A Stephen King inspired horror game about a depressed writer cursed with supernatural creative powers sounded like a perfect premise for me. I expected to be terrified, lost, and fully engrossed in a dark and atmospheric setting, but the only quality I found that this game shared with Stephen King’s novels was a desperate need for an editor.
Alan Wake was only a 10 hour game yet it somehow still felt too long. I can usually appreciate a slow burn horror, but the flat, tropey characters failed to carry the narrative and I struggled to get invested in them. It also didn’t help that the story was doled out in pieces between extremely repetitive and dull combat sections. The gameplay loop was very basic: press a button to shine a light, then press another button to shoot a gun. It never evolved or deviated past this loop, like playing a tutorial from beginning to end. The enemies were mostly copy-pasted shadow men, or occasionally when the Darkness wanted to spice it up, some shadow birds or trucks. The reward for finishing these encounters was a bit of cutscene narrated with Alan’s stodgy monologue.
This game was such a disappointment for me because I jumped into it right after having a wonderful time with Remedy’s more recent title, Control. I was ready to learn more about their “Remedy-verse” and wanted to connect the dots in the lore myself by playing all of their older games. Alan Wake quickly put an end to that endeavor, and I’m now happy to just read about the cool details on a wiki.
Alan Wake was only a 10 hour game yet it somehow still felt too long. I can usually appreciate a slow burn horror, but the flat, tropey characters failed to carry the narrative and I struggled to get invested in them. It also didn’t help that the story was doled out in pieces between extremely repetitive and dull combat sections. The gameplay loop was very basic: press a button to shine a light, then press another button to shoot a gun. It never evolved or deviated past this loop, like playing a tutorial from beginning to end. The enemies were mostly copy-pasted shadow men, or occasionally when the Darkness wanted to spice it up, some shadow birds or trucks. The reward for finishing these encounters was a bit of cutscene narrated with Alan’s stodgy monologue.
This game was such a disappointment for me because I jumped into it right after having a wonderful time with Remedy’s more recent title, Control. I was ready to learn more about their “Remedy-verse” and wanted to connect the dots in the lore myself by playing all of their older games. Alan Wake quickly put an end to that endeavor, and I’m now happy to just read about the cool details on a wiki.