For some reason some time ago I decided to play and review Alan Wake. I finally got around to posting it.
Hello. I'm Alan Wake. In this game, you -are- game.
Foreword
Alan Wake is an action-adventure game, set in the cheerful town of Twin Peaks, erm, I mean Bright Falls. Alan Wake is a stereotypical successful writer with stereotypical hot-but-smart girlfriend, a stereotypical flat in New York, a stereotypical overweight agent who won't just shut up and a stereotypical writer's block that, stereotypically, it's influencing his life and relationship. The not-so-happy couple goes on a holiday in the remote but Picturesque town of Bright Falls, Washington. Alan's girlfriend thought that some time off, immersed in breath-taking surroundings, enjoying nature and a bleak-but-suggestive sky, could help overcome his block and his issues. Without Alan knowing, she even set him up with a psychiatrist that specifically deals with creative people, those so-called "artists". This, dear sirs, is the premise to the game. Don't let all the stereotypes faze you because mostly, they are the "nice" kind of stereotype, the one that people can relate their own experience to. As per the axshun-adventure definition, although there is no actual choice as to how much of either component one shall experience, I guess it's up to personal preference upon which of the two to put the most focus.
Graphics
Alan Wake is heavily focused on being a thriller, on scaring, on "evil" darkness and "good", helpful light. The game's visuals do a really good job at helping out the "narrative", and at settings the mood. The landscape is really beautiful, the areas well modelled and well textured, despite the low-res textures (it is a console port, after all). The areas make an excellent use of the absence of light: most of the game takes place at night, in misty woods where the only light in sight is the pale glow of the night. Far away, you'll see some light, maybe a gas station or an abandoned flashlight, or the green-lit switch of a generator, and this will effectively become a beacon and Alan's goal. Light is also the main weapon against the monsters that lurnk in the dark, who are shrouded in an armour of darkness which needs to be "burnt" away by light to make them vulnerable to standard weapons.
Visually, light effect of the flashlight's beam is also really good, the beam widening or narrowing automatically depending on the situation, and the "weapons of light" all deliver really good visual effects: the flashlight, the flares, the flashbangs all light up your surroundings in different ways, creating dynamic shadows accordingly, that will dance around the player for a short while, only to leave Alan immersed in even more darkness afterwards. Fogs, mists and the "darkness shroud" effects are also well done, and the only visuals that are not really up to par with the rest is the actual visual effect used when focusing the flashlight on the enemy and "burning" away its shroud: sparkles will generate and burst off from the guy; these sparkles and the mobs' death-dissolve animation are not as nice as the rest of the visuals. Yet, I'm nitpicking and these are minor flaws in the otherwise great visuals of Alan Wake.
The populated, well-lit areas (well, giving the Twin-Peaks-inspired settings, no area is ever actually really "populated" nor "well lit", but a diffused dim light always lurks over everything), are also rich in detail and (mostly dull) colour. Characters, their animation, and lip-sync could surely have benefit from a few more polys and some higher resolution textures, but all in all they are more than acceptable.
Totally nothing eerie about this diner! Cupcaeks!
Sound
As for graphics, sound is also a very important part of Alan Wake's thrill, or so it should be... Way too often the background soundtrack, otherwise fitting and unintrusive, will suddenly change to a "tone" that screams "WARNING WARNING BAD THINGS HAPPENING SOON LOOK BEHIND YOU", which sort of spoils the very good job the rest of the game does at creating tension and keeping the player on edge. Sound effects are also average, with the exception of a few poor ones, such as the "creaking boards" SFX when navigating a ruined building made of brick walls and concrete floors. Voice acting is mostly good, too: it's got a few "meh" moments (especially when Alan goes screaming as if he was Darth Vader at the end of gapesode III), and a few decently-acted highs. It will even deliver a couple of laughs, occasionally.
Welcome to Fright Balls. Or was it?
Plot
Fittingly, Alan Wake sports a foggy plot. For good parts of the game the player will probably be wondering "where is this going?", and an entire chapter out of six doesn't seem to have much to do with the rest. Chapters also seem to follow a cookie-cutter format which could be summarized with safezone-shitbreakloose-runrunrun-moreshit-safezone. There is definitively an attempt at narrating a good story, through all the means available, those being visuals, level design, flashbacks, dream sequences, added details (like readable touristic plaques, tv programs, a radio host...), a few cutscenes (of cheap quality, I have to admit: they are pre-recorded movies of scenes made with a slightly enhanced version of the game's engine), characters and writing. The result is still somehow less than flattering: neither of the mentioned elements are particularly bad per se, and in fact they usually are between decent and good, but the "sum of the parts" doesn't quite deliver, as if to make a point.
