To be prepared to play Alan Wake 2, which is one of the most awarded games last year, I played the original title to catch up with the story.

I think the strengths of this game are his narrative and his charismatic characters. The plot is well written, as a real mystery novel, and is interesting enough to make you complete the game.

The adventure takes place in Bright falls, an seemingly peaceful village inhabited by strange people. The game invites you to explore his surroundings, rewarding you with collectible items almost every time you stray from the main path.

In therms of gameplay, it presents some original ideas, like the use of the flashlight to fight "The Dark Presence". But in the end the game can feel repetitive, due the lack of variety of enemies, weapons or puzzles.

Finally, this remaster includes two extra episodes which don't offer much more than more challenging zones

Alan Wake Remastered é um game que de cara me surpreendeu ao me fazer deparar com um survival horror e não um game de terror em si.

Com uma mecânica interessante de mirar através da lanterna que serve também para enfraquecer e vulnerabilizar os inimigos, o combate é bem divertido embora pouco frenético e com um sistema de esquiva meio estranho.

A experiência tem uma ambientação e um suspense muito bom, porém eu não entendi quase nada da história até minhas 5 horas de jogo, o que acredito que faz parte da proposta mas acaba não me deixando tão imerso.

Por fim é um remaster com bem cara de remaster mesmo, pouca melhoria gráfica em relação ao original e a otimização é bem ruim no pc, além de umas narrações que se tratam de comentários óbvios.

Porém o principal motivo que me faz deixar para um futuro próximo é de fato priorizar outros games, por mais que a experiência de Alan Wake me parece curta, não queria rushar o game já que vejo até um potencial e me faria entrar mais de cabeça para o segundo game que eu estou de olho, portanto, prefiro dar horas para jogos mais longos como o Dragons Dogma 2 no momento e até mesmo quero começar o No Rest For The Wicked que vem me chamando atenção.

I loathe basically everything about Alan Wake. I played this because the sequel is so critically acclaimed, but after playing this I cannot imagine how. I think this game is a failure in every aspect of design.

First, the graphics. Even with the remaster, these environments are at best passable, while at their worst they definitely show their age. The character designs and animations, however, are truly some of the ugliest I've ever seen in a video game. This is why the developers cunningly made the main enemy force completely concealed in a black shroud - it hides their awful appearance.

The gameplay is atrociously tedious. Every single level the game has to contrive a reason for Alan Wake to leave all his equipment behind but to venture out at night regardless. It became a running joke for me to see just how long the daytime segments were compared to the nighttime ones. I think this town gets about 10 minutes of total daylight every 24 hours based on how the game presents it. The combat system of not being able to shoot the enemies until you have shone a torch on them enough might sound kind of interesting but in practice it just drags the encounters out three times as long as they need to. The enemy variety is tragic; there is only 3. Men with melee weapons, crows and inanimate objects. WOW!

I've seen the story praised by critics, but I couldn't agree any less. It's a very simple story that's told in the most confusing way possible. Don't confuse that with the story having depth - it doesn't - it just makes it even harder to enjoy. The plot sucks, the characters are detestable and everything is padded out.

The only positive I have for this game it that it is playable. I got to the end without many issues. I recently tried my best to play the game Remedy made after this, Quantum Break, and found the worst optimised triple-A release I have ever seen. I could, at least, beat Alan Wake. There was one good section in Alan Wake, the musical number at the end of episode 4. That is 5 minutes of an eight hour game. Everything else in just insufferably standard. Hours and hours of wandering around the same looking dark woodland while shooting the same enemy over and over again, occasionally stopping to feed some awful piece of poorly acted exposition down your throat.

man i was so fucking bored. like the story had some intrigue and the combat was kinda neat at first, but there's so much of it and just wandering around that i got so fucking bored.

looked up the rest of the story and im kinda happy i didn't waste more time on it.

