One of the best games of all time dude

First, the gameplay. I cannot stress this enough: play on a controller and do NOT turn on direct aiming. The default looser camera controls are very carefully tuned to provide quick responsive turning while also being to carefully make small adjustments in aiming without having to hold down your flashlight and dynamically swapping between left and right over the shoulder views points depending on your movement and aiming - this feels amazing and results in incredibly cinematic feeling action. The direct aiming does away with that and is a flat 1:1 curve, meant more for a PC mouse. Whenever I see someone complaining about the game being jank they inevitably have the direct aiming turned on in their gameplay, just avoid it and learn to love not having your “crosshair” centered all the time.

The gameplay design is amazing - levels are linear and tightly paced, but offer ample rewards for going off the beaten path either in hidden ammo caches or manuscript pages that provide a bit more insight to the story. Every level introduces a new gameplay mechanic to play with, some staying on for the rest of the game like the flares and some being one and done like electric fences you can shotgun blast enemies into. You have a small but carefully considered arsenal built around having to weaken enemies with light before you can take them out. The flashlight and revolver combo is your main staple you'll almost always have access to - enemies always take a consistent amount of light damage and bullet damage regardless of where they get hit, so you'll do well to keep track of how many bullets you have loaded and how many hits you need. You get a handful of shotguns you'll sometimes have the option of choosing, the pump action is a direct upgrade on the normal shotgun and is the faster option but does a bit less damage while the hunting rifle does the more damage but is much slower. Your third gun slot is taken up by the flare gun, which is your strongest weapon by far but is low on ammo and can only fire one shot at a time so it's best used for crowds of enemies, especially those damn birds. Then you have the flares which have multiple uses: pop one when you're crowded to get enemies to back off, you can hold one to take the offensive back on an enemy, or drop one to create a temporary safe zone to catch a breath. Your last piece of arsenal are the flashbangs, which can wipe out weaker enemies and stun tougher ones but have a delay after throwing and are relatively scarce. Finally you have a dodge, there aren't any iframes attached to it but instead you need to dodge away from an attack in the right direction to trigger a little cinematic slow-mo you'll be briefly invincible during. Your gear is reset every chapter, sometimes midway through one and you'll always have enough to get you through encounters (at least on Normal PC/Hard Xbox 360, a Nightmare replay is imminent) so don't get precious about holding onto things, use em or lose em. This all adds up to an incredibly unique third person shooter, it isn't much of a survival horror but it does tap into a RE4-esque building of tension.

The story is the main draw of Alan Wake and man it's a doozy. Sam Lake and co have taken all the ideas they'd built on in the Max Payne games and gone a couple extra miles on them. It's metanarratives upon metanarratives upon metanarratives, all told compellingly through the eyes of our favorite washed up bestselling author. While I felt compelled to explain the gameplay in detail because I feel it's a bit misunderstood I don't want to spoil a thing about the story.

The game looks and sounds really good too. The character models are a bit iffy but the environments and lighting are to this day absolutely phenomenal. The original score is subtle and fits well while the licensed needle drops all land perfectly. And of course, Poets of the Fall debut their Remedy alter egos in The Old Gods of Asgard in one of the most memorable sections of the game.

Top 5 game honestly

Probably the worst console release of the original Tokimeki Memorial... is still pretty great! As I understand, this is a mostly-intact version of the original PC-Engine release, just with FMVs and voice acting stripped out, but the "Heartthrob Memorial" fan translation restores a lot of that anyway.

There's a playful innocence to TokiMemo that doesn't translate at all to the Western understanding of what dating sims are. Dating sims, as popular culture has it, are all about the romance; Tokimeki Memorial is less about that and more about capturing the highschool experience. Your goal is to win over the affections of your highschool crush, especially Shiori, but that plays out as more of a framing device for things like going to the movies, taking tests, joining a club, traveling abroad, etc. There is an entire RPG combat system as well as riffs on Konami's own Track & Field series, both of which only nominally play into the whole dating angle. I love how all-encompassing it is as a cute, larger-than-life simulation of the highschool experience rather than strictly about dating.

Also, a huge advantage to this game is how quickly time goes by. Later games are slowed waaaay down with more complicated animations, while this cycles through weeks at a breezy clip. This goes a loooooong way in making replays that much more appealing.