Alan Wake Remastered drops an out-of-the-blue patch that glams up the whole thing and lets you skip the intro—which you shouldn’t, because it’s now in dazzling HDR

Congratulations, Wakeheads: you can now witness Alan at such a brilliantly vivid colour intensity that it becomes, frankly, disturbing. Alan Wake Remastered has HDR now, is what I’m saying, as of its recent 1.33 patch that dropped, rather out of the blue, earlier today.

It does a fair bit, which I’ll get into, but I think the headline item is that Alan now has HDR support. His range? Dynamic. His bits? Well, never you mind, but quite high, thank you.

Alongside the new HDR tech, there’s also a “new, optional camera style mode. You can use this if you want the game to look a bit more modern.” Hate modernity? Remedy recommends you leave it alone: “If you prefer to keep a look as close to the original as possible, don’t touch this.”

On top of that, we’ve also got a new command that lets you skip the intro—”Shoutout to every speedrunner, and anyone on their 67th run of the game just looking to get into the gameplay quicker,” says Remedy—and “swapping between weapons takes a regular amount of time now, and not any longer than necessary.” Which I just find quite funny, insofar as the wording.

You can also now experience Full Alan at 240 fps (as opposed to the old, 200 fps limit), and the game will actually remember your custom settings now.

Things are even buffed up for those without luminous HDR screens: the game’s SDR colour mode is now 10 bits as opposed to eight, which simply put means more colors, if your monitor supports them (often manufacturers use terms like “true 10-bit”), and less banding in gradients.

It’s been a good day for surprise patches for (sort of) old(ish) games. A little earlier, I wrote about Beamdog dropping by unannounced to unleash a 2.7 patch beta for its Enhanced Editions of BioWare’s Infinity Engine games (save Planescape, which is coming later). I always like when old games get a bit of love. Keep it up, universe.

Here are the Alan Wake patch notes in full.

Alan Wake Remastered 1.33

Gameplay

• Added a command to skip the intro. (Shoutout to every speedrunner, and anyone on their 67th run of the game just looking to get into the gameplay quicker.)
• The sprint camera no longer activates when pressing the shift button when Alan is next to a wall or exhausted. This could sometimes cause Alan to not be able to move.
• The camera behaves the way it should when Alan is on top of a moving object.
• When loading from a checkpoint, the camera left/right side now resets properly.
• Vegetation moves the way vegetation is expected to when it’s windy or when Alan walks into some trees or bushes. Even above 30 FPS.
• Swapping between weapons takes a regular amount of time now, and not any longer than necessary.

Visuals

• Added HDR.
• Added a new, optional camera style mode. You can use this if you want the game to look a bit more modern. If you prefer to keep a look as close to the original as possible, don’t touch this.
• Unlocked the framerate from 200 FPS to 240 FPS.
• Improved DLSS and fixed grass transparency. Grass is now more pleasing to look at.
• Updated SDR to 10bit – it used to be 8bit. This reduces visible colour banding.
• Improved FOV scaling. (The math was off. Whoops.)
• Improved the way lens flare works. It now fades in/out much more smoothly.
• Improved the DX12 rendering path – this lowers the risk of crashes and glitches.
• Fixed polygonal rendering errors and visible depth buffer issues. This has greatly reduced the amount of visual glitches.
• The videos you could play on in-game TVs used to be affected by display brightness settings. Not anymore – fixed it!
• Fixed the enemies’ dark shield burning effect flare. It looks the way it’s supposed to now.
• In Ultrawide, fixed the enemies’ visual distortion effect looking weaker so that it displays properly.
• In Ultrawide, fixed cutscenes having both pillarbox and letterbox. You can now enjoy cutscenes in native 21:9!
• In Ultrawide and 4:3, fixed FOV and lens flares not scaling properly.
• Fixed DPI awareness where you had to set your display to 100% scaling to not crop the image. You don’t need to do that anymore.

UI

• Added a setting to scale the gameplay UI. It was quite tiny by default – you can now make it bigger.
• Fixed multiple issues related to mouse input
• Fixed it so that custom settings no longer leave multiple settings undefined. You are once again able to customise your settings, and the game will actually remember what you told it.