3/10

This might be one of my biggest disappointments in terms of "hyped" games, and this game is from 2010 it's insane to be disappointed by an old piece of shit!

"Play Alan Wake", they said, and since this game is somewhat considered a classic I thought "Sure, I loved Max Payne 2, and storytelling in games can be great! I'm sure I can trust Remedy's new game!" but oh-so-wrong I was!

This is the tale of a little boy saddened to see the state of Alan Wake on his Playstation 5.

Alright so pointing out the obvious, I don't care about pseud stories related to books and whatnot, I'm a gamer! I like Cheetos, I like Gamecubes, I like boxes with Xs on them and stupid shit like Mario! I don't fucking know about books and I'm not a writer either so I surely can't relate to Alan Wake and his stupid issues.
I'm not saying that all video game stories have to be dumb or relatable to the player, I'm just saying that if you give your game to greasy Xbox 360 players, from the Max Payne creators, I'm pretty sure they'd expect something else from the game.

Something that perplexes me is that this game does not seem to know what it wants to be, do you want to be a more story-focused experience like a Telltale game with episodes and such, or do you want to be a "Survival horror" similar to Resident Evil 5 and 6 (oh god)?
The game feels like they only had one idea on the drawing board and it was "Play with light and shadow", then they thought "Let's make it a horror game", but then like all 360era horror games it turned into a more action-focused game which removes any scares and replaces it by long fucking corridors that never ends with the same enemies and gameplay over and over, mixed with some poor metaphorical metastory meta whatever storytelling with a confusing cutscene and a story that writes itself with the most obvious ending possible which only released as DLC, yeah I'm pissed.

I have a fun game in mind, since this game is pretty much a mix of all cliché Xbox 360 games I think it would be fun to list everything you've seen overused in other games from that era!

This game is a third-person shooter
It has forced vehicle sections
it has regenerative HP
It has useless garbage collectibles for "Lore" and a set number of bonus collectibles for a nice "nothing" reward for collecting all 100
It uses a chapter system
Italian new-yorker sidekick

And probably many more that I cannot bring myself to remember, if anything this game is the most 360 of them all!

But is the main gimmick of the game even good? It's cool for 10 minutes, then you realize the "Light to fight monster" gimmick is just a loading bar for enemies, it never gets used in creative ways, you just flash the same enemies over and over till the very end of the game, the game doesn't even have real boss fights they are just copy pasted fast ghost dudes with the model of a relevant character from that chapter.

This game just feels like a time waster, the end twist is obvious, the gameplay isn't fun and it's REALLY repetitive, the characters all suck I don't like any of them other than the Italian sidekick.
I truly do not understand what people find so special about this game, did the people praising it even finish it?
But maybe it's just me, maybe I'm too dumb to understand such a deep and complex story! The boring gameplay just represents the sadness of alan wake! I swear!

Overall rating is a strong 7/10.

Pros:

+Great, chilling atmosphere through its lighting, settings and soundtrack.
+The perfect blend of suspense and supernatural, was fun to go through even as someone who isn't super into Thrillers/Horror.
+Very interesting premise of converging realities. Easy to become invested in, and gets quite thought provoking towards the end.
+Enjoyable characters and worldbuilding; the cast was all unique and all the little details added a lot to the game.
+A lot of unique mechanics and methods when it comes to taking out enemies, could be great fun at times.

Cons:

-Gameplay got a bit repetitive/linear.
-Audio mixing was quite poor.
-The controls haven't aged too well.

Excited to see how American Nightmare, Control and Alan Wake 2 expand upon this universe.

realmente os jogos da remedy tem um toque único, principalmente por causa da escrita e alan wake não foge disso.
o enredo é bem interessante, começa bem morno mas depois da metade eu fui fisgado completamente e o final achei fenomenal. Meu único porém é q não consegui simpatizar tanto com o personagem alan wake e nem com a esposa dele, eu estava é mais curioso pra saber sobre o universo e o plot da historia do que esses personagens, algo q aconteceu comigo em control também.
Sobre o combate e puzzle é só apontar a lanterninha e pou pou nos inimigos, nada inovador mas é bacana, achei q seria pior, problema é q se vc jogar varias horas seguidas certamente vai enjoar muito rápido por causa desse combate.

