Alan Wake (PC)...

It feels like I've been hearing about Alan Wake (2010 Xbox 360/2012 PC; Remedy) since the days of old DOS games. Ok, that's an exaggeration, but they were discussing it on podcasts as far back as 2006. Everyone was excited about a Stephen King-esque, horror themed open-world game set in the Pacific Northwest. As we all realized when the long development cycle finally ended, that is not what we got.

The game opens with the titular character, a famous horror novelist, arriving in a small town with his wife Alice. Alan's been having writer's block since his last best-selling novel and has taken a vacation on Alice's advice. Unfortunately, soon after arriving Alan witnesses his wife's drowning at the hands of an unknown assailant, after which he passes out. Inexplicably, he comes to one week later with no memory of the intervening time. As Alan struggles to find out what happened to his wife, he comes across pages of a mysterious manuscript that describe events before they actually happen to him in the real world. Many of these events are supernatural in nature, and the Alan soon realizes that the manuscript was written by him, though he has no memory of its creation. Shortly thereafter, a supernatural darkness takes over the town, and it becomes clear that this isn't all simply happening in his head.

In terms of everything but the terrible lip sync-ing, the game is quite gorgeous. It probably helps that the designers had so little diversity in their locales (see below).

It's an interesting and quite untested premise for a game. In addition, unlike many a review that I read, I also felt that it was satisfactorily 'wrapped up' as far as horror themes go - in the end, you do find out what is happening. But while the story and voice acting - particularly Alan's narration throughout the entire adventure - are by far the game's strongest features, this style of tale is also it's Achilles heel: How do you actually wrap a game around it?

I'm 100% certain that in the past, Alan Wake would've been an adventure game. I can think of classic titles like Gabriel Knight and Phantasmagoria from that genre that were in the horror mold. Point-and-click adventures catered well to aggressively linear cutscene-driven narratives of the style presented by Wake.

But this the present, and the dev team chose another route: Alan Wake is an action game. In between all of the story elements, Alan wades through endless forests fighting off people who have been 'consumed' by the supernatural darkness. Combat involves a somewhat clever concept whereby Alan must first burn-off the shadows shielding his foes by using a flashlight before he can exterminate them with firearms. I've read many praises about this system but I have to admit, I absolutely hated every second of combat in the game.

The battles just feel wrong and poorly balanced to me. From the very beginning of the game, fights are quite difficult. There are only a few different enemy types and even the basic ones require a lot of light, opening you up to attacks from their allies, followed by several bullets. Each and every battle begins in the exact same way: Enemies teleport in and surround you after which you have to scramble to some place where you can begin picking them off one by one. Your foes appear at specific 'spawn' locations that can sometimes, mercifully, be avoided, discouraging any type of exploration. It also doesn't help that your foes move faster than you do, making crowd control a huge chore. They're also able to hit you with ranged attacks from off screen, which is always fun1. It reminds me a lot of the combat in Grand Theft Auto in that it's functional, but at least in GTA's case, it was never meant to be the focus of the game. 

Yay, more trees! Honestly, the designers probably spent so much time designing trees that they should sell extras to other devs. Oh wait, nevermind. 

Sadly, the majority of Alan Wake's gameplay is this awful combat. Each of the six 'episodes' somehow contrives some way to get you back into the woods, where you fight the same three or four shadowy psychos over and over and over. There's no level design to speak of either: you just walk along mostly linear paths, struggling though waves of enemies and occasionally finding one of the game's excessive number of collectible doo-dads (yay replay value!). But aside from the occasional open-world style driving segment, every level pretty much feels exactly the same2. I just feel that if you're going to have hours and hours of combat in your game, it would do you well to add more variety to the mechanics or even enemy types.

The older that I've become, the more I've begun to fall into the camp that argues that linear stories don't belong in video games. The excessive number3 of action sequences in this game are completely disconnected from Alan's broader predicament. In fact, the story itself claims that the supernatural force is trying to 'capture' the writer, so why are all of its minions trying to kill him? This is a perfect example of the 'interrupted movie' style of game: You get the same effect from Alan Wake as you would by watching 15 minutes of The Exorcist, then playing 1 hour of Streets of Rage, followed by 15 more mins of the movie, and so on. Not integrating the story and game play together in any real meaningful fashion completely wastes the medium.

But hey, in my experience, many folks just love those boring, disconnected cutscenes, so I don't see them going away anytime soon.

1Wow a guy teleported in behind me and hit me in the back of the head with an axe! I didn't even know he was there!

2The game is so boringly monotonous in design that my girlfriend got tired of watching me play it. For nights on end she'd ask if I was still in the same place, or if the game was just one big forest that you fought through. The latter is more accurate.

3The game is a boring ~14 hours while it should have been a much tighter and more varied eight hours or so.