que gameplay de mierda hermano mamitaaa
la camara tosca que encima me la manejas y meten slow motions que hace todo mil veces mas tosco
los enemigos repetitivos que después del capitulo 1 ya me aburrieron
el movimiento no era algo que sea lindo de manejar

todo el juego tenía estas complicaciones que me la bajaban niveles abismales

la historia me encató, la ambientación y el sonido tambien pero lamentablemente a mi no me bastó como para poder disfrutarlo

hasta el punto que lo jugaba y me hacía doler la cabeza

prefiero leer o ver videos de la historia que jugar esto

Once when srcolling through twitter I stumbled across image of screen from Alan Wake II which made me think that that is probably one of the most artistic expressions I've seen in a video game industry for a while. But if it was the 2nd part then to fully experience it I would need to get my hand on the first one... made over 10 years prior.
And it was pretty good. Not at all I was expecting but had few good moments, sometimes plot actually made me feel engaged and gameplay with some time was more and more smooth. My biggest concern about Alan Wake is probably how game notifies you about incoming enemies yet nothing tells you that 4 more guys also spawned behind you (which is one of the most stupid mechanic I've seen in video game).
But boy oh boy... the DLCs.
It felt like anyone who was directing the main title was let off the leash by the studio cus "it's only 3 additional hours".
It creates really wonderful vibe with this dream-like theme that plays you around on well known locations and truly tests your abilities as a player.
It's harder, it's more artistic, it's more perfect. Love it.
Alan Wake - 7/10
DLCs - 9/10
Don't you dare finish it without finishing the Signal and the Writer.

Tiene sus años y se notan en el gameplay mas que nada, que es bastante simple y repetitivo. No es taaaan aburrido y safa lo suficiente como para que no sea infumable, pero es sin duda uno de sus puntos mas negativos, sobre todo al final cuando ya querés ver como se desenvuelve la historia y tenés que lidiar con dos horas de apuntar con una linterna y disparar, termina siendo frustrante. Además de que cada vez que esquivas o aparecen enemigos o te salvas de pedo, el juego decide ponerse en cámara lenta y sacarte control del personaje para hacer una especie de "momento cinematográfico" que está lindo las primeras dos veces pero cuando ya vas 8 horas de juego y momentos camara lenta es cansador y sobre todo molesto, te saca del momentum constantemente. DICHO ESO, la historia está muy piola. La dirección artística también, y es lo que sostiene al juego. Hay una recurrencia temática y una cuestión de la luz y la oscuridad y los miedos y las pesadillas super interesante, el mundo que plantea esta muy copado y es lo que me mantuvo jugandolo por 10 horas. No se si vale tanto la pena para jugar así simple, pero sabiendo que está Alan Wake 2 que debe ser una experiencia mucho mejor, se tolera lo suficiente.

Bons:
Gameplay, História, ambientação, personagens, trilha sonora
Mediano:
variedade de armas, seus itens não carregam de um capítulo para outro mesmo sem haver motivo na história
Ruins:
Excesso de coletáveis apesar das paginas de manuscrito serem legais são muitas e além disso tem muitos outros coletáveis, pulo

This is a game that I initially found incredibly lifeless. The acting and characters reminded me of Heavy Rain, but not bad. Not very good, but not bad. The gameplay felt tedious and everything about the experience of playing it felt so hollow. Until it didn't.

I don't know when exactly things started clicking together for me. Somewhere around the end of Episode 2, but there was no real specific section or moment that made it all snap into place for me. It just sort of crept into me, but I'm only realizing now what it was; sincerity.

There's a lot in Alan Wake that can be described as underwhelming. The combat loop doesn't get shaken up very much throughout the game, undercutting the clever idea that it's essentially built around. There's several cool and unique ideas that the game dabbles in, but never commits to. I could list off more gripes, but I just don't want to. Perhaps it's just me, but the more you play it, the more you see just how much Remedy loved what they were making. The entire game wears its influences on its sleeves, while never feeling too reliant on those inspirations. It's all these little things that just make you realize how much they cared about making this thing, and eventually those little things began overshadowing the flaws for me, no matter how big they might've been.

