This review contains spoilers
Bought this at launch and played it when I could during a busy period of work, so I'm a bit late to the party...I really loved it!
For most of this game's runtime I thought it was very good, although potentially a little overhyped. I say this as a huge Remedy and Alan Wake 1 fan, so I was still loving my time with it, but was worried that maybe it had been oversold. I adore the first game, but I felt like its game mechanics never reached their full potential. I didn't feel that as strongly in this game, but it was in the back of my mind. This game added in a lot of new mechanics and switched up a lot of the old ones so it was very different. One of note is the idea of the mind place and the writer's room, both of which use Remedy's strength of environmental and narrative storytelling. I was feeling a bit similarly to AW1 that they were good but not used to their fullest extent until the last part of the game where Saga was thrown into the dark place and Alan was back in the real world as a playable character. Suddenly these places were used to subvert their previous uses and highlight this switch of locations in a way that I truly don't think could have been done any better. The last chunk of this game has the gameplay and narrative synergising in a way where all cylinders are firing, and it truly feels like the peak of what it could possibly be. I really, really, really loved this one. I think it'll take a few replays to further dissect the story to get my love for it above my love for the first game, but I do think with time it will as it's the better game.
My one gripe with the game, and gripe is maybe pushing it, is resource balancing. This is partially self inflicted as I was playing this more like an older Resident Evil title, but when you have low resources in your inventory the game tries to balance this by dropping more of it in containers and enemies. The issue here is that if you are keeping ammo in your save room inventory, you quickly become over- equipped for any encounter. This was largely of my own making because if I'd thrown the ammo I had into my largely vacant personal inventory space it wouldn't have happened, but I accidentally created a situation where I eventually had so much ammo that I had to start deleting resources and avoiding picking things up at times. This undercut the "survival" part of the survival horror for me, however this was only really an issue towards the end of the game. I'm curious if a harder difficulty would change this. All that being said, a game being made easier because of smart resource management is not entirely a bad thing, it just feels like it wasn't intentional. I still had a ton of fun looting and fighting.
Overall this game is a great time. This review is mainly to quickly jot down some thoughts I had in my head that I hadn't heard people talking about, and there is so much more to be said about this game. I truly love it, and it is such a triumph of narrative and metanarrative fiction. I will be revisiting it often and I very much look forward to what is next on Remedy's docket.
For most of this game's runtime I thought it was very good, although potentially a little overhyped. I say this as a huge Remedy and Alan Wake 1 fan, so I was still loving my time with it, but was worried that maybe it had been oversold. I adore the first game, but I felt like its game mechanics never reached their full potential. I didn't feel that as strongly in this game, but it was in the back of my mind. This game added in a lot of new mechanics and switched up a lot of the old ones so it was very different. One of note is the idea of the mind place and the writer's room, both of which use Remedy's strength of environmental and narrative storytelling. I was feeling a bit similarly to AW1 that they were good but not used to their fullest extent until the last part of the game where Saga was thrown into the dark place and Alan was back in the real world as a playable character. Suddenly these places were used to subvert their previous uses and highlight this switch of locations in a way that I truly don't think could have been done any better. The last chunk of this game has the gameplay and narrative synergising in a way where all cylinders are firing, and it truly feels like the peak of what it could possibly be. I really, really, really loved this one. I think it'll take a few replays to further dissect the story to get my love for it above my love for the first game, but I do think with time it will as it's the better game.
My one gripe with the game, and gripe is maybe pushing it, is resource balancing. This is partially self inflicted as I was playing this more like an older Resident Evil title, but when you have low resources in your inventory the game tries to balance this by dropping more of it in containers and enemies. The issue here is that if you are keeping ammo in your save room inventory, you quickly become over- equipped for any encounter. This was largely of my own making because if I'd thrown the ammo I had into my largely vacant personal inventory space it wouldn't have happened, but I accidentally created a situation where I eventually had so much ammo that I had to start deleting resources and avoiding picking things up at times. This undercut the "survival" part of the survival horror for me, however this was only really an issue towards the end of the game. I'm curious if a harder difficulty would change this. All that being said, a game being made easier because of smart resource management is not entirely a bad thing, it just feels like it wasn't intentional. I still had a ton of fun looting and fighting.
Overall this game is a great time. This review is mainly to quickly jot down some thoughts I had in my head that I hadn't heard people talking about, and there is so much more to be said about this game. I truly love it, and it is such a triumph of narrative and metanarrative fiction. I will be revisiting it often and I very much look forward to what is next on Remedy's docket.