Behold, the first open world Garten of Banban. That’s only half a joke. Every Banban after… I think 3 has placed everything around a central hub you continually return to, and this time said hub is like, this fuck-huge city with NPCs walking around, where the core areas you go to are landmarks within and such. Honestly when I entered it for the first time my immediate thoughts were ‘oh god they’re gonna make me search for a keycard in this haystack aren’t they?' but… by and large the game is rather benign about its padding. Not like it isn’t there, or anything — the game is evidently still on its quest to run out the steam refund timer by taking as long as possible to beat — but, as opposed to the endless hallways, forced backtracking and stupid platforming segments of previous Banban games, at least here things are stretched out in terms of things you can actually interact with. Minigames you have to do three times when just once could be enough. Points where you’re told to do something, you do it, and then the game moves the goalpost right when you think you’re allowed to progress. It’s still not great, mind you, but it's at least more interactive, and a bit less blatant about its intentions. If it continues down that road, then… look, it’s never going to be good, but at least an upward trajectory is… something?

And, admittedly, this is a step up. If not quite a return to... ‘form,’ it's at least trying to scurry back up to where it once was, like somebody rushing past all the enemies in a souls-like to get back to the boss as quickly as possible. There’s a genuine attempt at an atmosphere here — a focus on audiovisual elements, that… if still not making the game scary, are at least somewhat striking. There’s mood lighting. There are cockroaches scurrying across the floor. There’s background music. Creatures slamming against the walls as you’re exploring an area. There’s this one room with a wet floor where you see the corpses of these things hanging from the roof as you walk towards a silhouette in the distance and if they went with a higher saturation light it honestly would’ve worked. It’s not much, but it’s an improvement, and it gives some segments a bit more character than they’d have otherwise. Gameplay wise… it’s rather basic — and I wouldn’t say it’s like Garten of Banban 4 where it’s… honestly fun at points — but there’s some highlights. There’s a neat chase sequence where you not only have to parkour from building to building, but also figure out where exactly you need to actually go in the heat of the moment. There’s this section where you basically take an exam on how well you recognize some of the characters that was honestly a bit stressful? Maybe I'm easy to impress, or eager to be impressed, but while it’s not back on the upward curve — not yet — it's at least headed in the correct direction. Or something approximate to it. It's better than Garten of Banban 6, that's what I'm saying.

Unfortunately, there’s some new stuff here which… decisively does not make the game better for its inclusion. The drone, once again, is given an upgrade. And, once again, it’s horrible: now you can physically become the drone and fly it in first person and it controls exactly as well as you think it does. Hitting, or even just brushing a wall locks you in place for several seconds. The animation for this also forces the drone to recoil downwards, and if doing so should accidentally cause it to clip into something? Back to the start. Which is merciful, of course, but it makes even the simple act of going through a window a herculean task. Not even going into how the game will still have the drone in the last place you’d used it when you enter drone POV, forcing you to either back out and recover it or force the drone over vast swaths of map level just to get it where it needs to be. And also not even going into how one time I clipped into the wall and sequence broke the drone into another section entirely. And also there’s this one point of the game where it’s- where it’s literally just the baby chase from Resident Evil Village??? And yet they don’t understand what made the baby chase as standout as it was? The core of what makes that whole section work so well in RE8 is how simple it is: you see baby, you run back to where you came from, you pick one of the many hiding places the room provides you, and then you wait until the baby leaves. You’re not likely to die bar you actively attempting to throw yourself into the baby’s maw, which is then to its benefit: you don’t lose that initial impact of the baby just appearing through having to watch the cutscene again. Garten of Banban 7 fucks up in this regard: not only does the game telegraph hard that something’s about to barge into the room (where part of what makes RE8’s rendition work so well is how it happens out of nowhere) but there’s a full puzzle you have to do which involves summoning the drone and making it push buttons as you leap off of tables, all while you continually have to juke the baby around tables and rooms, all the while never quite telegraphing to the player what they’re actually meant to be doing. I didn’t even realize just what made the baby section work as well as it does until I saw this fuck it up, but I guess that’s one way of showing how imitation can be flattery. Sometimes you make it clear how the original is so much better.

Oh, yeah, sidenote, that rooftop chase I mentioned a couple paragraphs up? It literally begins with the threat right in front of you, and the area you need to initially get to… right behind it. I’m still waiting for that Euphoric Bros. masocore platformer, honestly. I still think that’s their true calling.