The story starts off really nice, putting the player in the condition of not being sure whether the events that they are playing through are happening or are a dream, or whether they are happening now or in the past. This technique appears to get somewhat abandoned later on, in favour of a more linear, straightforward narration, which in my opinion is actually detrimental to the "mood" the game had managed to set in its onset.
At the same time, the further into the game, the more the plot goes a bit "aliens!!!", bringing in the paranormal, witchcraft and the likes of. The supernatural element grows a bit out of proportion whereas, in my opinion, it would have been a better plot if the hocus-pocus had been kept to a minimum. The whole story draws plenty of inspiration from Stephen King and there is more than a homage to David Lynch's Twin Peaks, which also clearly has had a fair amount of influence over the development and the visual design of this game. Fans of The X-Files will also experience more than an instance of familiarity with the generic mood of the game.
The plot goes really mind£$%^ as you get closer to the end, as it should be, although not in an enjoyable way, and ends up in a mix of not particularly effective attempts at plot twist and trite cliches involving the usual "ingredients" such as love, sacrifice, life, death, and a moose float. Ultimately the plot does lose a lot of its compelling power towards the end of the game, proportionally to the increasing focus on combat. Luckily (?) it's late enough in the story for the player to just push on a little further and see what happens next, until the very ending of the game. By the way, it took me 9 hours to finish the game on normal difficulty, just so you can gauge how much fun you can squeeze out of this game.
AAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!
Gameplay (and Combat)
Well, Alan Wake is a mix of walking around with a flashlight and/or killing things with guns, and that's about it. Both activities will be made a little awkward by the worst OTS camera I ever witnessed: it's literally impossible to run straight, at least on a KB&Mouse setup. Luckily, aiming has been streamlined into autoaiming, so no real worries about not-hitting stuff. Of course the most hardcore of you will want that disabled, but I honestly don't see the point as there is no "headshots" or any osrt of damage model in the game, and all hits on a mob count the same. The camera, well, it's nothing like the Arkham series camera (quite functional, if you ask me): this one will stay way on the side even while sprinting (something you'll be doing a lot in the game), and the point the camera is focusing at is not the point the character is running at, or at least that's how it feels. Thus running will require slight but constant trajectory adjustments.
Combat is banalshitboring and I really disliked it, so I will try and be as concise as I can about it: while running in dark woods (which is what Alan does about 80% of the time in the whole game) monsters will jump at you. Of course, a nice chance in the music theme and even a sudden automatic slow-motion mode will trigger, the camera usually will zoom back and rotate to show the position of the incoming creeps in relation to the player's: that being, 95% of the time, "behind". Alan will then need to "burn" the enemies using the flashlight's "turbo" mode (yes it has one, please don't ask): when the darkness that protects the mobs is all gone, which you can tell by some sort of flash, the creeps will take much less hits to go down. Alan's arsenal over the whole game will include a handgun, a couple of types of shotguns and a hunting rifle to take them down. As far as the "lighting" equipment goes, there's the flashlight (and its two upgrades), flares, flashbangs, and the flare gun. Whereas the flashlight and flares will only burn the darkness off monsters and make them cower of slow them down, flashbangs and the flare gun will usually 1-hit anything near the impact point. Use them wisely. There are a few hidden caches of equipment here and there, slightly off the beaten path, usually indicated by yellow paint that is only visible if actively flashed by the beam of Alan's flashlight.
That's about it: combat gets really trite soon, and even the few "minibosses" aren't not that hard (although the poltergeist-excavator boss is conceptually badass). Probably other people will not find it as annoying as I did, and some will even genuinely enjoy it.
There is no real "freedom" in Alan Wake: areas are sort of railroaded, and on the few occasions on which I found alternative paths or shortcuts, it almost always ended up in the game bugging, some event not triggering, and me having to reload the last checkpoint. Don't try and be creative with your approach to Alan Wake, follow the path and get on with the program. That's the message. Collectibles are scattered around the whole game, although there is really no incentive to go and explore the mostly-railroaded areas just to get the extra coffee thermos or manuscript page. Oh, manuscript pages are just awful: don't even bother collecting them, and I suggest you avoid reading those you collect "accidentally". Last word on gameplay, the player even gets to drive around a couple of cars, and can go Carmageddon on the mobs: these driving sections felt so disconnected from the rest of the game that they made little point really; not sure if driving was supposed to have greater importance in the planning of the game, or if they added it as an exercise in game-design.
