After going through the first Alan Wake again I should’ve known, but my tempered enjoyment of Control, all the high praise and the new style in the trailers convinced me to give this a try. Honestly I just don’t know what everyone is seeing in this? Are we just that starved for games going slightly out of the ordinary that this gets praised as a masterwork?
The game certainly is a huge step up from AW1. It has a lot of style but there’s still not much substance behind it. Alan Wake is ostensibly about writing and literature, yet not that well-read.
Remedy has grand ambition and clearly some talent there, I’d love to see that be refined into something more focused. Get some writers involved that really know what they’re doing and are prepared to have something to say. I can’t help feeling like this would work better as a TV show. Not just because of the cool, fun live action scenes, but because it genuinely feels plotted like one, and it barely does anything with the medium it’s in.
There’s also a strange contradiction where Remedy seems afraid to use cutscenes, but still relies on that structure to tell its story, having both exposition and dramatic moments play out by having characters stand and talk to each other while the player can only pace back and forth.
I do want to commend the effort to have a stronger art direction and build an atmosphere. The live action scenes and some of the theatre sequence are genuinely interesting, but out side of that there’s a lot of the same back and forth, walking about and fighting the same old enemies.
The game certainly is a huge step up from AW1. It has a lot of style but there’s still not much substance behind it. Alan Wake is ostensibly about writing and literature, yet not that well-read.
Remedy has grand ambition and clearly some talent there, I’d love to see that be refined into something more focused. Get some writers involved that really know what they’re doing and are prepared to have something to say. I can’t help feeling like this would work better as a TV show. Not just because of the cool, fun live action scenes, but because it genuinely feels plotted like one, and it barely does anything with the medium it’s in.
There’s also a strange contradiction where Remedy seems afraid to use cutscenes, but still relies on that structure to tell its story, having both exposition and dramatic moments play out by having characters stand and talk to each other while the player can only pace back and forth.
I do want to commend the effort to have a stronger art direction and build an atmosphere. The live action scenes and some of the theatre sequence are genuinely interesting, but out side of that there’s a lot of the same back and forth, walking about and fighting the same old enemies.