Aside from those notes… it’s a Garten of Banban game, I guess. A lot of the highs and lows are things I’ve already talked about previously covering the series. Its attempts at being scary, its attempts at delivering the Deep Lore are laughable at best, but in the midst of all this is this honest-to-god soap opera plotline which is honestly incredible to watch unfold, bolstered by a penchant for humour, of catching the player off guard, which… at least works more often than it doesn’t, even if here I noticed a couple jokes repeated from previous episodes. The voice acting remains as gloriously inconsistent as it's always been: pretty decent performances placed in conjunction with one of the developers speaking in monotone while constantly bumping the mike placed in conjunction with this... guy from Boston? guy with an Irish accent? desperately trying and failing to sound Australian. Gameplay wise, the modus operandi still seems to be padding, padding, padding: through making it take as long as possible to get from A to B, to having puzzles where the barrier to progress is “what am I even doing”, to hiding objectives where no player would assume they’d be. I’ve gotten the sense, perhaps, that this stretching out is on at least a little bit of a macro level as well, padding out this story as long as possible to make more games to get more $$$ from the kiddies who’re unironically eating this up, and Garten of Banban 7... does not beat those allegations — ending the plotline I thought the series was going down and cliffhanging on a completely new one. I know a non-zero amount of people here dropped after 6 for that reason, but if there’s actually an endgoal to all of this, if the games remain at least interesting in how they flounder then I’m still willing to keep going. I guess we’ll have to wait and see next time. 4/10.

I’ve never watched Twin Peaks. Not for any particular reason, mind you — I’m bad at watching episodic things and there sure are a lot of them out there — though, given just how many things it’s influenced, perhaps I should get around to it. If, in part, so I can see just how much it influences Alan Wake. It’s not like the game is lost to me just because I didn’t do the required reading — it’s not solely beholden on its references, and even if it was it still draws from other things (like Stephen King, House of Leaves, The Twilight Zone, etc.) that are far more in my wheelhouse — but it does feel like I’m missing a piece of the puzzle, knowing that it’s an influence yet not knowing how it impacts the work in question. Is it merely how the game is set in a small town with a dark secret? Is it the cast of offbeat, often kooky, often exaggerated townspeople? Is it the way the game often calls its framing into account: how it frequently calls into question whether the events depicted are real, or representative of something else entirely? I can guess, but I can only guess — I don’t even know whether that last one is something Twin Peaks even does. I suppose it doesn’t super matter, but, like, usually when I go through something I wanna learn alllllllll about it. And in the case of something like Alan Wake — where it’s operating on multiple different narrative layers, where it’s in some ways actively seeking analysis and interpretation from the audience — I liked it enough to feel like I should maybe do my homework. At least before I delve into the series further.

I’ll start with the easiest thing to talk about, if, mainly, for the sake of getting a foothold: I wasn’t expecting this to be as combat-heavy as it was. I knew there was combat, of course — that the game carried a balance between walking-sim-esque segments where you explored the town/chatted with the inhabitants vs. pretty direct gameplay segments where you fought against The Darkness — but I didn’t think, going in, that the ratio would veer so heavily towards the latter. It’s fun, though! It’s certainly much more action-oriented than survival horror — much like a Resident Evil 4, even down to the way your flashlight functions as a laser pointer for your weapons — yet sticks the landing much more than a non-zero amount of its contemporaries do. What I think sells it is its simplicity. Near every encounter comes down to shining some sort of light on them to remove their defences before using some sort of weapon to kill them dead. You don’t even need to aim for the head — bodyshots do the same damage, it’s just mostly a matter of getting them weak in the first place, making sure you have enough ammo on hand, then letting rip. There are remarkably few enemy types (you have your normal guy, your tough guy, your fast guy, your chainsaw guy, but nothing much more than that) — the diversity primarily lies in the type of encounter: are you getting intercepted from point A to point B? Do you have to battle your way through the hoard? Do you have to hold out against the horde? There are a lot of different situations you find yourself in, and through that a lot of situational tools that make each encounter feel unique, from your environment, to the things around you, to the tools you have with you.

