Turn the tables on the Taken.
Remedy Entertainment's survival-horror game Alan Wake 2 features two protagonists, Saga Anderson and the titular writer Alan Wake. Each of them has a collection of weapons they can grab in order to fight back the shadowy Taken, people and animals possessed by the powers of The Dark Place.
While there's overlap in other places, Saga Anderson alone gets access to one of the more unique weapons in the game, the crossbow. Here's how to unlock it.
How to get the crossbow in Alan Wake 2
In order to get the crossbow, you'll need to be playing as Saga Anderson. You'll also need to have finished the first five chapters of the game, Return 1 and 2, and Initiation 1, 2, and 3.
This means that the earliest you can possibly get the crossbow is in Rebirth 3: Local Girl, but you're not locked out if you initially went past it. As long as you haven't started the endgame yet (a process that is explicitly warned by the game) then you can go back at any point to get the crossbow.
With that important information out of the way, you can find the crossbow in Watery. Simply go up the hill past the first point where you get attacked by ax-throwing Taken. You'll eventually come up on a safe house with a Cult Stash nearby, as marked on the map above.
In order to get the cult stash open, you'll need to enter the correct code. It's a bit obtuse, but you'll notice there's a large amount of crossbow bolts embedded in nearby targets, and that's the secret of figuring out the code. You need to count the bolts that are clustered together and enter them in order, which means the code is 527.
Once you've got it open, you can grab the crossbow and the nearby bolts! Make sure you've got enough space in your inventory, if you don't, then go to the shoebox in the nearby safe house and store some items you won't be using.
The crossbow is slow to reload, but it does heavy damage per shot, and you can sometimes retrieve the bolts as long as you didn't miss your target. This means it's a great weapon to open up combat with before switching to your shotgun or pistol.
A dark journey awaits
Alan Wake 2 is a challenging, emotional adventure that finally brings a new chapter to the story of Alan Wake. He's trapped in The Dark Place, but his fate is colliding with that of FBI detective Saga Anderson in surprising ways.
In our review of Alan Wake 2, I wrote that "Alan Wake 2 isn't flawless. In fact, it might be Remedy Entertainment's most imperfect game. Despite that, it's also my favorite title from the studio's storied history, lending weight to Alan Wake's 2 ability to enrapture you every darkness-laced step of the way."
