Alan Wake 2 devs won’t fix a bug used by speedrunners

After learning of a pivotal skip in speedruns of Alan Wake 2 expansion The Lake House during Awesome Games Done Quick 2025 in early January, developer Remedy Entertainment has promised not to fix the bug that makes the strategy possible.

“Thanks to [the AGDQ 2025] run by suavepeanut, the Lake House development team found out that you can actually interact with the elevator from the outside... and immediately decided that’s not something that will be fixed,” the studio said through its official Bluesky account. “You’re welcome.”

The skip is basically as Remedy described. At several points during The Lake House, players are required to ride an elevator between the various floors of the titular building. But by manipulating the elevator and choosing their desired floor from outside the transport after the doors close, speedrunners are able to teleport between floors rather than sitting through travel cutscenes.

During their AGDQ 2025 performance, current world record holder for The Lake House suavepeanut said that every instance of the skip, which can be “tricky” due to having to press four buttons at the same time, saves 20-30 seconds. Used successfully up to seven times over the course of the game, this can shave relatively huge chunks of time off a speedrun that takes less than 20 minutes to complete.

It’s a rare thing for a major studio to leave its game in a less-than-perfect state just to satisfy a small group of diehard fans. Hollow Knight speedrunners, for instance, play a much older version of the game because developer Team Cherry infamously patched out a lot of the bugs they used to beat the game as fast as possible.

Remedy Entertainment did not respond immediately to Polygon’s request for comment.