In Review: Alan Wake

I recently finished playing through Alan Wake for the Xbox 360, and have decided to jot down my feelings on the game. Out of the three of you who read this blog, I imagine the subject matter and depth of this post will be of interest to only one of you, so I won’t be offended if the other two of you click away now.

Alan Wake is the latest game from Remedy Entertainment, a Finnish game developer responsible for the very-popular Max Payne series of games. I, however, have never played the Max Payne games, and thus had no idea about what to expect from Alan Wake, aside from finding that the internet at large seems to hold Alan Wake in high esteem.

Upon opening the game’s DVD case, I was presented with an insert thanking me for preordering the game (which I had not done), along with a code for unlocking some additional content as a reward. I entered the code and was subsequently informed that the additional content was not yet available, and I was instead allowed to watch a short “behind the scenes” video, prepared by Remedy Entertainment, telling me how cool Alan Wake apparently is, and why it took them five years to make it.

Upon firing up the game for the first time, you are forced to play through a tutorial level, where the game treats you like you’ve never touched a video game controller before, which is great if you’ve never touched a video game controller before, but I imagine that most of Alan Wake’s target audience will simply find this to be a bit patronizing, if not a waste of time. The tutorial is presented as a nightmare that the main character is having, in which you have to dispatch a few evil guys on your way to a lighthouse, and as far as I can tell, it has no real connection to the rest of the story. I wouldn’t have missed a thing if it had been left out entirely.

The main plot of the game is as follows: Alan Wake, a mega-famous novelist, known for his series of crime thrillers, has been suffering from writers’ block, so he and his wife take a vacation to the Pacific Northwest, where they stay in a cabin that doesn’t actually exist, where, after a contrived argument, Alan storms out of the cabin, the power goes out, and somehow Alan’s nyctophobic wife ends up in the water behind the cabin, prompting Alan to jump in after her, which is when he wakes up in a crashed car, starts finding pages to a book that he wrote but doesn’t remember writing, and sets off on a quest to find his wife while being hunted by both a trigger-happy FBI agent and a supernatural dark force, which takes control of both townsfolk and inanimate objects to attack Alan, who must fight back by shining a flashlight at things. Got it? Good.

Now, admittedly, I’ve gone out of my way to make the plot sound ridiculous; I sort of stopped taking the game seriously at the point during which I found myself fighting (and defeating) an evil front-loading tractor with nothing but a six-inch long flashlight. At times, though, I found it to be genuinely interesting. Remedy did a nice job of playing up the uncertainty about whether or not certain events taking place are real or simply happening in Alan’s mind, which drove me to keep playing to find out what was really going on. In other places, the story is entirely predictable and/or laughable, especially when Alan’s wisecracking agent shows up and drags the plot into slapstick territory, or when your demonic enemies yell things like, “EAT YOUR FRUITS AND VEGETABLES!” before attacking you.

One of my favorite aspects of the game, though, is the way that the plot itself is used as a gameplay mechanic. As it turns out, those aforementioned pages that Alan finds conveniently lying around town describe the very experiences that Alan has as the story unfolds, if that makes sense. It’s kind of meta, but simply put, Alan wrote a story with himself as the protagonist (but doesn’t remember writing it), then the events of the story happen in real life. The neat part about it is that sometimes you’ll find pages from the story that haven’t happened yet, which give you information on how to handle situations that will crop up later in the game. It’s a unique gameplay mechanic that I’ve not seen before and, while kind of a subtle one, I think it helps Alan Wake to stand out from similar games.

One of the main selling-points of the game is that it adds an extra layer to the traditional combat found in other third-person shooters. All of the enemies in the game are protected by a supernatural darkness. To kill the bad guys, you must first shine your flashlight on them for a sufficient period of time to purge them of their evil shield, before proceeding to shoot them with traditional bullets. Alternatively, enemies are quite susceptible to flashbang grenades, which is great news, considering that once you make it halfway through the game, grenades become quite unnaturally abundant in the rural Washington forests.

Having to remove the enemies’ darkness shields was kind of interesting/fun at the beginning of the game, but I feel like by the end it started to become a chore, and generally just served to stress me out. The enemy AI is nothing remarkable, and once you figure out how the bad guys work, dispatching them becomes a process of just going through the motions; there’s not usually a whole lot of brainpower involved. One of the more annoying bits, however, was running out of ammo and having no way to attack. It was rather frustrating that Alan is quite capable of shattering wooden doors with a single kick, but totally incapable of attacking enemies in the same way. Rather than at least attempting to kick and punch his way to victory, he just stands there, shining his dinky flashlight at his assailants while they hack him to bits with axes. If you run out of ammo, you’ve pretty much got no choice to but to restart the game from the most recent checkpoint in an effort to use up less ammo than you did before.

As part of the combat, you have the ability to dodge attacks by tapping the left shoulder button on the controller. This works much better than I expected it to, and it does a good job of making you feel like you’re nimbly evading swinging axes. Overall, I felt that moving around in the world felt good. Third-person games have a tendency to feel clunky and claustrophobic to me, especially in indoor situations, but Alan Wake, in my opinion, does a good job of avoiding that.

Visually, the game is generally above average. The world is quite detailed and immersive, especially in the daytime portions of the game, and I don’t recall and significant framerate issues during my playthrough. There were a few times when I stumbled across some distractingly low-quality textures, and you’ll probably notice some “popping” effects on the terrain when the game raises the poly-count as you get closer to certain areas. In darker areas of the game, the bloom effect the game puts on your flashlight beam makes it really hard to see, and kind of makes me wish I could turn the flashlight off altogether.

Those things are entirely forgivable, however, when you take into consideration the worst visual aspect of the game, which is, by far, facial animation. Coupled with average to sub-par voice acting, it is enormously distracting. The first time I saw it, I literally laughed out loud at what was supposed to be a rather serious moment. It’s as if the animators are under the impression that humans talk by repeatedly scrunching and unscrunching their noses while simultaneous moving their mouths up and down like nutcrackers. In humans, so much subtle communication happens in the face that, in my opinion, high-quality facial animation is more integral to telling a story than believable grass physics and dynamic lighting. When we’ve got game developers like Rockstar Games showing us, with games like Red Dead Redemption, that high-quality animation is entirely possible with currently available hardware, it makes the animation in Alan Wake all the more depressing. Remedy missed an opportunity to make the characters so much more real and believable.

The sound design and music of the game are well done, effectively helping to keep you on the edge of your seat. Some of the scariest moments I experienced where due to nothing more than thinking I heard something move nearby, or having the music build up tension as I crept through an abandoned windmill. My only complaints here are that, as mentioned before, some of the voice acting leaves something to be desired, and that the exciting battle music drops away as soon as there aren’t any enemies near you, which is a shame since much of the game’s thrill comes from not knowing if there are enemies nearby, and the music gives away the fact that there aren’t.

In conclusion, Alan Wake isn’t as revolutionary as it could/should have been, especially since it was in development for five years. It’s worth a playthrough, but I’d probably recommend renting it rather than buying it. The game successfully kept my heart-rate elevated throughout, despite relying on horror/thriller tactics we’ve all seen before. The story sometimes drifts into the realm of the intriguing, but seems to prefer staying average most of the time. I think I’d say the same about the gameplay in general. The game looks pretty, and the world in which it takes place feels real and immersive, except for the terrible facial animation. Overall, I’d give it an 8/10.

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