Best-selling novelist Alan Wake has been suffering from writer's block for the past two years. In hopes to cure it, Alan and his wife, Alice, go on a vacation to a small remote town in the Pacific Northwest called Bright Falls.

Shortly after arriving in their cabin, a force of darkness kidnaps Alice and Alan wakes up in a car crash almost two weeks later. Trying to wrap his head around the scenario, Alan soon finds himself a target to the force of darkness, possessing the people of Bright Falls to stop him from saving his wife. It's a horror story Alan is unsure he could overcome and a mystery he seems to have written in a manuscript he has no memory of.