Last year, Control developer Remedy announced it had signed a two-project publishing deal with Epic Games, and then re-introduced its fan favourite hero Alan Wake via Control's excellent second expansion, which wove the story of both games together as part of Remedy's wider narrative universe.

Was Wake being teed up to tease a full sequel to his Xbox 360 cult hit? After Epic's publishing deal was announced - for a big "AAA multiplatform game already in pre-production" and a "new, smaller-scale project set in the same franchise" - fans' hopes were high that Wake would also appear in one of these games.

Now, chatty but reliable Venturebeat journalist Jeff Grubb has announced via his Twitch he had heard "Alan Wake 2" was one of Remedy's Epic-funded projects.

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Remedy has said it's working on the next game in its connected universe.

Alan Wake and Control are part of the Remedy Connected Universe, creative director Sam Lake said in a blog post.

This week, during Sony's State of Play event, Remedy unveiled the trailer for AWE, the next expansion for Control and the first Remedy Connected Universe experience. In the trailer we see a bearded Alan Wake.

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Five of the Best is a weekly series about the bits of games we overlook. Things like crowds, potions, mountains, hands. Things we barely notice while we're playing but can recall many years later because, it turns out, they're fundamental to our memory of the game. Well, now is the time to celebrate them!

Today we're celebrating...

Blocks! Or do I mean cubes? Don't! We had a whole argument about this. Cubes are a kind of block, as far as I'm concerned, and so are other shapes like the lower-case L Tetris block. If we confined ourselves only to cubes, we'd have to talk about the Companion Cube from Portal, again, and then I'd be forced to counterbalance it with Peter Molyneux's Curiosity cube just to be mean. But no, I'd never be so cheeky as to put a red herring in the list...

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Epic continues to frisbee out the free games, as backlogs around the globe grow so unwieldy they're liable to topple over and squish their owners flat. But should you be willing to risk your chances against Death itself, then, hey, why not add Observer and Alan Wake's American Nightmare to your library later today?

Both games, of course, paddle in the wading pool of blood that is the horror genre (appropriately enough, given the season), with Bloober Team's Observer taking the surreal sci-fi approach, while Alan Wake's American Nightmare offers up a Twilight-Zone-inspired slice of small-town terror. They're both good!

Observer time-travels players to 2084, and a dilapidated apartment building in a dystopian version of Krak w, Poland. Here, they take on the role of Daniel Lazarski (voiced by Rutger Hauer), a so-called Observer detective attempting to track down his estranged son.

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UPDATE 2.30PM: Speaking to Eurogamer, Alan Wake developer Remedy has teased the possibility of a multiplatform release for its previously Microsoft-owned hero.

"The only thing we want to clarify, now that Remedy owns the publishing rights, is that we could bring Alan Wake to different platforms if we so choose," a Remedy spokesperson told me this afternoon.

"We have nothing to announce for now. We are fully focused on Control releasing on 27th August."

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