Game Review: Alan Wake

Every so often I'll feel the urge to play a solid and scary horror game in an attempt to force some kind of emotional reaction from myself, thus I tried Alan Wake, the "intense psychological thriller". Somewhat odd to have a tagline as a subtitle for a game, though I can understand given that the cover art is merely a silhouette of a dude with a flashlight.

The game opens up with a guy driving into an idyllic mountain town with his wife in an attempt to have a holiday from writing so he can catch up on his writing. I can relate to Alan in his psychotic rage against his wife when his holiday from writing becomes a holiday FOR writing. It was all a trap and now Alan must escape the evil clutches of his ball-busting wife who demands that he works for a living.

Okay maybe that isn't exactly what happens but the initial plot setup makes so little sense that I thought of a more plausible scenario. In any case, after arriving in town and seeing some suspect old people, Alan and wifey get into their secluded holiday home where it promptly explodes and "something" takes his old lady to parts unknown. Alan loses consciousness, wakes up a week later with convenient amnesia and now has to find out what happened in that week and then to rescue the incessant nagger.



Gameplay is in third person adventure style shooter, more like Max Payne than Gears of War. Your primary weapon is not a gun but your handy Everyready-battery-powered torch; the main danger in Alan Wake is "the darkness" - an amorphous and ill-defined entity that can possess anyone wielding an axe or pipe wrench. Whenever you shine the light on one of these dark guys they freeze like a freshly shaved husky in the Arctic and you are free to blow chunks out of them with your pea-shooting pistol.

The horror aspect isn't too bad as the scenery is very atmospheric - moonlit mountain trails with rustling leaves and shifting shadows, welcome lodges (which are inherently creepy) and run-down motels, forests and eerie mines. The enemies are less scary though - the same 3 character models armed with the aforementioned farm implements charge at you and attempt to whack you like a baby seal at a Marilyn Manson concert; it's more frustrating than scary when your torch runs out of batteries and you are forced to run.

I have to spoil part of the story now as it really pisses me off. You eventually find out what happened in that lost week - you were writing. The darkness tricked Alan into writing his book. For a whole week. Not that he erased his memory to cope with the horror of his actions, or that he skipped out for a delightful vacation at Disneyland, or even that he was kidnapped by kung fu fighting brothel workers. Instead he sat at a desk and wrote. Shock! What an awesome revelation! Perhaps Alan Wake 2 can have him waking up after a night with his face in a bowl full of pudding and the mystery is that he got drunk and ate pudding!

It's strange that the worst part of the game about writing is the writing itself. If the story made more sense and the characterisation was better - I find it very hard to care about Alan or his fat comic-relief friend (who shows up when the plot starts to drag) considering they're jerks, and this can't be excused because they aren't funny.

I'd give the game an average rating - not good, not bad - worth playing if you enjoy horror games but will never hit a top ten list for anything.

Perhaps it would have been better if Alan had wanted to write and his wife wanted him to give up on his dreams, and he uses his writing to materialise the darkness to take the nagging wench to Disneyland for a week.