How to Find Nightingale in Return 2: The Heart in Alan Wake 2

Once you find Nightingale’s Heart, actually locating where our walking corpse has gone can be a little difficult. Here’s how to find Nightingale in the Witch’s Ladle in Alan Wake 2.

Alan Wake 2: How to Find Nightingale’s Heart

During the events of Return 2: The Heart, you’ll have to aptly find Nightingale’s missing heart. This will occur after you complete Return 1: Invitation and see Nightingale reanimate in the morgue before vanishing. After finding Nightingale’s heart, you’ll need to find his wayward corpse.

To find Nightingale’s Heart, you’ll have to light up the Witch’s House. Then, enter Saga’s Mind Place and interact with the profiling table. Select Nightingale and a new option will be available for ‘The Heart’.

Saga will realize that the Heart is in the General Store. Head to the General Store in Cauldron Lake. Once you step inside, a Taken will attack you. Once you’ve dealt with them, enter through the wall they destroyed and turn left to find the Heart in a cooler.

How to Find Nightingale in the Witch’s Ladle in Alan Wake 2

With Nightingale’s Heart in tow, we’ll need to find Nightingale. Nightingale is located in the Witch’s Ladle tree. The tree acts as a pathway between this world and the Overlap. Nightingale is in the Overlap.

Return to the Witch’s Ladle and the flooded area. You’ll encounter two Taken here. Once you’ve destroyed both, approach the Witch’s Sign and interact with it using Nightingale’s Heart.

This will turn the surrounding area an eerie red. You can then pass through the Witch’s Ladle, which is a massive tree that now has a split in its roots.

The tree will spit you out in a contained area. This area has nothing in it at all. It’s a trick! Don’t scrounge around in it, haplessly trying to find our corpse friend. He’s not here! Learn from my mistake.

Instead, walk right back through the roots of the Witch’s Ladle tree roots and you’ll find yourself in the exact same area.

But there’s one key difference. In the middle of the shallow pool of water, there will be a rock. On this rock will be a concentrated point of darkness that you can destroy with your flashlight. Very similar to what you did at the General Store to access Nightingale’s Heart.

Once that point’s destroyed, head forward and you’ll start to get some weird flashes, as if there’s some overlap between worlds.

From here, the pathing is straight. Keep heading forward and you’ll need to jump down, then crouch beneath two different branches. Eventually, you’ll find yourself in a rock tunnel which will lead you to an entirely new area.

Once you’ve hit Nightingale’s badge and loot stash, look left. There’s a rock outcropping you can climb up.

You’ll get more trippy visuals as you continue forward, and thankfully it’s all linear. But you won’t encounter Nightingale until Saga has to squeeze in sideways between two rocks. Once you get this cut scene, you’ll know the fight is about to begin! But at least you found Nightingale.