I did Episode 2 of Alan Wake today. The screenshot is of the sawmill in the park. My assumptions were right about it ramping up in difficulty on nightmare. I found myself dying a lot more in this episode, and enemies are bullet sponges I feel like. Rusty alone took up about 3 clips of headshots. I think it may have been a lot harder if I didn’t use actual strategy (saving ammo by running away, not always hard pressing the flashlight to aim, and using the flares to chokepoint areas to escape, etc.). Overall though I found the difficulty a fun challenge, especially since I usually play on Normal Mode. I ended up taking a detour and also collecting all the Manuscript pages. I’m hoping to wipe out a good chunk of the Achievements and finally 100%. Something that has evaded me in all my past play throughs.
I've never actually played through AW1 on Nightmare as I was afraid the challenge would be unfun, but maybe I will in the future based on your testimony. Though I find it increasingly hard to go back and replay games these days with the size of my backlog...
Nightmare though, at least for me, isn’t as difficult as I expected it to be. It’s a nice challenge up from Normal mode I’ve been making my way through and cleaning out my Backlog. I have over 250 games I need to play. So I try and stick with just one and work through it