Alan Wake is all about stories and creativity, but it struggles with language. Both games center around reality-warping meta-narratives which shed light on the author’s disorganized psyche, but an abstract conflict like this is difficult to portray either visually or interactively. The visual motif it uses to do so is probably the most simplistic and traditional one of all: darkness and light. Light of goodness, shadow of despair, it’s been in use for literally thousands of years, and for a nontraditional story like this, it at least works as a familiar foundation to ground understanding. The interactive language meanwhile is equally simple, but in a way that feels less purposeful.

A game about creativity, self-doubt, and the nature of reality is, for some reason, presented by way of a third-person shooter, with a dynamic difficulty system generous enough to preclude any sense of survival horror. These shooter mechanics exist mostly as a way to create a sense of pushback, rather than actually representing the conflict that drives the narrative. However, I do have to give it some credit, as it actually does come close to doing so with the design of its enemies. Most of them are faceless shades, which stand around in the midst of other identical, but harmless, shadowy figures. At the start of the game, you’ll find yourself waving your flashlight from spot to spot, hoping to find foes amongst the fakers, but that’s as far as the mechanics ever push you. If you use a healing item, you can be certain that within two item boxes, you’ll find a replacement, and if you used all your ammo, you’ll instantly find more. The interactive language it’s using is, again, incredibly simple, just meant to slow you down, not to have much actual relevance to the story.

But of course, that’s the reason why we’re here in the first place; it’s hard to portray a struggle against the self in a way that can be experienced from without. It’s what brings us back to the darkness-and-light motif, an idea general enough for an audience to reflexively understand, but this generality creates a feeling of hollowness in its message. With this theme being the core of its visual and narrative identity, the only language it had to convey the fulfillment of a character arc was in the shedding or embracing of inner darkness, which flattens the nuance of a mature plot into a finale that feels like a kid’s cartoon, telling you to just believe in yourself.

That’s what I mean when I say the game struggles with its language; its genuinely interesting plot and narrative themes are let down by the methods chosen to communicate them. This is the same way I felt while playing Alan Wake 1 and Control as well, like Remedy’s boundary-breaking impulses are forcibly being restrained by the need to speak in marketable terms. That’s, ironically, why I’ll just keep buying these games. I want them to know that they’ve proven themselves, that they’ve reached their audience. I’m here, I’m listening. I want them to confidently say what they have in mind, to finally speak without reservation.

I want to be clear that I’ve already lied to you by the time you’ve read this, because this game isn’t worthy of four stars. However, it is one of the most interesting and unusual games I’ve played in a long time, so I wanted to get the word out. If janky, mediocre PS1 games which fly off the rails are your thing, then go play it. Otherwise, I’ll just talk about its weirdness, spoiling things as I go.

So, the plot starts off in a Ghost-in-the-Shell cyber future, with your three protagonists entering the stage via the obligatory cyber helicopter. The first one you control is Hana, a slick super-spy who fits the mold of her time, essentially being Lara Croft by way of Motoko Kusanagi. Then, you have Glas, whose five o’ clock shadow and bright blue hoodie signify that he’s a hard-boiled detective undercover as a fifth grader. Finally, you have Deke, a potentially fake Australian who says “bloody” and “sheila” while wearing an unflattering turtleneck. The mission of this little mercenary band is to sneak into a yakuza hideout, and get information from their inside-man about the leader’s missing daughter. Sneak in, get the info, go out and find the girl, turn her in for a massive reward, easy. But of course, the job goes bad, the informant dies, the boss discovers what the mercs are up to, and they’re on the run. Now they have to get the girl as a bargaining chip for their own lives, and the race is on.

Please change the disc.

This game’s backgrounds are all pre-rendered videos, and it’s extremely central to this game’s identity. I may complain about how you have to juggle four discs to play a five hour game and laugh at the low resolution, but I can’t help but love how this game looks. I mean, it looks rough, but it’s the sheer commitment I respect. They didn’t want a rectangle with a circle on top as their helicopter; they created a fully-detailed model to be used in a pre-rendered video alongside other real-time effects. They wanted vents fogging up a rooftop with steam, not flat concrete walls. MGS-style head wiggling for talking wasn't good enough, they wanted animated faces with expressions and mouth flaps. They wanted an interactive animated feature within the limitations of the PlayStation, and that ambition really impresses me. I’ve played a ton of games which call back to this era, but they never replicate that ambitious attitude. They never capture the feeling of pushing the system to its breaking point, or of solving technical challenges with creativity. I mean, analog flaws are cool and all, but it feels like throwback games often miss the point by celebrating limitations for their own sake rather than for the creativity they engendered.

Please close the lid. Loading.

The second mission has you catching up to the missing girl, who’s in a town overrun by what seem to be zombies. She’s a little vague on the details, but she tells you that she “didn’t know that blood was the catalyst”. It’s a bit of a jump from the straight cyberpunk we started with, but sci-fi mixes with any genre pretty well, so it’s all good. She agrees to return to her father, as long as she gets to see a woman known as Madame Chen first, since she can explain things. But of course, Chen’s working with the yakuza, and the girl’s captured as soon as Glas brings her in the door. This third mission has you switching between characters in Madame Chen’s restaurant-slash-brothel: escaping capture as Glas, sneaking in as Hana, and kicking in the door as Deke.

This is an abrupt stop, but I’m about to drop a significant spoiler for the exact moment that shit flies off the rails. If this has piqued your interest at all, stop at the end of this sentence and go play it. This is the big reveal.

Ok, now change the disc again.

