Alan Wake (2010)

I will be honest. I had never heard of Alan Wake before the advent of Alan Wake 2 and my subsequent playing of Control (which I still need to complete). Even then, it took me until now to try and play the first entry solely because I am extremely curious about the second one.

Because I had loved (love?) Control, I had relatively high expectations for Alan Wake... expectations with, frankly, were not at all met. Both as a third person shooter and as a horror game, AW is kind of lacking. The controls are imprecise, the acting almost entirely flat, the shooting janky, and the story promising but unpolished. It /was/ entertaining, but just not... memorable? I played it mostly looking forward to when I finished it so I could move on to playing the rest of Control.

Roll Credits?: Yes!

Surprised/Let Down/As Expected: Let Down

Favorite Mechanic or Narrative Moment: You can tell that writing this story was a blast. Having a narrative device in place to be able to just manifest macguffins or brazenly lean on tropes rules. They absolutely take advantage of it to make this thing constantly surprising and downright fun to watch unfold. It was a little difficult to follow exactly what was going on (probably somewhat intentional given the Lynch influence), but individual moments like learning that the Old Gods of Asgard are actually plot relevant or Barry doing just about anything were great.

Least Favorite Thing: The combat here is just not good. Alan Wake absolutely shows its age in the design of most of the combat sections, and quite a few of them feel added in for the sake of extending playtime. The enemy variety is more or less nonexistent, and they all boil down to dodge while using light and then shoot a gun. Combat set pieces were fun, but the walk forward->slow-mo 3 guys pop out of a bush->kill them loop dragged the experience down.

I had played some of this game a couple years back on PC. Got a PS5 (finally found one lmao) and I got this and its sequel as priorities (the praise the latter got, with some great pieces of writing about it, sold me, one even said that Death Stranding and this were «the Art Games» of mainstream, or something like that... Anyhoo, it was the pairing with DS that really perked me up! So anyway, last time I played this, I didn't found it bad nor exceptional, it was an intriguing story with an intriguing setting. And I felt sad I had to stop playing it for other reasons. So, I was meaning to check this one sooner or later.

But you see, I've got a problem here. I love Remedy because they made Max Payne and because I have played Max Payne I know that Remedy and Sam Lake are all for postmodern storytelling, homages and intertextuality within the game (between referential works, or between various fictional elements such as TV shows, Comic-strips, Radio Broadcasts within the game), but I think that even if Max Payne was deliciously over-the-top... Alan Wake seems rather amateurish. Beginning with Alan Wake (the famous thriller writer of his world) speaking as its first sentences Stephen King is so obvious, and kind of stupefying, why do it? (Not to mention that its a explanatory quote of 'the mysteries of horror' and beginning with 'As Stephen King once said...') But then this only the first in a constant barrage of references, there's a limitation between homage and straight out fan fiction, this reads partly as a Twin Peaks fan fiction, but without any of its actual charm, mystery and also... tonal contrasts, which is what makes Twin Peaks great - you go from the melodrama, to the eerie, to the murder mystery, to the horror, to the absurd comedy and back again, in a circular fashion. Just know someone said that a couple of birds are going all 'Hitchcock on me', who speaks like that! A man with an axe starts chomping at a wooden door, Wake's first instincts 'they are going to come knocking like Jack Nicholson on The Shining', are you serious. I do see how Sam Lake can see himself in Alan Wake (the names partly rhyme), but this feels like he just wanked all his pop-culture references until they came into a story, all of his favorite films, series and books. And it's beginning to feel tiresome. Not to mention, that I an getting bored of collecting 'manuscripts' (and I am only on Chapter 2)!

TL;DR I REALLY HOPE THAT ALAN WAKE 2 IS WORTH IT, BECAUSE RIGHT NOT, I AM NOT VIBING WITH THIS AS I THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO BE!

Going from this game into control, and then Alan Wake II is ideal I think. Going from Control into this game makes the game feel really small in scope, and the slow burn of the world coming to life really doesn't hit as hard from this perspective.

