Deeply evil game. There is nothing in this game that can actually do harm to the player character in an explicit or mechanical sense and yet the presentation creates such a powerful sense of constant danger and hostility that despite knowing going into it that I would never round the corner to find a Scary Guy waiting to bash my head in, I was gripped with indescribable dread throughout. There are some truly cruel moments in which the game forces you to do things you absolutely do not want to do in order to progress. Masterful horror. It also feels just deeply, intrinsically trans in a way I really can't put to words? Like I can't point to any specific thing about this game that is particularly trans other than maybe the bit that describes a home invasion in a way that feels more like a sexual assault, but just looking at this game and KittyHorrorShow's other output I was able to correctly guess that she's trans before I got confirmation that that was the case, there's definitely something going on here that I can't quite put my finger on but I feel it in my bones.

Masterpiece. Pure isolation in which you're forced to mechanistically carry out simple navigation tasks while the ocean of blood you're submerged in makes the most fucking awful noises you've ever heard in your life. The entire thing is largely spent staring at a control panel with your ship's x and y coordinates, intermittently cross referencing these with your shitty little dot matrix printed map so you can hopefully avoid running into walls. Sometimes you get too close to a radioactive anomaly and your vision starts warping. Sometimes there's a loud THUMP that shakes the entire sub and suddenly you're in a completely different position. Sometimes the steam pipes spring a leak or the engine catches fire. Do what you gotta do, but stay focused on what's really important: That control panel and your current x and y coordinates. This is Tunnel Vision: The Game.

There's neat ideas here for sure (the Champion system, where major units that your deck is built around will flip over into a stronger version of themselves when certain conditions are met which change from unit to unit, is really interesting and an elegant way to direct the player toward their deck's win conditions, spell mana which lets you bank up to 3 units of unused mana per round which can only be used on casting spells is a neat way to mitigate the sense of aggressively overcontrolled pacing given off by the now-standard gradually increasing mana pool) but ultimately I find the way turn passes back and forth constantly within each round to be far too inimical to my ability to develop a sense of flow while playing and the ever-present gacha structural elements of passive background quests which constantly beg for your attention with notification pings, overbearing collection systems which the game immediately waterboards you with in the hope that the flashy animations will get their hooks in you before you even have context for what you're receiving, and a generally overdesigned, sickeningly sticky overarching UX create an experience which I find so passively off-putting that I can't ultimately motivate myself to stick with it long enough to see if the mechanics work any better for me at higher levels of play.

Fell off a couple levels in, I'll come back to it eventually but playing it immediately after having run through the entirety of the original game was too much of a downgrade, I need to give some more space between em. I certainly wouldn't call American Nightmare a bad game but it has way less clarity of vision than its predecessor and the changes made to the gameplay to accommodate the new structure make it feel super bland. None of the enemies feel like they pose a real threat with their decreased darkness thresholds and Alan's faster, snappier arsenal, and combined with the lack of any clear narrative hooks it just makes for a game that's way more susceptible to tedium than the original. The rhythms of collecting and watching or listening to TV spots, radio broadcasts and manuscript pages don't fit nearly as well into this faster-paced game either, especially since Mr. Scratch's live-action vignettes actually have a lot of downtime in them, taking up more time to deliver less story than sequences you got of Alan in the Sunken Place in the first game. Overall this game is fine but it just doesn't have enough going on to keep me interested right now.

A little weaker than The Signal, I think. The setpieces are more ambitious but also jankier, and the plot is mainly just tying up loose ends as all the most interesting elements were pretty effectively established by the end of The Signal. The segment where you clear out rocks and use the lights to just decimate the Taken is cool but it's unfortunately immediately followed by an AWFUL boss fight. If you feel the need to put an unlimited supply of ammo in your boss arena you've probably fucked up. Still, not a bad time overall and provides a pretty satisfying end to the first entry in Alan Wake's story.

Absolutely dripping with style and intrigue, Alan Wake is the gripping tale of a hack writer who started rewriting his own reality. It's a generally pretty excellent action game with fantastic atmosphere and a really interesting thematic exploration of the act of writing fiction, and while it does stumble in places on the gameplay front and certainly shows some of the telltale markers of being A Seventh Gen Game, I highly recommend it, especially now that it's been folded into Remedy's shared universe in some REALLY interesting ways that makes its story and themes even more interesting in retrospect.