which was just released yesterday. "But they are still a key part of our way of getting across the mental state of characters and the way the supernatural works and the way the psychological elements of the game works,” Rowley said.
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