Alan Wake II is a cool game. From the opening act, you know you're in for an interesting narrative experience. The presentation is unique and aggressively stylistic. The atmosphere is thick, in both cutscenes and gameplay. The general vibe is unparalleled, at least compared to other games that came out in 2023.

Alan Wake II is a video game though. And as a video game, it often misses the mark. Too often. For starters, the game wants to be Silent Hill so bad bro. It often comes close, but more often, it's kneecapped by a lot of design decisions that run counter to what made those games fun to play.

The differences are manifold. But it boils down to two major contributors in my opinion: exploration, and campaign length. In Silent Hill and similar horror games from the PS2 era, exploration was limited to urban areas, where the level geometry wasn't often more complex than a few slopes and some waist-high walls here or there. In contrast, much of Alan Wake II is set in heavily forested areas. How is this a bad thing, you ask? Invisible walls and uneven terrain. Everywhere. You see that bush in front of you? It's an unscalable wall now. You see that three-foot drop? Well, good luck jumping down from it, because the developers neglected to put an interact prompt in front of it. These scenarios compound and multiply throughout the entire game to make traversal and general exploration a massive chore that takes me out of the experience entirely. Earlier horror games didn't suffer from this because the levels were primarily designed with ease of exploration in mind, rather than photorealism. The first Alan Wake didn't suffer from this either because the developers were dedicated to abolishing any and all invisible walls in that game and also allowed the character to jump. Ironically, that felt magnitudes more immersive than the sequel's approach.

The second is length. It's self-explanatory, really. The average Silent Hill or classic Resident Evil didn't run longer than 6-8 hours. I think there's a good reason for that too, because the puzzle-box nature of level progression in those games is not suited to longer run times. Alan Wake II adopts the same progression, find the right key to the right lock in a different part of the map to progress, but it's spread out over a 20+ hour campaign, and it starts to drag because of it. To be fair, you do more things in this game than you do in older survival horror games - like talking to NPC's, putting together Saga's case board and exploring her criminal profiles, and changing plot and world details with Alan, but the novelty of these new mechanics also wear out over the game's bloated run-time.

Also true to classic survival horror trappings, the combat in the game is dog. Except, unlike in those games, you can tell Alan Wake II's combat tries to be something more, but ends up falling short. Enemies are far too spongy and much too prone to leaving your line of sight. Melee attacks often don't do anything meaningful and the flashlight mechanic is completely overhauled to be something that's much worse than what was there in the first Alan Wake. Now, flashlight boosting is all but mandatory to use on enemies, and often unreliable. Gone are the days when strategic positioning was encouraged by giving a passive flashlight beam chip damage capability. Gone are the days when levels made creative use of light to destroy enemies. Gone are the days when you could load one bullet into your revolver at a time for a nice risk-reward interplay between player and enemy. This game at times seems dedicated to abandon all the creative ideas the first game had in favor of more standardized, often underwhelming, third-person shooter tropes.

At least the story and presentation are great though. And all negatives aside, Alan Wake II is still a cool game. (It's not a loop, it's a spiral. OOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHH.)