Alan Wake is one of those games where the sheer intrigue of where it's going is practically the only thing keeping you invested in it.

It has very little else going for it; the gameplay gets boring really, really quickly, to the point it almost becomes a competition with itself for worst encounter with its own combat. Lots of official game designers say that the best way to make horror game combat is to make it just frustrating enough that you feel helpless, but not so much that combat is downright annoying: Alan Wake went so off into being annoying that the end of the game corrects itself by giving you enough items that make monsters leave you alone that you could easily just walk by them without hassle.

The story isn't necessarily good, either, but it has a weird quality to it that makes it interesting enough to see to the end. So many characters are either one note or just weird for the sake of it that you can't really like any but about three of them, but the fact the writing of the game is in a mobius-strip like loop and that it has an effect on how literally everything else is supposed to go is the strongest reason to finish it.