Alan Wake

Posted by Steve on June 24, 2010 Leave a comment (1) Go to comments

Abut a month ago I made this post to Twitter:

Me: Alan wake is a “psychological action thriller”. Sarah: That’s code for “scary as shit!”

Thus began my decent into the darkness that claimed Alan Wake, the latest story driven thriller on the Xbox 360. I had decided to hold off on playing Alan Wake due to my obsession with Red Dead Redemption. Since RDR took quite a while to get through the story, it delayed my run of AW. Of course once I finished AW I had planned to write up my review but my house was set upon by a plague of darkness on it’s own with everyone catching some sort of head cold. This leaves me behind on quite a few posts, but I will do my best to catch up.

So, Alan Wake lives up to it’s tag line (and thusly, Sarah’s translation). The main story gets played out as a kind of a Television episodic story that is broken up into 6 parts. Even though I spread it out over the course of the month, the actual game play was exactly 6 days. I did this because I really didn’t want to cut off an episode mid way. Each episode was approximately 2-3 hours of game play, so in hind sight, the whole game was just about 15ish hours of play time. Some of you would think that is short but trust me, the story is more than worth it.

The story is where Alan Wake really shines. Most games that come out these days have amazing graphics, outstanding music, etc, etc. The story is really one part where many games loose it just a little. Case in point, I loved the story in Red Dead Redemption, but there were enough holes, and missing elements that, as a player, I missed out on. With Alan Wake, the whole game was very linear so that the string the player follows is the story the developers want to tell. When the story is done, you may want for more, but it’s not from holes in the story, it’s from the story being so compelling that you want more of it.

Ok, Spoiler time, if you don’t want to know, don’t read any further.

Alan Wake is a troubled writer who, with his wife, vacations to a lake side town of Bright Falls. Unfortunately, the town has it’s own dramatic flare. A haunted lake claims Alan’s wife as it’s hostage and forces Alan to write infusing his story with it’s own powers of darkness to gain strength. Alan escapes the story by writing himself into it (I know, it’s weird but it does make sense, kinda) so that he can rescue his wife. You spend the bulk of the game racing through town trying to learn about the whereabouts of your wife and following a trail of dropped manuscript pages that “you” wrote for the story. The really mind blowing meta comes from the last two episodes where you learn that Alan’s Father was trapped by the same lake and forced to write a story that leads to Alan coming to the lake, to get trapped, and forced to write a story where he encounters his father’s story…. I’m going to stop there before my head explodes.

Now, as for the likes and dislikes:

Bright Falls (Likes)

Story – The story was so well written that you really felt like you were playing out a good novel or enjoying a really well written TV show.

Ambiance – In order to set the mood for the story, the ambiance in the town flows with the story both for daytime and night time.

Narration – I loved that Alan was Narrating the whole story as I played it out. It added more of that “I am in a novel” feeling.

Barry – Your agent comes to “rescue” you in Bright Falls and ends up tagging along on most of the ride through the story. His comedy relief is a great add to the whole experience.

Night Falls (Dislikes)

Lip Sync – This was the BIGGEST distraction of the game. The voicing is good by the sync with the character models became such a distraction that I had to force myself to not watch the character faces during cut scenes because it was detracting from the game.

Scavenger Hunt – One of the things you have to do in the story is to hunt around and find various scraps of the manuscript. Hidden along the way there are also a number of Coffee Thermoses, weapon stashes, and radio/TV shows you can tune into. The problem I had with this is that I would walk into an area and start searching the areas that were more off the path of the story in order to try and find these things. In some respect it’s cool, but in many it’s just a distraction.

Over all I felt Alan Wake was an amazing game. I can’t wait for the next two episodes that are due out as DLC soon. Hopefully the game won’t suffer in numbers due to being released opposite Red Dead Redemption. Go Buy It!!