Dat ass!
Conclusions
From the very beginning, Alan Wake has reminded me of two games "of old": Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy in 'murica) and Dreamfall. Both games had a good story to tell and were trying a different approach to narrating it than classic point&click adventure games, both games tried to incorporate gameplay elements from different genres (stealth, some kind of combat, and such), and both failed miserably at this latter attempt. Both games would have been greatly better off if they had focused more on the story and less on the action (well, of if the action they featured had been implemented much better). Both games had an ending that was both weird and anticlimactic. Similarly, I got the feeling that the action is getting in the way of the narrative in Alan Wake, and in fact the game could have been much better an experience without the combat (which wasn't as horrible as combat in Dreamfall, mind you). To a certain extent, Alan Wake's ending is also meh, and not just because the player will be disappointed by what happens, but mostly because the player will be disappointed by how it happens and at the way it is narrated.
After chapter 4, I was so curious to see "what happened next" and at the same time so annoyed by the combat that I just played the rest of the game with a trainer and, guess what, I actually enjoyed it much more. To the extent that I had my girlfriend sitting on the bed behind and "spectating" my playthrough of Alan Wake as if it was a movie. All in all, Alan Wake -is- a good game which delivers an alright story, despite being crippled by an identity crysis. As per usual, no numerical score from me, as I said all I wanted to about the game.
Spoiler alert: the very ending scene of Alan Wake.
Screenshot Selection, Now With 3.74% more Captions!
Red. I like red!
Get familiar with scenes such as this.
Or this. (actual screenshot)
Not like AAA titles are bug-free.
Look, Fox Mulder must have passed by...
Creepy stuff. MILFs, anyone?
Now, let me think, where have I seen those guns before...
Is this the real life? or is this fantasyyyyyyyyy?
Caught in a landslide...
No escape from reality.
Hello. I'm Alan Wake. In this game, you -are- game.
Foreword
Alan Wake is an action-adventure game, set in the cheerful town of Twin Peaks, erm, I mean Bright Falls. Alan Wake is a stereotypical successful writer with stereotypical hot-but-smart girlfriend, a stereotypical flat in New York, a stereotypical overweight agent who won't just shut up and a stereotypical writer's block that, stereotypically, it's influencing his life and relationship. The not-so-happy couple goes on a holiday in the remote but Picturesque town of Bright Falls, Washington. Alan's girlfriend thought that some time off, immersed in breath-taking surroundings, enjoying nature and a bleak-but-suggestive sky, could help overcome his block and his issues. Without Alan knowing, she even set him up with a psychiatrist that specifically deals with creative people, those so-called "artists". This, dear sirs, is the premise to the game. Don't let all the stereotypes faze you because mostly, they are the "nice" kind of stereotype, the one that people can relate their own experience to. As per the axshun-adventure definition, although there is no actual choice as to how much of either component one shall experience, I guess it's up to personal preference upon which of the two to put the most focus.
Graphics
Alan Wake is heavily focused on being a thriller, on scaring, on "evil" darkness and "good", helpful light. The game's visuals do a really good job at helping out the "narrative", and at settings the mood. The landscape is really beautiful, the areas well modelled and well textured, despite the low-res textures (it is a console port, after all). The areas make an excellent use of the absence of light: most of the game takes place at night, in misty woods where the only light in sight is the pale glow of the night. Far away, you'll see some light, maybe a gas station or an abandoned flashlight, or the green-lit switch of a generator, and this will effectively become a beacon and Alan's goal. Light is also the main weapon against the monsters that lurnk in the dark, who are shrouded in an armour of darkness which needs to be "burnt" away by light to make them vulnerable to standard weapons.