Which, speaking of? By and large? Fun to use! Your pistol is shockingly capable: it’s accurate, it has a fun kick to it, it kills enemies in three hits, but if you don’t have the time or the ammo, you can instead use the shotgun or hunting rifle to obliterate the enemy where they stand. If that’s not enough, if you’re in the middle of being overwhelmed… man I love love love how the game just gives you its equivalent of the rocket launcher. And lets you choose how to manage its resources! Do you choose to use it now or later? If you do it now, do you know if you’re going to get more ammo for it later? If you don’t use it now, do you know if what’s down the road is even worth using it later? Of course, you can bypass all these problems by just finding enough treasure chests to make sure you have ammo forever, which…

Leads me to another thing I love: how much the game rewards exploration. The environments you explore are huge, and oftentimes have much more than the player ever has to cover. You can keep going down the path you’re meant to, and the game’s compass (once you notice it) does a good job at delineating what’s “the path” and what’s comparatively more optional, but should you want to look around, you’re rewarded in a variety of ways. If you want a little more extra story content, you can find radios lying around, pages you can read, even little Twilight Zone knockoff TV episodes the game allows you to watch in full. If you want gameplay advantages for going the extra mile, the chests/lootboxes give you more flare gun ammo and flashbangs than you’re ever going to need - and often give you one of the shotgun/hunting rifle before the level would otherwise let you have it. And if you just like exploring for exploring’s sake, you can sate Alan Wake’s addiction to coffee by finding it in the most unlikely of places. The game lets you go above and beyond, as well. Near the beginning, you’re at the bottom of a chasm, a rope bridge across from the cabin you’ve been heading to. You can go across like the game directs you to… or you can instead climb all the way back up the cliff… just to get a coffee thermos. You never have to go up there, and you never get the chance to go up there again. The game, in general, really encourages you to go off the beaten path - offering multiple incentives to entice you to do so, but not only that, the game and the level design lets you go to so many nooks, so many side routes, so many places you never otherwise need to go just to facilitate all these collectables. The world is way bigger than it has to be. To some extent, that’s commendable.

And it’s so fascinating how much focus there is on how it plays, given, ostensibly, that it's a game that’s… primarily all about its story. Perhaps it’s a remnant of when Alan Wake was initially meant to be an open-world game with a day/night cycle — much like, of all things, Deadly Premonition — though this then makes the result… feel somewhat imbalanced, where often it feels like you’re going through looooong gameplay segments and the narrative is being left by the wayside. Not to say the latter isn’t effective, though! As… little as it feels like we spend our time in the town, I liked the glimpses of it that we got! Specifically I loved a lot of the bit characters/NPCs. They lean a little off-beat, a little eccentric, but yet never so much that they don’t feel like real people — more in that sense of, like, that one person from your hometown everybody knows who's a liiiiiiitle bit off their rocker. They’re cute, they’re fun, and I like how they turn Alan into a straight man for whatever antics they force upon him — waitress Rose's obsession with him immediately blowing his cover the moment he enters town, or FBI Hemingway's referring to him solely by other American writers. There’s other little things I like too: the Twilight Zone parodies you find on TVs around the place are fairly on point (and made me realize just how much it kind of is a more adult Goosebumps episode lmao), and the radio shows do a lot to let the world around you feel lived in, and let the writing seep in even during sections where you’re just traversing from one place to another. The manuscript pages are fun for this too: sometimes they recap what just happened, sometimes they tell you what’s about to happen, sometimes they let you know what’s happening beyond your immediate scope, and sometimes they’re just really cute bits of narrative, like the one where Alan picks up a page about him picking up a page and it enters a recursion loop. Every person you talk to, every sign you walk past, every little thing around you helps build up the world around you. To some extent this game could be a case study in how much the micro-level stuff matters in building up a greater picture.

On a macro level — the overarching narrative — it’s… certainly ambitious, but ultimately I reckon sticks the landing. The game draws from pulp novels: not just from the novels themselves, but also how the personal lives of the authors would impact their work — how a lot of these novels had writers/some-form-of-self-insert as the main character, Stephen King not even remembering writing Cujo because he was on so much coke at the time, etc. It’s metatextual, as much a story about itself, and the writing process, as much as it is about a story about Alan Wake fighting against The Taken. The in-universe manuscript the plot of the game is forced to follow is as much of a first draft as anything written, in, say, NaNoWriMo, and the game has so much fun with that: plot holes, kibble, deux ex machinae are present yet accounted for. The story will often turn on a dime, often into stock plots or cop-out endings, much in the way someone would if they’re writing to get words out with no idea of where they’re actually going. Characters or things appear, are professed as important, then will drop out of the plot entirely the moment their scene ends. Even some of the kooky characters will make sense from that lens — an author having to write something fast rather than write it well, relying on cliches that seem much less true to life once those characters start walking and talking in a 3D space. I also enjoy how much the writer makes his way into the work. I’m… not necessarily familiar with Sam Lake’s works, nor do I know much of Remedy as a whole, but I like what I see: the way Alan’s attempt at writing something other than a noir thriller results in a total nightmare of a creation process, how the game stops at a halt so that the in-universe version of a band whose members Sam Lake is friends with can play a few of their songs. To some extent, every work of writing has a bit of the author in it — their experiences, their way of thinking, the specific things they’re a fan of — and often by going through these works one gets to learn about the one who created it along the way. Metatext (or, rather, metafiction) often brings this relationship to the forefront through its continual self-analysis, and Alan Wake, narratively, shines at its brightest on this front, presenting a story that is as much about the process of writing as it is about its literal events, and in turn letting us see just a little about the mind behind it.

