Alan Wake 2’s Clicker may not be evil in itself, but it can amplify the Dark Place’s reality-altering properties. It’s not something you want hanging around and this horror sequel probably wouldn’t have happened if Control’s FBC had it under lock and key.
But we’re finding it a lot less menacing now that we’ve learnt the adorable truth about the real-life Clicker. Horror game Alan Wake 2 is a work of fiction, and fiction within fiction, but the Clicker was real.
Remedy’s Sam Lake, who co-wrote both games and directed the second, had an actual Clicker, a disconnected light switch, as a youth. It was this device which went on to inspire the game’s Object of Power. As explained in a 2012 Edge interview, as a child, Lake stumbled across a box of electrical ‘junk’.
Picking through it he discovered a light switch which became fascinated by. “To me, stuff like that always felt particularly mysterious and magical,” he explains in the interview. He named it the Clicker and imagined it having “secret powers”.
So, writing Alan Wake, he had just the thing in mind, and the Clicker became capable of banishing darkness. In the game, Alan Wake gets it from his mother, a trinket to help him deal with his night terrors. It’s enough to make us want a Clicker of our own.
Sure, Alan Wake 2 is still unsettling but whenever anyone mentions it in-game we’re picturing a tiny Sam Lake getting hours and hours of entertainment out of it. However, while we’ve been poking around eBay and the like we’ve yet to find a switch that perfectly matches the Clicker’s in-game design. Maybe it’s time to get the 3D printer out.
You can read the full, now-archived Edge Sam Lake/Alan Wake interview here. Alan Wake 2 is out now, digitally, on PC, Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5. And if you’re wondering what makes it so great, check out our review.