Combine this with gameplay that feels dated and you have a recipe for a game that many people really love and will encourage you to play, that you yourself are not invested in.

This is from the perspective of someone not in love with the horror genre, so if you have patience you might find the magic in playing this game. With that said, watching the cutscene movies of this game is a nice alternative if you want to enjoy the sequel.

Really don't like when games media forget us mortals don't have infinite time to play games and we can only pick 1-2 every month or two.

This is of the remastered version on Series X. I had already loved the game but had not played it since it came out.

This was my road to AW2 and y'know what?! Shit holds up! Very simple gameplay and mechanics but the boilerplate horror tale and the world of Wake is just too interesting.

It is annoying sometimes that I can just die in every encounter if I stop paying attention but it is also the first game in a long time that demanded my full attention. There is always chatter and story and narration and action sequences that make me play single-screen, focused.

I do not think this is a very hard game on the whole and maybe to a gameplay detriment, but it is my favourite style of progression in video games, it gets easier as it goes. You have more tools, you get friends, it feels really nice and like you are improving as you go.

My first time playing Alan Wake and the intro is giving me a giggle. He talks so fast and also sounds so monotone that I thought it was a bot at first. I love it though, it's cheesy and overdramatic to me, but I wouldn't change it at all.

The dodging mechanics though are confusing. Holding the sprint button and the movement button makes you do a kind of dodge move but when the enemy swings at me it looks like I'm taking the hit, or at least making contact but the game says "well done!". I'll just go with it!

What works

• Graphics are not a top concern for me but crikey this game still looks great for its age. The lighting effects look great, as you would expect, and there are some genuinely beautiful vistas. Not sure why they felt the need to even remaster this. Runs pretty well on the Deck (high settings, limited to 40fps), but the sessions I played on my desktop sometimes had weird performance hitches, fixed by a reboot.
• I really enjoyed the combat. I recall this being a criticised aspect of the game but I feel it works really well. The way the torch aims and the way the enemies try to get around you reminds me of the original Resi 4.
• I started watching Twin Peaks at the same time I started replaying this (no spoilers please, still got a lot to watch), and seeing the inspiration this game took from it was delightful.
• The TV format is cute...

What doesn’t

• ...the product placement much less so

• There’s a lot of artificial padding. Too much fighting off enemies while something slow happens, and most of the final sequence feels like a bit of a drag. The driving in particular adds nothing.

• I appreciate the need to keep the tension high, but losing my good torch and my guns every five minutes was a bit of a drag

• On more than one occasion two fast guys spawned behind me and killed me before I even got control back to fight them off

Verdict

I mainly played this to refresh my memory ahead of picking up the sequel, and I didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I did. I played it when it was new and recalled it being decent, but nothing to write home about. This time I genuinely had a blast with it, especially being able to see some of the signature Remedy ground work they laid here (Control was my favourite game of whatever year that came out). This game absolutely screams for a sequel and I can’t believe it took so long to make one, but now I can’t wait!

Remedy, I love you guys, but what the ♥♥♥♥ was this.

The same boring, repetitive gameplay loop is copy and pasted for 11 hours, on top of taking place in samey environments with samey level design and gives you boring guns and puzzles. The story is legitimately the worst one that Remedy has ever written, including Quantum Break, and that ending was ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ horrible. No memorable characters or even remotely memorable dialogue to even be found, were the writers just asleep for the entire dev time?

I cannot believe that this is the same studio that made Max Payne and Control.

Review for the Remastered PS5 Digital Version

I played “Alan Wake” when it was first released on the 360 and remember being underwhelmed. Decided to play the remastered version in preparation for part two and I think i disliked it even more the second time around. The gameplay mechanics, specifically the combat system, are an absolute headache. Encountering enemies aggravated me every single time while trying to traverse through the always tedious forest. What barely saves the game is the story. It’s mysterious and interesting even if it remains overall vague. The idea of “Alan Wake” I think far exceeds the game itself, in my opinion.