Phasmophobia's Alan Wake Event Was Written By Sam Lake And Is A "Match Made In Heaven"

Phasmophobia's next event is unlike any before it, because it's the first to involve a crossover with another franchise. The "Phasmophobia by Alan Wake" event runs for three weeks, beginning today, May 12, and includes the game's debut of unlockable skins, modeled after the main characters of Remedy Entertainment's Alan Wake 2: Alan himself and FBI agent Saga Anderson.

During the Phasmophobia by Alan Wake event, four of the game's maps have been reimagined to suit the Alan Wake world, including touches that are inspired by Alan Wake 2 locations and events. Included in that limited-time map overhaul are the newest of them, Nell's Diner, as well as both of the farmhouses and Camp Woodwind. Like in Remedy's own games, you'll be seeking out pages from Alan Wake's writings and interacting with some of the game's enemies, including cultists in deer masks, though the game will still fundamentally feel like Phasmophobia, so it doesn't "introduce any confusion for players," Kinetic director of marketing and partnerships Asim Tanvir told me.

New challenges will guide you through the event, and you'll use new items taken right out of Remedy's game, such as Alan's angel lamp. Perhaps most exciting of all, if you're coming to the event as a fan of Alan Wake, is that its story was written by Remedy's creative director, Sam Lake, and will feature narration from Alan Wake's voice actor, Matthew Poretta.

In a recent conversation, Kinetic and Remedy told me how the collab was born from a DM and grew from there, because the Phasmophobia fans at Remedy and Kinetic saw the crossover as a seamless fit.

"I know [Remedy communications director Thomas Puha] from a while back," Tanvir said. "When I joined Kinetic, one of my things was to look at potential opportunities in the future for collaborations and partnerships, and being a huge Remedy fan and a huge Alan Wake fan, it was like, 'All right, I know Thomas is there, so let's reach out to Thomas.' So back in September 2024, I think it was, it started with a Twitter DM, and now, almost a couple of years later, the event is coming to fruition [...] and it was great to see that there were huge [Phasmophobia] fans at Remedy. So there was a great appetite from the Remedy side to do something, as well."

Remedy has such a "fleshed-out world," Kinetic's senior narrative designer Ana Dukakis said. "Every corner you look into in that world, there are answers, and there are more questions. It feels so, so rich. So getting to interface with that, even a little bit, was honestly quite inspiring, you know? So it's quite cool, as we're fleshing out our world, to be able to see what other games are doing. And I think that, atmospherically, there's actually quite a lot of overlap in the sort of themes that we're looking at."

Though Tanvir said players can think of it as a one-time event and not canon to Phasmophobia, Remedy's principal narrative designer Molly Maloney did tease that the door may as well stay open because in Alan's world, anything goes.

"We've kind of created a lore that expressly allows reality to be rewritten [...] We're always really ambitious with our storytelling and our goals," Maloney said. "But this also stems from the fact that, you know, we really appreciate our fans so much, and we aren't interested in creating different tiers of content where it's like, 'Oh, this is real. This is not real.' If you're engaging with the Alan Wake universe, or Alan Wake as a franchise, we always want the fans to feel that they're a part of our universe and our experience. That was the attitude we went into this with. There's a lot for Remedy fans, I think, to uncover and explore in here.

"Phasmophobia was a match made in heaven in so many ways," Maloney continued. "Like, [in Phasmophobia,] you've got this presence from the other side, right? Kind of trying to intrude. Who is Alan, if not a presence from the other place, intruding?"

Tanvir said that though this may not be Phasmophobia's last crossover event, neither should fans expect it to become a game that routinely features collabs of this sort.

"This is a huge milestone for us, having this first collaboration and partnership out, " he told me. "We'd definitely love to explore more collaborations in the future, but they need to feel right with the fit of the game, and with Alan Wake 2, it showed us that it can work really well when there's genuine alignment between both games."

Last week, Kinetic released Phasmophobia's Player Character Update, meant to overhaul the game's (sometimes beloved) janky animations and characters. Reactions in the game's community suggest players almost universally rejected this update for a variety of reasons, not least of all because, in some cases, it merely created new jank. The game's next patch arrives with the Alan Wake event today and is meant to quickly fix much of what ailed Phasmophobia days ago.