Echoes are collectibles in Alan Wake's story in Alan Wake 2. They are visions that can be found while traversing the Dark Place, which has taken the form of a dark New York City. They show visions of Alan's fictional detective Alex Casey, with some describing his life in New York City while others describe his investigation of the Cult of the Word as depicted in Alan Wake's manuscript Initiation.

Background

According to the interdimensional entity Warlin Door, the Dark Place is a "mirror that reflects all possible realities."^[1] The Echoes are visions brought to Alan Wake by this property of the Dark Place. These visions are a mixture of "fiction" and reality. Some are nonexistent events, fictional story beats Wake had thought of for his novels (often featuring Alex Casey as a result) but ultimately forgot about or discarded. Others are actual events happening in the real world which Wake could not otherwise have known about. Wake uses these "real events" in his writing to make his fictional parts more acceptable to the Dark Place. Wake has had similar visions throughout his life before entering the Dark Place, including his nightmares as a child, which had influenced his previous writing; he suspects that the power of the Dark Place has been responsible for this, giving him "dreams as visions through time."^[2][3]

List of Echoes

Initiation - Draft One

This chapter contains a total of ten Echoes.

The Manuscript

Location: Alley. Seen in a cutscene. Audio replay is bugged; see below.

• Casey: Rumor had it, the manuscript contained the details of the murders. A murder cult was following the story to commit their gruesome acts. Was Wake their leader? Had he written it? How far would he go to create a perfect work of art? Or would he be the next victim?

FBI Agent

Location: Caldera Street Station. On the unaltered Caldera Station scene.

• Casey: An FBI Agent had come here before me, on the trail of a murder cult. He’d gone missing, presumed dead. The cult was leaving me clues to follow, connecting the dots from one murder to the next, inviting me to draw an obscene picture of the city map. Caldera Street Station. The name made me think of the exit of a wound of a bullet.

Murder Cult

Location: Main Tunnel.

• Casey: Word is your research can help me, ma'am. What do you know?
• Professor: There's more than one urban legend about the Cult of the Word. The murder cult used these tunnels for their ritual sacrifices. They say the cult reenacted the murders in Alan Wake’s crime books. That Wake was even involved somehow, and a false identity: Mr. Scratch. Which is, of course, a nickname for the devil himself.

Markings

Location: Shrine Street Station.

• Casey: Turns out the cultists weren't the only ones using the tunnels. Hidden markings led to secret routes. I kept hearing whispers around burn barrels of an underground society of mystic outsiders with hidden knowledge. Typical New York.

Torchbearers

Location: Abandoned Station. On the Murder Cult version of the Derailed Train scene.

• Casey: Go on, ma'am.
• Professor: This is where the history of the cult gets genuinely disturbing. The cultists tracked down the Torchbearers living in the tunnels. They locked the poor folks up in a derailed subway car, doused it in gasoline, and... yeah.
• Casey: Charming.
• Professor: It turns into a bit of a ghost story after that. They say the dark smoke from the fire still roams the tunnels, searching for new victims to devour.
• Casey: There are no happy endings in this city.

Summoning Ritual

Location: Shrine Street Station. On the Murder Cult version of the End of the Line scene.

• Cultists: This is the ritual to lead you on.
• Casey: The fed had witnessed something here that made him run scared. Whether the summoning ritual had been a bona fide supernatural event or the mass psychosis of stark raving lunatics, it didn't change the facts. The cult was messing with things no one should mess with.

Something in the Air

Location: On the tunnel exiting the FBI Agent's murder site.

• Casey: Stepping to the murder site, I had felt it, hanging in the air. A meaning. The violent emotion of the act. Like a cloud of wrath. The dead eyes of the victim, starting at something you couldn't see, and yet, marking you aware of it. Something had soaked into this place on a molecular level. Overlapping with your meaningless existence. A regression to something you had managed to forget. Marking you. Taking you for a ride. Making you crazier.

Bad Luck

Location: Main Tunnel. On the Missing FBI Agent version of the Collapsed Tunnel scene.

• NYPD Officer: It's bad luck to be in this case. The cult can get you anywhere, with that black magic shit. Let the day shift handle it. What happened anyway?
• NYPD Officer: Some fed came looking for the cult. But it was a trap. A satanic blood sacrifice.
• NYPD Officer: Anyone who gets involved with the cult, they're next. I heard their leader is this famous writer, Alan Wake. Their unholy motherfucking messiah.
• NYPD Officer: Sounds like a load of bull.