Glas and Deke are ambushed. They die, and their souls go to hell. The madame turns out to be a demon queen, and Hana kills her. Her blood melts a hole into the underworld. Hana descends the melted blood hell pit to go kill Satan.

That’s not an exaggeration. Not a joke. That’s what happens. You've spent the majority of the game as these two characters, and now they're bloody scraps. As hard of a tonal pivot as it is though, this is the exact moment where I totally fell in love with this clunky old game. With such an unsafe move, it achieved something that Resident Evil was never able to: the establishment of vulnerability when players are at their strongest. It’s a Predator-esque pivot where a lone action hero has to come to the realization they’re actually in a horror movie. You used to worry about normal soldiers shooting at you, and suddenly you’re facing demons with scythe hands. Maybe the zombies in the second chapter should have struck me more than they did, but I was expecting them to be explained away. I thought it would be revealed that the yakuza girl was genetically engineered to work with next-generation nanomachines or something, and that the nanobots in her blood were lethal to anyone else. I mean, the zombies in the games which inspired Fear Effect were the result of an engineered virus, and I don’t expect Jill Valentine to go kick Satan’s ass until RE10 at the earliest.

One last disc change.

That’s as far as I’ll spoil the plot, since I think it’s enough to convey why I have four-star love for this mediocre game. It’s just so wholeheartedly bold. Even to this day we get lazy rearrangements of Resident Evil and Silent Hill, but Fear Effect showed how to use the format while fearlessly establishing its own identity way back in 2000. It fought every technical limitation, ignored standard practices, and did its own thing. Being just as good as the other games out there wasn’t the goal at all, it had to blow people away. It probably shocked you at least once just in this summary, and I didn’t even include some of the cooler things it does towards the very end. So, I’m fine with it having a shit inventory system. I’m fine with a broken lock-on. I’m fine with all the flaws, because, as cheesy as it is to say, this game was never trying to be good, it was trying to be awesome.

I’m going to spoil an early-game puzzle here, without giving you the solution. It’s a little paradox I want to present because it truly embodies La Mulana.

Strength lies at the foot of Futo.

This hint is in an early-game area themed around the history of a family of giants, with their statues dominating each screen you walk through. There are a series of tablets describing their defining characteristics, so you have to find all that information, write it down, and use it to determine who is represented with each carving. Then, there are a few hidden ways to interact with some of them, letting you discern a few which seem identical. If you’re meticulous in your note-taking and experimentation, you can determine the exact statue that represents Futo, walk right up to it, stand at its foot in search of strength, and find…

Nothing. You whip it, use every item you have, poke at everything on the screen… nothing happens. You actually need an item from much later in the game to follow up on this hint, despite your best efforts.

Except, that’s not true. You need to activate a mechanism in the prior area first, then the chest will appear, so if you’ve skipped it, you’ll need to go back.

Wait, that’s not it. It’s that you need to enter that screen from above through a false wall, then whip a normal-looking block at the top to break it, causing a chest to fall at Futo’s feet, which you can then open for your reward.

Actually, that’s wrong. You need to use a weight to activate an invisible mechanism at its feet. Turns out, every giant statue had one of those little invisible mechanisms, so instead of compiling notes and doing research, you could have just lucked out and hit the down button at some point while you were walking around like I did. So, I just went down the line placing a couple weights and got my reward. Zero thought required.

That experience is what it’s like to play La Mulana. You buy the game after hearing how much cleverness is required, how you have to take pages of notes, and how it’s obscure and gratifying. You start your little document, dutifully adding screenshots where necessary, and then find it mostly useless. It occasionally helps, but La Mulana is not a game about testing your intellect or ability to correlate information from different sources. It’s about running into every wall and being sure to whip it a couple times. It’s about killing every enemy on each screen at least once, just in case. It’s about pressing the down button on top of, and to the side of, any suspicious objects. The puzzles and tips are actually, for the most part, straightforward and direct. You can usually read a hint tablet, make a guess at the solution, and be right the first time. However, what you can’t guess is how to even interact with that solution, because it's lovingly crafted to be arbitrary.

That’s why I listed out all those false ideas. I bet if it’s been a long time since someone played La Mulana, they may have gone “ah, of course” at first, because each of those solutions are recurring tropes which apply to the majority of the puzzles across the game. It’s why, after dipping my toe in with a 20-hour guideless hintless expedition, I’m going to shelve it. For all the hype surrounding the confounding puzzles, it requires a shockingly low amount of logical problem solving. Instead, it requires perseverance, and I don’t find that to be a particularly engaging concept on its own. Video games are so comfortable to play that all it takes to persevere is deciding you want to, which means a design like this is forced to do whatever it can to disinterest the player in some capacity. It has to frustrate you, because if it didn’t, there wouldn’t be a game here at all: the central conflict of the player against self wouldn’t exist. La Mulana isn’t bad because of it; it has to be this way.

So, I’m just gonna stop here. I might have continued if the game made me feel smart or skillful, but I don’t want to annoy myself for its own sake, which is what it would boil down to. That core of the experience is probably why my little group has made a ritual of coaxing people (like myself) into streaming it. You don’t get friends to stream normal puzzle games, and you don’t get them to stream simple platformers, but you get them to stream La Mulana. It’s funny to watch people get annoyed, and it gives cathartic schadenfreude to see them fall into traps the same way you did. That leaves your choices for enjoyment being completion of the entire game, laughing at someone, or just saying "fuggit" and doing something else, and personally, I think my chances of success are best with the last option.