Review: Alan Wake

Alan Wake was supposed to be an early highlight for the Xbox 360; proof that it was both a powerful machine and capable of giving us entertaining, visually stunning games. Sadly Alan Wake fell by the wayside, and games like Mass Effect took up the crown of gaming quality as Wake began to look like another Duke Nukem Forever. It’s only recently that more news came out, and after a long wait Alan Wake has finally appeared to present us an interesting dark thriller tale.

Wake plays upon one of the oldest fears of all: darkness. The creeping night that can make us see strange objects, shadows and curves that creep us out. The true dark where light cannot penetrate and where we’re all alone. This fear is different to that of Dead Space; there are no creatures jumping out at you, no screeching noises or metallic rattling of demons behind the scenes. Instead there’s just the fear of the unknown that lurks around you, which can be the scariest feeling of all. Of the occasions i’ve played it at night it can be rather scary when i’m done and left in a dark room, wondering if the same things haunting Wake might be around me.

Alan Wake’s story reads like a Stephen King novel with a blend of David Lynch cinematics and characters. Remedy have done well to create a rich interesting world with movie like quality. It’s perhaps not quite the standard of Heavy Rain, but for Xbox 360 owners it’s the nearest rival in presenting a game that feels like a series you’d watch on TV. The only complaint that can be forged from it is that the animation for voices is extremely poor, which is a shame given that the game looks visually stunning throughout. The forest retreat in which Alan Wake goes to is quaint and quiet, a perfect getaway for a writer who has lost his ability to write. Like Remedy’s other infamous anti hero Max Payne, Alan has good character traits that draw you into enjoying the game. He can be rather stubborn and mean to friends and fans of his work, but his strife is endearing and drives you through the game.

Like all horror novels it starts sweet and then turns sour. Before you know it you find yourself in the darkness after a car crash, your wife missing, yourself hurt and for some reason you’re finding manuscripts of pages you wrote that eerily predict future events unfolding in the game. The manuscripts are short snippets of information that can guide you as well as explain the story. The odd problem with these notes though is that they’re scattered about the world as you travel, with not alot of sense as to why they just happen to be lying around all over the place. The result is that gathering the manuscripts becomes a fetch quest, a poor design choice that doesn’t quite mix well with the cinematic episodic effect Alan Wake is trying to achieve. Indeed, even though these manuscripts are scattered about Alan makes little mention of them, and in one situation a character makes a mention about the manuscript, yet there’s no real explanation as to how he knew what it said.

Strange design choices aside, Alan Wake redeems itself with an unexpected defence; your torch. Becoming both sword and shield, your torch “burns” off the darkness that shields the enemies you face, allowing you to destroy them with a weapon at hand. Light becomes your natural friend, shielding you from the evils around you. Lights also become a tool of healing, beams shining down from light poles acting as replishining energy and a breather before you have to continue on in the dark forest.

The world itself has maintained some of its open feel while still dragging you down a linear pathway. Trees sway in the wind as a dark forces that seem to swim around the air pushes them; the result is that trees can take on a nightmarish life of there own, with you wondering if there’s anything in the dark that could come out to attack you. If you explore hard enough you can find secret stashes and optional manuscripts that tell you more about the characters of the world.

There are a couple of problems to this however. One is that any attack performed by the possessed psychos that are haunting you in the forest will trigger a slow motion cinematic scene showing you in which direction they’re coming from. Either that or they become fairly noticable rather quickly, with only one situation when I was playing in which an attacker jumped out of a scene unexpectantly (I cried a little). This rather ruins the heightened terror of the forest since after a while you begin to realise that you won’t be attacked unless these situations occur, so suddenly its just a case of running through the forest from A to B.

The second problem is that you seem to gain alot of ammo and batteries (courtesy of Energizer, thank you product placement) rather quickly, resulting in you never really having to worry about ammo. This is lightened slightly as you increase the difficulty, but it never quite feels like the desperate struggle that Dead Space had in attempting to conserve ammunition. Couple this with the fear factor being diluted by the fact that the possessed aren’t good at jumping out of bushes, and the result is a game that isn’t overly scary.

Perhaps this is unfair though, as Alan Wake doesn’t bill itself as a horror game, but a psychological thriller. Its method of telling the story in episodes is well thought out and isn’t as painful as, for example, Alone in the Dark’s attempt at performing the same task. Each episode tells a particular part of a story and then ends either in a cliffhanger or a resolution, with the next episode opening in the “Previously on” style that exists on most TV shows today. The story itself is intriguing throughout and leaves you guessing; has he gone mad? Is it him that’s writing this story? Who is the mysterious scary woman that is causing this nightmare to occur? Stephen King would be proud of Remedy for creating a masterful piece of writing in the game.

The biggest gripe of the larger review groups is that the story never quite blends with the game to well. Certainly this is true in some instances; the manuscripts being left around as described earlier doesn’t work. There’s also a feeling that it could have done with a bit more polish here and there. The voice work is excellent, but the dubbing is absolutely terrible, with the facial expressions limited and only just managing to convey emotional expressions.

What’s important is I can’t wait to see what they do with the story. Planned DLC should hopefully expand what is in the end a particularly fascinating game. It’s taken a long time to develop, but Alan Wake is a great success for Remedy. It may not be as exceptionally animated as say Mass Effect, but it holds up well against other heavy storyline based games such as Heavy Rain. I would recommend you give it a shot.

8/10

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