There’s… a couple things that bring this game down, mostly on the gameplay end. The game’s use of vehicles leaves… something to be desired: they’re often required for traversal/combat within certain sections, yet trying to use them for their intended purpose is oftentimes clunky, accidentally getting the car stuck on a surface when trying to U-turn it in the direction of the enemies, accidentally drifting it off a cliff trying to make a simple turn. Not even going into how easily it is for the camera to make you motion sick going into certain cars. While I do know that survival horror isn’t meant to be ‘fun’ by definition, a lot of the sections where the game takes away your items I felt were rather the lowlight, often feeling as if they were total crapshoots as to whether I could run through before I got wombo combo’d to death. Some levels — again, perhaps, because of the game’s initial premise as open world — feel rather too long, and often seem to be there to fill time, more than anything. The final level, in particular, has almost nothing story-wise between beginning and end, and while you can pick up pages/listen to Alan’s thoughts the plot doesn’t actually progress until you’ve reached the final section, leaving like, two hours of combat for combat’s sake in-between. I guess it’s a good thing they were able to use all those assets from when it was originally open world? It just… maybe could’ve benefited from being a little more streamlined. Or at least, in the final level’s case, having a bit more between A and B.

As a whole, though, that doesn’t fully detract from near everything this game has going for it. From how well the gameplay does the action horror formula — doing a lot from what little it has, and just from how much the game world encourages and rewards random exploration — to how well the story functions both as a metafiction and as a narrative in its own right, to even the most minor of things: I legit did the Leo pointing meme when I heard, of all Nick Cave songs, Up Jumped the Devil playing on a radio in the woods. It’s not quite a tour de force, and it was much more of a cult classic than a blockbuster when it released (given it released right next to Red Dead Redemption), but… to an extent, that feels appropriate. Something that goes in as many different directions as this does I think works best as an unsung darling. Besides, Twin Peaks, as beloved as it was, didn’t do too well in the ratings either.

…I think. Don’t quote me on that.

(8/10.)

From a game I remember fondly to… a game I don’t remember at all. The next stretch of games here are almost back-to-back-to-back in terms of how often I returned to them, how representative they were of my memories frequenting Nitrome.com, and then there’s also Magneboy, which… I probably played, but certainly not enough to leave any sort of impression, especially compared to what’s around it. Not to say it doesn’t compare to them, though! This is more of a straight puzzle game compared to anything else (so far) in Nitrome’s oeuvre, but it’s neat to see just how well their tendencies translate from one genre to another. Your goal for each level is to use your power of magnetism to get from the start square to the end square, but the number of things you interact with to fulfil that end varies level by level. From tiles that you pull towards you, from tiles that you pull towards them, to tiles that create bridges across the level, to portals that you can enter and/or send blocks through, there’s a real ebb and flow to the way the game handles all its disparate mechanics. I especially like how the first level to introduce a mechanic will usually take it easy on you… then immediately throw something much harder, giving you the basics of the mechanic before asking you how that mechanic fits in with everything else in the game. It’s decently cerebral, manages to avoid the typical puzzle game trap of becoming too complicated for its own good, and that feeling when you finally realize what you’re meant to do and complete the last couple of steps in quick succession is unparalleled. It’s probably the first 50-level Nitrome game where that length… almost feels justified. I’m… a bit unsure whether this game really needed enemies/a health bar — they were often just kind of an annoyance at best and felt rather superfluous to the systems already there — but aside from that this is a solid way to spend an hour. I can’t quite remember how many more puzzle games Nitrome did after this — I don’t think they really started popping up until the year after this — but for a first-ish foray this isn’t half bad. Can’t wait to see more.