Visually, light effect of the flashlight's beam is also really good, the beam widening or narrowing automatically depending on the situation, and the "weapons of light" all deliver really good visual effects: the flashlight, the flares, the flashbangs all light up your surroundings in different ways, creating dynamic shadows accordingly, that will dance around the player for a short while, only to leave Alan immersed in even more darkness afterwards. Fogs, mists and the "darkness shroud" effects are also well done, and the only visuals that are not really up to par with the rest is the actual visual effect used when focusing the flashlight on the enemy and "burning" away its shroud: sparkles will generate and burst off from the guy; these sparkles and the mobs' death-dissolve animation are not as nice as the rest of the visuals. Yet, I'm nitpicking and these are minor flaws in the otherwise great visuals of Alan Wake.
The populated, well-lit areas (well, giving the Twin-Peaks-inspired settings, no area is ever actually really "populated" nor "well lit", but a diffused dim light always lurks over everything), are also rich in detail and (mostly dull) colour. Characters, their animation, and lip-sync could surely have benefit from a few more polys and some higher resolution textures, but all in all they are more than acceptable.
Totally nothing eerie about this diner! Cupcaeks!
Sound
As for graphics, sound is also a very important part of Alan Wake's thrill, or so it should be... Way too often the background soundtrack, otherwise fitting and unintrusive, will suddenly change to a "tone" that screams "WARNING WARNING BAD THINGS HAPPENING SOON LOOK BEHIND YOU", which sort of spoils the very good job the rest of the game does at creating tension and keeping the player on edge. Sound effects are also average, with the exception of a few poor ones, such as the "creaking boards" SFX when navigating a ruined building made of brick walls and concrete floors. Voice acting is mostly good, too: it's got a few "meh" moments (especially when Alan goes screaming as if he was Darth Vader at the end of gapesode III), and a few decently-acted highs. It will even deliver a couple of laughs, occasionally.
Welcome to Fright Balls. Or was it?
Plot
Fittingly, Alan Wake sports a foggy plot. For good parts of the game the player will probably be wondering "where is this going?", and an entire chapter out of six doesn't seem to have much to do with the rest. Chapters also seem to follow a cookie-cutter format which could be summarized with safezone-shitbreakloose-runrunrun-moreshit-safezone. There is definitively an attempt at narrating a good story, through all the means available, those being visuals, level design, flashbacks, dream sequences, added details (like readable touristic plaques, tv programs, a radio host...), a few cutscenes (of cheap quality, I have to admit: they are pre-recorded movies of scenes made with a slightly enhanced version of the game's engine), characters and writing. The result is still somehow less than flattering: neither of the mentioned elements are particularly bad per se, and in fact they usually are between decent and good, but the "sum of the parts" doesn't quite deliver, as if to make a point.
The story starts off really nice, putting the player in the condition of not being sure whether the events that they are playing through are happening or are a dream, or whether they are happening now or in the past. This technique appears to get somewhat abandoned later on, in favour of a more linear, straightforward narration, which in my opinion is actually detrimental to the "mood" the game had managed to set in its onset.
At the same time, the further into the game, the more the plot goes a bit "aliens!!!", bringing in the paranormal, witchcraft and the likes of. The supernatural element grows a bit out of proportion whereas, in my opinion, it would have been a better plot if the hocus-pocus had been kept to a minimum. The whole story draws plenty of inspiration from Stephen King and there is more than a homage to David Lynch's Twin Peaks, which also clearly has had a fair amount of influence over the development and the visual design of this game. Fans of The X-Files will also experience more than an instance of familiarity with the generic mood of the game.
The plot goes really mind£$%^ as you get closer to the end, as it should be, although not in an enjoyable way, and ends up in a mix of not particularly effective attempts at plot twist and trite cliches involving the usual "ingredients" such as love, sacrifice, life, death, and a moose float. Ultimately the plot does lose a lot of its compelling power towards the end of the game, proportionally to the increasing focus on combat. Luckily (?) it's late enough in the story for the player to just push on a little further and see what happens next, until the very ending of the game. By the way, it took me 9 hours to finish the game on normal difficulty, just so you can gauge how much fun you can squeeze out of this game.
AAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!
Gameplay (and Combat)
Well, Alan Wake is a mix of walking around with a flashlight and/or killing things with guns, and that's about it. Both activities will be made a little awkward by the worst OTS camera I ever witnessed: it's literally impossible to run straight, at least on a KB&Mouse setup. Luckily, aiming has been streamlined into autoaiming, so no real worries about not-hitting stuff. Of course the most hardcore of you will want that disabled, but I honestly don't see the point as there is no "headshots" or any osrt of damage model in the game, and all hits on a mob count the same. The camera, well, it's nothing like the Arkham series camera (quite functional, if you ask me): this one will stay way on the side even while sprinting (something you'll be doing a lot in the game), and the point the camera is focusing at is not the point the character is running at, or at least that's how it feels. Thus running will require slight but constant trajectory adjustments.
