I mean… that’s kind of a hard question. Alan Wake 2 is the culmination point of everything Remedy has done up to that point. You’ll get paid off for having played all of:
- Max Payne 1
- Alan Wake
- Alan Wake’s American Nightmare
- Quantum Break
- Control
- Control’s AWE DLC
AW2 is a direct sequel to Alan Wake, so that is of course the single most important previous game to play. The story is directly built on top of AW1. But at the same time I will say… Alan Wake 2 is such a good game that if you are absolutely certain you have no interest and never will have an interest in playing the other Remedy games first, you should probably just play Alan Wake 2 then, because it’s really just fantastic.
I would still recommend watching some kind of recap of the previous games on YouTube, it might be better than nothing.