"Alan Wake" is like watching atmospheric pulpy episodic television (somewhere in between "Lost" and "Harper's Isand") punctuated by occasional bursts of repetitious gameplay. The story itself is creepily serpentine and I was intrigued that a video game was featuring an alcoholic novelist as its protag, and setting itself in the misty woods of the Pacific Northwest.
As a game, "Alan Wake" doesn't really evolve into anything really that noteworthy. It boasts derivative gameplay and gets bogged down by too many slithery cut scenes, and lots of running through the dark with a flashlight. The gameplay it builds out of its beautiful atmosphere doesn't ever spin into anything compelling enough to keep one happily addicted (unlike, say, the superb "Arkham Asylum", which expertly used its characterizations and setting to play against one another, creating a brilliant and unique psychological arcade).
Alan himself is also kind of a jerk. It's such a glaring mistake on the part of the developers, that it's almost comical. An arrogant and uptight hero? Ok. I'm sure he'll loosen up in further sequels as Alan's saga continues (which is promised at the end of the end credits, ho hum) but I just kind of wanted to pour him a gin and tonic and give him a bus ticket.
Alan is on vacation and then both his cabin and his wife go missing. Pages of a novel he doesn't remember writing are scattered everywhere, their pages describing future events, making reading all these badly-written paragraphs both superfluous and tedious. There are possessed diner waitresses and an old lady behind a black veil. TVs in abandoned cabins glare with odd "Twin Peaks" style sequences that don't really ever add up. Come to think of it, for a GAME, there is an odd amount of both watching and reading, and not very much PLAYING.
The puzzles the game puts in front of you are equivalent to a mouse running around a wheel, I mean you could be blindfolded, you could be half asleep, and solve these suckers. And then there are "The Taken". The Taken...
Just wanted to say that again. They are Grant Wood style farmer zombies dressed in LL Bean garb that like to throw axes and talk in verrrry deeeep voices making them reeaaally scccarrry. You point your flashlight at them which "weakens" them and then you shoot them. Again and again. And again and again and again. They get really irritating. You get like 3 different boring ole guns which alternate back and forth. You get some flares and flashbangs which they don't take to. You get a couple of different flashlights which have no discernible difference. I liked that the game has a generous checkpoint system and at times allows you to operate a motor vehicle, but even that gets repetitive.
The plot itself is sort of watered down Dean Koontz. And parts of it really go nowhere (who was that creature cut out of "Bioshock" that kept telling me to go towards the light?) But I won't give anything away, not that I'd really be depriving you. The game is fun and short, just nothing extraordinary, considering all the advance buzz and the eons they took to develop this. There are some glitches (I had to re-start the checkpoint several times when Alan would get caught in a crevice or trapped in a ditch).
"Alan Wake" might make an exciting series one day, as they develop this further; but for now it's pretty, but a bit lazy, all told.Get more detail about
Alan Wake.