Perhaps my hindsight is making me biased, since I know that Remedy apparently went all-in when making the relatively recent sequel, a game that was seemingly always on the back of their minds while working on their other titles. I've yet to play anything from Remedy besides this and the Max Payne games, and I don't plan on playing Alan Wake 2 until after getting through Control and maybe Quantum Break. However, I can't help but feel excited to see what they made, using this as a foundation and springboard of sorts.

Shout out to small rural towns overtaken by an evil or dark presence that corrupts them or brings hellish creatures. Gotta be one of my favorite genders.




Deemon, the incompetent reviewer, started off his write-off with one of his usual jokes, so unfunny that one might wonder if he was doing it on purpose or if he really has such poor comedy taste. He was trying to hide the fact that he really didn’t know where to start; the path to take might seem clear, but like the streets and forest of Bright Falls, it’s more deceiving than it may look at first, like a maze that’s also a downward spiral.

Deemon pondered, searching for a way to salvage the review, desperately trying to find out which step he should take, what words he should use. He sighed. He decided to let the words write themselves, to let out all the thoughts that had formed while the darkness and light of the town surrounded Alan Wake. He surrendered himself to the unknown, one that might be already written after all… Though he knows he had to talk about the music for sure, that selection of bangers had to be celebrated somehow.




Ambition almost killed Alan Wake, in more ways than one. I mean, I may not know much about Remedy Studios, in fact, it is the very first game of theirs I have ever played and beaten, but I do know the story of Bright Falls and how it was initially going to be something else, an open world of sorts, something that didn’t quite work, as it seems. Translating an already crafted open world into a linear style of game is such a monumental task that if I were in that predicament, I’d have considered outright scrapping everything and starting from zero, but that probably wasn’t even a realistic option for the team to begin with.

But that’s not even what I’m specifically referring to. Alan Wake, the game, the package, the copy made out of code and specific sections, is riddled with hiccups and bumps; it’s filled with padding, sections of trees and mist than don’t offer much aside from one or two manuscripts pages and combat sections that can feel overbearing at times, the remnants of its troubled production remain in aspects such as the barren areas and driving sections that don’t have much of a place and are so frustrating to playthrough even if you ignore any cars I just wish they were taken out —tho it’s kind of cute how it also uses the same light mechanic as the rest of the game—,  the encounters with the Taken or the groups of mad crows often lack imagination and enemy variety or don’t jam very well with how the camera works in the case of the camera, and at one point I just kept thinking how much the experience would have benefited if some sections were repurposed in different ways or outright removed.

The imperfections of Alan Wake mostly come from this, factors outside of the game itself, of its story, but they still impact it negatively; I can’t scratch off the feeling of something being lost a bit when all of the boss enemies behave the exact same, the only thing that changes being the creepy lines they spat out and the character model. If the game wasn’t anything more than a series of levels where you shoot at things, then these issues would have rotted its pages…

…luckily, it has a dragon.

Wouldn’t it be funny if I started to praise the actual combat itself after spending two paragraphs criticizing some gameplay sections? Yeah, it would be hilarious! ... ANYWAYyeah I fucking adore the way Al controls. It occupies that same space as Simon from Castlevania, where how slow and imprecise it feels actually benefits the gameplay. You truly get the feeling Alan has never picked a gun in his life in any major capacity; he’s slow, clunky, imprecise, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. The tense dance of using light to weaken the Taken and gen emptying the chambers of them, or hell, simply using a flare and trying to activate the closest generator, it’s a super straight-forward system, and I love it. It’s incredibly satisfying to come out of encounters on top, because even if there isn’t much scarcity in resources (even if you start off each chapter with nothing each time), they are still somewhat limited, especially the most powerful weapons, and little things like mashing X to reload faster or the camera panning out to warn you of nearby enemies are things I didn’t know I needed until now.