Combat is banalshitboring and I really disliked it, so I will try and be as concise as I can about it: while running in dark woods (which is what Alan does about 80% of the time in the whole game) monsters will jump at you. Of course, a nice chance in the music theme and even a sudden automatic slow-motion mode will trigger, the camera usually will zoom back and rotate to show the position of the incoming creeps in relation to the player's: that being, 95% of the time, "behind". Alan will then need to "burn" the enemies using the flashlight's "turbo" mode (yes it has one, please don't ask): when the darkness that protects the mobs is all gone, which you can tell by some sort of flash, the creeps will take much less hits to go down. Alan's arsenal over the whole game will include a handgun, a couple of types of shotguns and a hunting rifle to take them down. As far as the "lighting" equipment goes, there's the flashlight (and its two upgrades), flares, flashbangs, and the flare gun. Whereas the flashlight and flares will only burn the darkness off monsters and make them cower of slow them down, flashbangs and the flare gun will usually 1-hit anything near the impact point. Use them wisely. There are a few hidden caches of equipment here and there, slightly off the beaten path, usually indicated by yellow paint that is only visible if actively flashed by the beam of Alan's flashlight.
That's about it: combat gets really trite soon, and even the few "minibosses" aren't not that hard (although the poltergeist-excavator boss is conceptually badass). Probably other people will not find it as annoying as I did, and some will even genuinely enjoy it.
There is no real "freedom" in Alan Wake: areas are sort of railroaded, and on the few occasions on which I found alternative paths or shortcuts, it almost always ended up in the game bugging, some event not triggering, and me having to reload the last checkpoint. Don't try and be creative with your approach to Alan Wake, follow the path and get on with the program. That's the message. Collectibles are scattered around the whole game, although there is really no incentive to go and explore the mostly-railroaded areas just to get the extra coffee thermos or manuscript page. Oh, manuscript pages are just awful: don't even bother collecting them, and I suggest you avoid reading those you collect "accidentally". Last word on gameplay, the player even gets to drive around a couple of cars, and can go Carmageddon on the mobs: these driving sections felt so disconnected from the rest of the game that they made little point really; not sure if driving was supposed to have greater importance in the planning of the game, or if they added it as an exercise in game-design.
Dat ass!
Conclusions
From the very beginning, Alan Wake has reminded me of two games "of old": Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy in 'murica) and Dreamfall. Both games had a good story to tell and were trying a different approach to narrating it than classic point&click adventure games, both games tried to incorporate gameplay elements from different genres (stealth, some kind of combat, and such), and both failed miserably at this latter attempt. Both games would have been greatly better off if they had focused more on the story and less on the action (well, of if the action they featured had been implemented much better). Both games had an ending that was both weird and anticlimactic. Similarly, I got the feeling that the action is getting in the way of the narrative in Alan Wake, and in fact the game could have been much better an experience without the combat (which wasn't as horrible as combat in Dreamfall, mind you). To a certain extent, Alan Wake's ending is also meh, and not just because the player will be disappointed by what happens, but mostly because the player will be disappointed by how it happens and at the way it is narrated.
After chapter 4, I was so curious to see "what happened next" and at the same time so annoyed by the combat that I just played the rest of the game with a trainer and, guess what, I actually enjoyed it much more. To the extent that I had my girlfriend sitting on the bed behind and "spectating" my playthrough of Alan Wake as if it was a movie. All in all, Alan Wake -is- a good game which delivers an alright story, despite being crippled by an identity crysis. As per usual, no numerical score from me, as I said all I wanted to about the game.
Spoiler alert: the very ending scene of Alan Wake.
Screenshot Selection, Now With 3.74% more Captions!
Red. I like red!
Get familiar with scenes such as this.
Or this. (actual screenshot)
Not like AAA titles are bug-free.
Look, Fox Mulder must have passed by...
Creepy stuff. MILFs, anyone?
Now, let me think, where have I seen those guns before...
Is this the real life? or is this fantasyyyyyyyyy?
Caught in a landslide...
No escape from reality.