The Tree

Location: Main Tunnel. On the Torchbearers version of the Collapsed Tunnel scene.

• Casey: The Torchbearers painted the tree there. The tree of knowledge? the tree of life, with its roots reaching down to hell? It could have been a Christmas tree, for all the good it did them.

Alice Wake

Location: Parliament Tower.

• Casey: The writer. Maybe he was a victim. The cult using his words. Or maybe he was the monster behind it all. Either way, Alice Wake, his ex, she knew things. It was there in her art for all to see. A cry for help. The darkness she'd witnessed. And that put her in danger.

Initiation - Draft Two

This chapter contains a total of eight Echoes.

Another Murder

Location: Outside Room 665.

• Casey: Whispers from the police radio kept me awake at night. The word through the ether: A murder in the backdrop of a play featuring a murder cult. How meta can you get, he said, looking knowingly at the camera. I could sense the Cult of the Word in this, and their leader, Mr. Scratch. Rumored to be Alan Wake, the writer who'd gone missing years before.

Pre-Show Ritual

Location: Reception.

• Casey: So you were the director of this play?
• Play Director: Yeah, that's me. Our performance of "The Cult" was cursed from the pre-show ritual on. "The Cult" is an immersive theatrical experience.
• Casey: Uh-huh. You're gonna have to walk me through what that means.
• Play Director: Immersive theater. A play where the audience can participate, spread across this hotel. "The Cult" is a legend. The only written copy of the manuscript lost, the play is passed on as oral tradition between theater companies. Each company only performs it once. The play was said to have special power. We were like kids playing with a Ouija board. But when you call for the devil, he will come.

Haunted

Location: Room 202. On the Pre-show Ritual version of the Rehearsal Room scene.

• Cultists: This is the ritual to lead you on.
• Casey: Why set up a play in a hotel? Why in this hotel?
• Play Director: 'Cuz the rent is cheap. Nah, the Oceanview was perfect for this. It's said to be haunted. Dark stories about murder, death, suicide. Supposedly an actual cult once performed an unspeakable ritual to summon... something in the ballroom. Did we summon the same thing, tapped into something horrifying? It seemed like it was part of the play, but it wasn't. Does that sound crazy?
• Casey: You don't want to ask me about crazy, kid.

The Devil

Location: Ballroom. On the Haunted version of the Ballroom scene.

• Casey: Nice set you got here. What was the scene in this room?
• Play Director: This is what we called the Writer's Room. In the play it's where the Devil rewrites reality while god is asleep. The Devil was our star role. I got a big-time celebrity to play him. And he was method acting the role to perfection. He never broke character, always wore the cult mask. His name was scratched out on the posters.
• Casey: And who was this mystery celebrity? Let me guess, Alan Wake?
• Play Director: I wish I could tell you, but turns out there were masks upon masks. Whoever he really was, shit got weird when he was around. Some of the crew joked that we'd actually hired the devil to play himself.
• Casey: Mr. Scratch as the devil. He was born to play the role.

Room 666

Location: On the stairs leading to Room 666.

• Det. Casey: Mr. Scratch, if that's who the actor playing the Devil was, had stayed in the hotel. Asking around at reception got me a room number: 666. He had requested that room specifically. The devil had a sense of humor, or he really didn't. It was funny either way. According to the director, the actor hadn't mingled with the rest of the cast. He had only come out for the play, always in character.

The Climax

Location: Room 666.

• Casey: Okay. Let's talk about the murder victim, the lady who was killed in the climax of the play.
• Play Director: The leading lady. It was an honor to get to work with her. A "grand dame" for sure. She went back a long time. Kept insisting she had seen the long-lost, original script of the play. She'd been with its mysterious writer, his muse. That was her role in the play, the Muse.
• Casey: She was staying in room 108? Where the murder happened?
• Play Director: The set of the final scene, right. The Devil comes, an unstoppable force, crashing through the hotel, through each scene, executed with devastating mastery, all leading up to him meeting his Muse. Turns out he knew her. He had only joined the play to get to her.
• Casey: To murder her.

Dead Tired

Location: Outside the Oceanview Hotel.

• Det. Casey: Had I chosen to pursue the cult, or had they chosen me for some unknowable purpose, to be a demon to sort the clues based on my interpretation, to change that which I observed? It was all a play, shadows on the wall of a cave, an echo of the true events that happened somewhere else. Was I there to watch the shadows, or was I a shadow too, in a performance set up for someone else?