It would be a far cry to call it a survival horror, but it’s tense; it’s tense to try to manage the purge while a bulldozer is charging full speed at you; it’s tense to try to outspeed a force you cannot do nothing against; and Alan gets progressively more and more tired. I can make the argument that there should be less of it or at least more variety in what it offers enemy-wise, but nothing will take away from the fact that the core itself is some fantastic shit.

Like… there’s something about fighting against waves of enemies on stage while the sickest rock tune ever plays in the background and the lights and flames fill your eyes that I can only call ‘’fucking awesome’’.




Deemon knew that wasn’t just it. He could talk about flaws and shooting Taken all he wanted, but something else lied within the light. He ran into it.

‘’But there’s something else’’, he said




But there’s something else.

A story already written, touched by the darkness. Written already as a part of it before birth, its muse trying to corrupt it. An ending yet to be typed out.

I have never seen a videogame story that trusts so much that the player will be intrigued enough by it to stick with it and engage with it all the way through. The tale Alan Wake, Alice, Barry, Sarah, and the whole town get tangled into is not intriguing; it is fascinating. I have never felt such closure from getting answers to questions I never realized where there in the first place. From being pretty disappointed about how Nightingale and Mott had such a poor presence as antagonists to being in awe of how their actions fell into place after the truth of this unfortunate series of events was revealed. Alan Wake offers a hell of a mystery. Alan Wake solves it.

The pages of the manuscript are as essential as the cinematics and interactions, so many pieces of the puzzle fit, it’s almost like getting spoiled before something happens, which in a way is exactly what’s happening. At first, I felt pretty disappointed that this would be a jarring light vs darkness story mixed with a thriller. Then it ended up being a meta-narrative within its own meta-narrative. The fact they did that without it feeling overcomplicated or screwing it up is ovation worthy.

But I also feel a huge sense of admiration for the micro-stories at play; hearing and talking to the inhabitants of Bright Falls, listening to Maine’s night radio, the echoes of the Taken and stellar ambience sounds ringing through my ears, the fucking incredible Night Springs shorts that had me HOOKED... It was the little things scattered in the trees and buildings and the small talk that gave this spiraling world even more meaning.

It ends with the darkness hungry for more, just like me. I’ve seen people call Alan Wake ‘’the most 6/7 out of ten game I’ve ever played’’, and even though I do not sympathize with that statement at all because it feels reductive in any context, I kind of get what people mean by it. Alan Wake is profoundly flawed, but most of them do not come from the game itself, but rather from the complicated production it had to go through.  In the face of such adversity, I’ve never seen such confidence, such talent, or such a desire to tell a tale like this. Alan Wake isn’t just *a* story, there’s more to be written and read, but at the end of the day, it’s also its own story. And what a story it is.

Maybe this isn’t what the champion of light could have been if the circumstances were different, but the hardships cannot be avoided, and even after going through them, they really sold me on this novel.

Let me start by saying that my initial experience with the game was soured by the motion sickness I endured for the first 1-2 hours of gameplay due to the lack of an option to disable motion blur. I almost dropped the game because of that, but thanks to modders, I was able to overcome this annoying issue and immerse myself fully into the game.

Alan Wake's soundtrack, atmosphere, and story are incredibly captivating. From the depths of dense forests to the eerie solitude of abandoned cabins, every location feels thoroughly designed to immerse you in its haunting atmosphere, creating a sense of constant unease.

Sadly, the game's greatest weakness is its gameplay. While the gameplay is well thought out, it became too repetitive rather quickly. And goddamn, Alan needs some cardio training because this man can't run 5 meters without getting out of breath. Seriously, the stamina could as well have been non-existent. I also feel like some set pieces have overstayed their welcome, making me wish they would just end already so that the plot I was really engaged in can go on. All of this dragged the pacing and overall flow of the story down for me.

At its heart, Alan Wake shines through its fantastic storytelling and engrossing plot. As someone who truly enjoys story-driven games, I had a good and unique experience. However, the repetitive and somewhat dull gameplay, specifically shooting down the Taken, diminished my overall enjoyment.