After something like 8 years in development, Remedy Entertainment released Alan Wake this year to fairly exceptional reviews. In it, writer Alan Wake, suffering from writer's block for two years, decides to go on vacation to Twin Pe-- I mean, Bright Falls, and relive every book Stephen King has written in the last thirty or so years. His wife is kidnapped by a nameless unknowable evil (cool), people are possessed and you have to burn the darkness away by hitting it with your flashlight before shooting them (sort of cool, mostly repetitive), possessed objects FLYING AT YOUR FACE (pretty cool at first... slightly spoiled since they then point out the Stephen King connection before you can catch your breath), and of course, a writer finding pages describing terrible things about to happen to him in a book written by him that he never wrote (::puff, puff, sharp inhale:: "What if, like, we were all characters in a Stephen King book?"::kaffkaffkaffkaff::).
Before I say a few nice things and end on a high note, I must first indulge my petty gripes, like the fact that a restaurant busboy dolly is clearly far too sturdy for a full grown man to just *push out of his fucking way* or anything. Also, the collecting missions. At one point in the development cycle of the game it was apparently going to be more sandboxy, but developers scrapped that in favor of having more control over the storyline and pacing. However, they awesomely (sarcasm.) left in over 250 items for the player to collect, ranging from the pointless (100 coffee thermoses, essentially the "hidden packages") to the vaguely interesting and mildly story related (radios and TVs, as well as the aforementioned pages describing what's about to happen in the plot), to the actually helpful (30 hidden caches of equipment and weapons). And this might be shallow and petty, but fuck you, there is an achievement for watching a specific TV in the game, it's the only TV that isn't story related or one of the awesome Twilight Zone parody episodes scattered about, no, it's the TV that plays, I shit you not, advertisements for their sponsors. Verizon and someone else.
One last thing about the story and the importance of proofreading: the pages that Alan picks up from the book he never wrote switch, seemingly at random, between first and third person. I mean... seriously? He wasn't writing Ulysses. No, that's just poor design. And I beat the game in a sitting and a half, which is just too short. It should take me more than a weekend to get all the play out of a game.
"But," I hear you wail, "all those other people really liked it! Doesn't it have any good qualities?"
I will thank you to let me determine the pace of this review myself. I was just getting to the good points, of which there are several. As mentioned above, there are several Twilight Zone parodies (more like homages, really) found on some of the TVs scattered about under the title "Bright Springs," complete with Serling-esque narrations and moral lessons. Also, as the less-than-amusing comic relief character says, the birds go "all Hitchcock on you" at several points, creating a really harrowing experience for brief periods of time as you try to figure out from where the flock is going to swoop at you (hint: it's always the other direction). And the pacing is really good, actually. The game is presented as episodes of a show, so presumably the next game would be "Season 2" (and hopefully longer than 6 episodes). The story is somewhat weighed down by the Kingness of it all, but the ending is open enough (and I am interested enough to play the DLC and see what happens next) that it could go to some really interesting places.
So all in all, not a bad game. Just definitely not the groundbreaking psychological thriller experience you might be looking for.
Bonuses!
+ .5 - for the music selection, especially playing "Space Oddity" by David Bowie over the end credits.
+.25 - for Lovecraftian horror. And for namedropping Lovecraft and, more subtly (really though, good on ya) August Derleth
-1 - for introducing characters solely for the purpose of killing them in the next scene and possessing them to attack you. This is not effective horror strategy. We should care about the fate of these people in this small town where everyone knows everyone else.
-.5 - for including driving for no discernible reason beyond "Well, we wrote all this code back when it was going to be a sandbox."
-.25 - I had another really witty put-down, but I can't remember what it is, so I'm going to take the quarter point anyway.
Total: 7/10. Rent it, enjoy it, put down some unnamed evil. Just don't expect Max Payne levels of greatness.
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