Off the back of Alan Wake II being released I thought I’d give the first game a go to see what all the fuss was about. If I could sum it up it would be: If Alan Wake was a real author this would be his version of Tommy Wiseau’s “The Room”.

Alan Wake contains all the ingredients of a Stephen King book with the seasoning of a David Lynch film. The game’s plot revolves around a writer who travels to a lake with his wife Alice to try and help with his writer's block. She gifts him a typewriter and Alan ungratefully throws his dummy out the pram, storming out of the cabin. Shortly after he hears her screams and finds out she has fallen into the lake. Sam then wakes up a week later in a car crash and bumps into these dark shadowy humans (called the Taken) which he must defeat with the help of light.

The game takes its inspiration from Stephen King, David Lynch and The Twilight Zone. Each section of the game is split down into episodes as if you’re playing a TV show with credits and a “Previously on…” title before each episode. As someone who is not a fan of TV shows I found this to be irritating. Thankfully you can slip each of these title cards.

I played the remastered version and the graphics look great. The game runs at a buttery smooth 60fps on Xbox Series X with remastered 4k graphics. Other improvements include: redone cinematic cutscenes with improved facial animation and lip sync, richer environmental details, improved lighting and character models. Shame they couldn’t fix the cutscenes entirely. They look pre-rendered but the animation and FPS is really choppy which is a jarring contrast to the actual gameplay. The bad writing and voice acting don’t help the cutscenes either.

I really like the gameplay mechanics of Alan Wake. Using your torch to weaken enemies and the light from the torch acting like a crosshair is very smart. Reloading your guns which can be quickened by tapping the reload button is a nice touch. Other games that don’t have this feature have gamers panicking and rapidly tapping a reload button in hopes that it will help the character reload faster. Much like people who tip the controllers in racing games hoping it improves their turning ability.

There’s not a lot of variety to the “Taken”. You get your standard guys, fast ones and the heavys. Eventually you’ll come across inanimate objects to your surprise. You’ll be standing taking damage wondering where it’s coming from before you look down and see a wheelbarrow kicking your shins.

The areas are big enough that they have little side areas to explore and find extra weapons and ammunition, however sometimes leaving those areas you will get attacked and use up the ammo you just collected. The one big collectible in this game is Thermos flasks which give you absolutely no benefit to gameplay; they are all just for a trophy which only appeals to certain gamers. Alan Wake seems like the type of game that would spawn unlimited enemies as you explore each area but luckily it doesn’t.

The downsides to the gameplay are all to do with Alan’s Movement. He can take heavy damage or even die from falling from relatively small heights. He cannot run faster than the Taken, which means if you run out of ammo and try to run away, you’ll likely die quite quickly. The game takes place over 6 chapters and most of those take place in the woods. After 2-3 chapters this can get quite repetitive and lacks any surprise. It reminded me of the E.T. ride at Universal Studios, YouTube it if you’re unsure what I’m on about. Between chapters Alan will constantly lose his flashlight and weapons making you think just proving he has the same careless approach to his belongings than he does his wife.

Alan Wake is a decent enough game which has had it’s gameplay and graphics improved with newer consoles in a remaster. Unfortunately though, remasters don’t tend to fix poor writing and woeful cutscenes. The gameplay is what kept me going through this game albeit a bit repetitive. Thankfully coming in at around 22 hours in length Alan Wake doesn’t overstay its welcome and it’s unlikely you will regret playing the game. If you’re a seasoned gamer like me who likes to explore every franchise then I recommend this game. If you’re a part-time gamer who is looking for something entertaining I'd say give this one a miss as there are better games out there.