No Spoilers
I really really wanted to love Alan Wake II, but ironically, I feel a little bit like Alan himself seeing the wave of critical praise this game has garnered. I just can't seem to see the beautiful, magnificent meta-textual masterpiece that everyone else is enamored with, and am left in the dark... place.
In concept, this is a game made exactly for my taste, but many of the executions fall unfortunately short of the promise showed by the premise. Every cool idea was only explored in the shallowest way, and the meta-textual element got more annoying as it went along. I'm a coffee-drinking, Pacific-Northwest-living, horror-media consuming freak, and even I could see right through the paper-thin facades.
The game's visuals are absolutely arresting and the mix of live action and CG graphics are interesting enough to almost be worth the price of admission. The survival gameplay is alright and inoffensive, although nowhere close to the standard set by Resident Evil 4 earlier this year. The star of the show is clearly the narrative but I never felt truly captivated by any character or theme. I can easily tell the story wants to be about art and death and the nature of storytelling itself; perhaps a million other things could also fall under Alan Wake II's thematic banner. I'm not allergic to this kind of thing either, and am an avid fan of all the Lynch and Film Noir inspirations that Remedy so gleefully remind you they take cues from. Alan Wake II forgets that the cool trippy metatextual stuff only works when built over a base of truthful and emotional storytelling. By the time they smashed the fourth wall and the author was well beyond dead, I didn't have any interest in solving the crime of who killed him.
Sad! One of my most anticipated of 2023. I hope others enjoyed it more than I did, and it seems that they have. Despite my criticisms, the one thing you can't say about Alan Wake II is that it's phoned in, and I appreciate that. Remedy set out to make the game that they wanted to make, and although it failed for me, I'm happy that they did.
I really really wanted to love Alan Wake II, but ironically, I feel a little bit like Alan himself seeing the wave of critical praise this game has garnered. I just can't seem to see the beautiful, magnificent meta-textual masterpiece that everyone else is enamored with, and am left in the dark... place.
In concept, this is a game made exactly for my taste, but many of the executions fall unfortunately short of the promise showed by the premise. Every cool idea was only explored in the shallowest way, and the meta-textual element got more annoying as it went along. I'm a coffee-drinking, Pacific-Northwest-living, horror-media consuming freak, and even I could see right through the paper-thin facades.
The game's visuals are absolutely arresting and the mix of live action and CG graphics are interesting enough to almost be worth the price of admission. The survival gameplay is alright and inoffensive, although nowhere close to the standard set by Resident Evil 4 earlier this year. The star of the show is clearly the narrative but I never felt truly captivated by any character or theme. I can easily tell the story wants to be about art and death and the nature of storytelling itself; perhaps a million other things could also fall under Alan Wake II's thematic banner. I'm not allergic to this kind of thing either, and am an avid fan of all the Lynch and Film Noir inspirations that Remedy so gleefully remind you they take cues from. Alan Wake II forgets that the cool trippy metatextual stuff only works when built over a base of truthful and emotional storytelling. By the time they smashed the fourth wall and the author was well beyond dead, I didn't have any interest in solving the crime of who killed him.
Sad! One of my most anticipated of 2023. I hope others enjoyed it more than I did, and it seems that they have. Despite my criticisms, the one thing you can't say about Alan Wake II is that it's phoned in, and I appreciate that. Remedy set out to make the game that they wanted to make, and although it failed for me, I'm happy that they did.