Alan Wake

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

I've had a chance to play a bit more of it now and I have to say it's one of those games that frustrates me because I can see how good it could have been if it weren't for some poor design decisions.

As I mentioned in the Mommy Day thread, the game looks fantastic.  The night time levels are very well done.  Wandering through the forests of the Pacific Northwest at night is creepy, tense, and filled with forboding.  It's a shame that the "horror", once it shows up, is anti-climatic.  The game really shows its console roots in that the levels are pretty small, mostly linear, and use a checkpoint save system that seems pretty arbitrary and overly forgiving. 

Horror, like comedy, is pretty subjective and this just doesn't do it for me.  I find games that slowly build up tension and play on your fears with sounds, brief glimpses of something in the shadows, and only rarely come at you full on are much more likely to unnerve me than the constant boogeyman jumping out of the shadows to attack style of games.  Alan Wake is more of the latter.  The game throws far too many of the baddies at you and there is really no variety in them other than the weapons they carry.  One might have an axe while another has a knife or a sickle.  They are all prone to the same weaknesses and can be defeated in the same way, so the game becomes an exercise in repetition.  Futher, the game liberally sprinkles supplies throughout each level so you never feel like you need to decide if you should try to risk it and run from some of the baddies in order to conserve ammo or batteries. Supposedly secret caches abound and can be easily spotted as the "invisible" paint used to mark them fluoresces under your flashlight beam.  The action just becomes reflexive.  Move into the woods, see baddies, shine light on them, shoot them, move to cache, resupply, flee big mob of baddies, reach checkpoint, turn on big light to drive off mob.  Repeat, repeat, repeat.

The story borrows a lot from Stephen King's life and books as well as John Carpenter's movie In the Mouthsof Madness.  You play a horror writer whose works may be coming true.  Or you may be just stuck in a nightmare.  You find copies of your manuscripts hidden throughout each level and reading each page can reveal clues about the level or explain the backstory.  Again, consolitis rears its head here and the game throws a lot of pointless "achievement"challenges at you.  Try to find 100 coffee thermoses!  Knock over 100 soup cans!  Collect all the manuscript pages!  It really takes you out of the story and  reminds you that you're playing a game.  The problem is taht you can't really just ignore the pages and play through the game as the story is very disjointed and you really need the manuscripts in order to know what's going on much of the time.   That means you've got to backtrack and sniff around for hidden pages and this ruins the pacing and destroys the feeling of being under threat once you've cleared a section of the spooks.   It's kind of disappointing that the writing of the manuscripts is so weak, seeing as how Alan Wake is supposed to be a best selling horror novelist.

Technically, the game is pretty solid.  Runs well with no slowdowns of hiccups for me.  My only issue is with key bindings.  As a lefty, I like to rebind my keys to the numpad.  I usually use the "/" as my reload key.  Every time I start the game, I have to remap this one key as the game seems to forget its the numpad / I want to use and not the once next to the period key.


I know this comes across as a pretty negative review, but that's only because I can see how much more this game could have been with a little bit better design and some removal of the gamey elements.  I wouldn't recommend paying full price, but if you like horror games, it's worth the $15 they're asking for on Steam or GOG.

[eyebiter]

Notice Alan Wake is 75% on Steam this weekend.

[Gusington]

^Yeah I just viewed the trailer and was thinking about getting it before SDR poopooed in my coco puffs.

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

For the price it's at now, it's worth it Gus.  It's not a bad game by any means, it just could've been so much more.  The graphics are great and the levels are very atmospheric.  The only two real drags on it are the combat mechanics (too much combat and no real variety to it.  You defeat every single thing the same way) and the gotta-collect-em-all achievement stuff.  You can easily ignore the coffee thermoses and stacks of tin cans, but missing out on the manuscript pages means you don't get the whole back story and I am too OCD to let that slide, so I ran around every nook and cranny on each level to ensure I found them.  Never did find them all though.

[Gusington]

I'm sure I would like it a lot but my backlog of games is winning out. I just got bored of Civ V literally 10 minutes ago and now I am thinking of beginning Witcher 2 next. If I didn't also have Diablo III, Skyrim, Thief III and Deus Ex to play [or replay in some cases]...I would get Alan Wake right now.