A frustrating bug can occur in Alan Wake 2, where you can’t talk to NPCs. When this happens, you can’t progress dialog, which makes it a game-breaking glitch. In fact, it could soft-lock your playthrough entirely, forcing you to start over.
How to fix the NPC not talking bug in Alan Wake 2
You’ll often have to talk to NPCs in Alan Wake 2 by pressing a button to advance the story. Doing so will play your line, and then the NPC will respond. Unfortunately, there’s a way for dialog options to get bugged out, which will essentially break the game and block your progression.
Unfortunately, if the bug has already occurred, the only fix is to reload your game. Unfortunately, if you saved after the dialog issue happens, reloading doesn’t work. You can only fix the problem by loading a save from before the NPC talking bug. Unfortunately, this can set you back quite a ways depending on when you saved or when the last checkpoint was.
Once you reload the save, preventing the bug from reoccurring is simple. You need to be directly adjacent to NPCs when you talk to them in Alan Wake 2. Make sure you’re standing right next to them before you hit the button to advance the dialog. The bug is caused when you try to talk to an NPC from too far away. If this happens, instead of speaking, both the player character and the NPC stay silent, and there’s no way to force the prompt to reappear.
If, for some reason, you don’t have a save or checkpoint from before the bug happened, you can attempt reloading the game. However, this never worked for us, so we assume that, in this case, your game would be soft-locked, and you’d have to start over from the beginning.