Quid Pro Quo

Location: Reception. On the Climax version of the Entrance Hall scene.

• NYPD Officer: I've had enough of that freaking gumshoe dick asking too many freaking questions, not letting us proper police take care of it.
• NYPD Officer: This is our chance to make the powers-that-be happy. We'll be set for life, part of the inner circle.
• NYPD Officer: Amen to that, partner. I like it. And so will the fraternity, the club, the Word, our dear friends with many names. The way I see it, it was a lone nutjob, a junkie out of his mind on some fancy new designer drug.
• NYPD Officer: Open and shut case. All we got to do now is to dump the evidence from room 108 in the usual place in the alley.

Initiation - Draft Three

Thomas Zane

Location: Ocean Avenue.

• Casey: Inside this messy, maze of blood trails I was chasing the cult through, I ran into the film maker Thomas Zane. An esoteric bohemian with a hard-on for acts of cruelty performed in the name of occult nonsense. A director wants to control every aspect of the world in their films. Is a cult leader any different? Was Zane just another alias for Scratch? There was a rumor that Wake and Zane had been working on something together. I was going to get the truth out of Zane, with whatever means necessary.

The Cult of the Word

Location: Lobby

• Casey: I felt like I'd been on this case, looking for the Cult of the Word, for a lifetime or more. The only case I'd ever been on. They would surface from the dark with their depraved acts of violence and fade back into the night, leaving behind bloody crimes scenes and clues heavy with obscure meanings that led nowhere. Arriving at the cinema, I felt a monumental, terrifying revelation trembling before me. Ready to open its jaws and swallow me whole.

Crooked Cops

Location: Concession stand. On the Cult of the Word version of the Lobby scene.

• Casey: It would do you a lot of good to talk, buddy.
• Cultist: Haha. It was an initiation ceremony. Or so we made our "new members" believe. Two of New York's finest. They had performed endless favors to earn their place among us. We had something special waiting for them. And something very special for you, Alex Casey.
• Casey: Who's your leader? Alan Wake? Scratch? Zane? Give me a name!
• Cultist: You will meey him soon enough.

Nightless Night

Location: Screen.

• Casey: The urban legends circling Tomas Zane were a bottomless rabbit hole. I'd done some digging. To film freaks he was a mythic auteur in the arthouse cinema. A rising star, coming to America from Finland. But he only created one film, Tom the Poet, before he went missing, mirroring the vanishment of the main character in the movie, played by himself. The biggest mystery was around his lost film, an early work made in Finland, Nightless Night, rumored to have mystic properties. Some claimed it was a snuff film, that the ritual murder in the film was an actual murder. There were no known surviving copies, but the Cult chased it as if it was their unholy grail, just like Wake's books were.

Clip of the Lost Film

Location: Theater Hall. On the Cult of the Word version of the Theater Hall scene.

• Casey: Look at you, following your master into la-la-land. A sad bunch of clowns in funny masks and hoods, pretending to be a secret society.
• Cultist: Maybe it is you who is playing a role, Mr. Casey. A role carefully laid out for you. A puppet blindly performing the ritual steps for the glory of the Cult.
• Casey: What the fuck have you been smoking?
• Cultist: Nightless Night. A clip of the lost film survived. You will see, Mr. Casey. In the Nightless Night, you will finally see.

Down the Chute

Location: Backlot. On the New York's Finest version of the Out in the Night scene.

• NYPD Officer: You don't think they're gonna want us to, like-cut off a finger or something, for this initiation, do ya?
• NYPD Officer: I'm sure we'll just chant some ceremonial stuff, nothing to it.
• NYPD Officer: It's about time. We paid our dues. Made plenty of their problems disappear. Dumped all those nobodies down that chute.
• NYPD Officer: What we did or didn't do, it's all behind us now. We're going straight to the top, partner.
• NYPD Officer: Yeah! Like we dead and went to heaven!

Death of a Cultist

Location: Cinema sign. On the Cult of the Word version of the Out in the Night scene.

• Casey: Don't you fucking move, or I'll blow you away.
• Cultist: You got me, Mr. Casey. I'm all yours. Go ahead. Ask that burning question in your mind.
• Casey: How'd you do it? How did you get me into that film clip without my remembering it? Talk to me, damn it!
• Cultist: You've seen the film? Good, good, now you're ready to meet the Grandmaster. He's waiting for you in the projection booth, where everything will be revealed, where he will project a new reality onto this one. And now, Mr. Casey, I have played my part to the end.
• Casey: No! Crazy bastard. Why'd he jump?

The Grandmaster

Location:

• The Grandmaster: Welcome, Alex Casey. You've done well. You played your role perfectly.
• Casey: Everything out of your mouth is a damn lie. The only place any of this makes sence is in your psychotic brain.
• The Grandmaster: As a fictional character in a story, you have fulfilled your purpose. You brought the writer of the story here. You can go now, Casey.
• Casey: I'm not going anywhere before I get some answers! How I was in that movie? Why does all this feel so familiar? Who the fuck are you? Who the fuck am I? No!
• The Grandmaster: And welcome to you Alan Wake.

Trapped

Location:

• Casey: There wasn't enough alcohol in this city to drown the memories of this nightmare, but I'd damn well try. This case would never be closed, I had more questions now than at the start, the irony of being trapped in a postmodern detective story. I felt watched, the eyes of some unseen audience on me. I wanted to turn to the hidden camera and tell them to fuck off, but I didn't know where to look to break the fourth wall. There would always be another case for Casey. A million stories in this dark city. The night opened up to welcome me. I walked into her arms. Roll credits.

Casey Billboards

• Cold Case
  • Casey: The rain tried to wash away the sins of this city.  But some sins, the evidence of the crimes committed, could never be erased.  Not by the rain.  Or any amount of therapy from Dr. Jack Daniels.  It remained, bruises under my skin like tattoos.  Bruises in my soul.  Scar tissue on my heart.  The rain never stopped falling.  And I never stopped drinking.

• Hard Case
  • Casey: The city was a monster, poised to tear into you the second you let your guard down.  You thought you had it tamed, that you knew what the hell you were doing.  Your last mistake, unless you got lucky.  And you didn't deserve to get lucky.  You blinked at the wrong time, let your mind wander- and the fire escape that was meant to be your getaway route was gone, was never there at all, you'd gotten turned around somewhere along the way.  The city was coming to finish you off and there was nowhere left to run.

• Closed Case
  • Casey: This city will suck you dry if you stay here for too long.  You'll end up a lost soul haunting the streets and alleys, a faded-out shadow, glimpsed by some other poor bastard on his way toward the same fate.  Your broken dreams become a broken mirror, and the twisted reflection- staring back at you with all the pent up anger, regret, guilt, and shame- was the monster you could never get away from.

• Final Case
  • Casey: You dream of calling it quits.  Making a clean break.  Retiring.  Escaping.  Leaving all this sordid misery and terror behind.  Getting in a car and driving till you see the sunrise, somewhere where the sun still rises.  Settling down, buying a house.  Fixing it up.  Building a life.  Finding someone.  It's a fool's dream.  It would all go bad.  And having let hope in, it would be unbearably worse than this.  You can take the man out of the city.  But you can never take the city out of the man.

• Murder Case
  • Casey: They say God made us in his image.  Just like us, he is an uncaring, cruel son of a bitch.  Having made it in heaven, he doesn't want us there- dirtying up all that nice white upholstery.  And he doesn't want to reach down to help us, he gets his kicks just binge watching us struggling, hurting, killing, dying- screwing it up again and again.  Lazily stirring it up when things threaten to get too placid.  This city is only here to satisfy his sick voyeuristic pleasure.

• Worst Case
  • Casey: Something kept me going.  A broken man, no hope, no prospects.  No love.  To stubborn to die.  Like a cock roach with a misguided sense of honor and justice- in a city where there can never be justice.  

Notes

Bugs

• The Echo titled "The Manuscript" was bugged and unobtainable prior to patch 15 on January 31, 2024. As of patch 16.1, there is currently another issue associated with it, as all of the lines are cut short when listening to it on the Radio.
• When listening to "Bad Luck" and "Quid Pro Quo" on the radio, the audio will cut short on the lines when "Thornton" switches to "Mulligan" or vice versa.
• In the subtitles, the speaker's name sometimes differs between when the Echo is listened to in the vision vs. on the radio in the Writer's Room. For example, for all Echoes, "Ed" is shown when collecting Echoes where his voice is heard, but when listening to those Echoes on the radio, his name is "Play Director" instead. Another example are the police officers in "Bad Luck", "Down the Chute", and "Quid Pro Quo," which is reversed: the officers are named "NYPD Officer" in the visions, but are named "Mulligan" and "Thornton" instead in the radio.

References