Few games have the winding life cycle that survival-horror Alan Wake has, coming exclusively to the Xbox 360 from developer Remedy Entertainment and publisher Microsoft Games. It was announced at E3 2005, swerving in and out of the gaming news mainstream for the past 5 years like a roller coaster. Originally meant to be a Windows Vista PC title, it was revealed in February of this year that Alan Wake would be coming exclusively to the Xbox 360 gaming platform, and what a great thing that ended up being. Like the rest of gamers out there we were quite skeptical about how the game would come together, and if it would be worth playing at all. Thankfully after hours of freakishly scary gameplay and one of the most intriguing storylines (and story telling methods) ever to hit the video game industry we can confidently say that Mr. Wake will be in the running for more than a few ‘game of the year awards’ for 2010. Countless times while reviewing Alan Wake we managed to be transported back to when it was first announced, only because that was the last time we can remember playing a psychological-thriller game of this extremely high caliber.
Probably the most interesting aspect of Alan Wake is the way the development team chose to tell the story, breaking it up into “Episodes” and using CG movies to explain what happens in-between. Each episode (there are six in total) ends with a song and the next one begins with a “previously on” segment that recaps what has happened in the story up to that point. With a total playtime on normal difficulty of over ten hours we were very satisfied with the game as a whole, especially from a story aspect. The protagonist, Alan Wake, is a bestselling writer who hasn't managed to write anything in over two years. His wife, Alice, brings him to the idyllic small town of Bright Falls to recover his creative flow. When she vanishes without a trace, Wake finds himself trapped in a nightmare. Word by word, his latest work - a thriller he cannot even remember writing - is coming true before his eyes. At night a powerful dark entity takes over the town and its inhabitants, and Wake's only protection seems to be light. At day things return to normal and the townspeople are no longer possessed. But in the game Alan will have to outrun police, find his book's missing pages, fight the darkness, and use the surrounding objects with light elements; ultimately with the goal of finding his wife.
Alan Wake has more twists and turns in it than any television show currently on the air, however a fantastic story means nothing if the gameplay isn’t there to back it up. We were so happy to hear that the team at Remedy decided to remove the Grand Theft Auto like sandbox mechanic that was on such a huge upward swing in gaming there for a while. After completing the game we have to think that it would have been a totally different, and worse experience if that open-world type of gameplay would have been included. There are points throughout Alan Wake where quite a bit of side-exploration is involved, and the path is not directly laid out for you (some evidence of the old style). Other than the main quest the player has the option of collecting different objects for Achievement purposes (televisions, radios, coffee mugs, and manuscript pages), because of this and the differing difficulty levels there’s a good bit of replay value in the survival-horror game. Alan Wake plays very much like prior video games of this genre, such as Resident Evil and Silent Hill. The camera is pinned right over the main characters left shoulder and can be rotated on a fixed 360-degree axis; it works perfectly.
This feature review concludes on the next page, please click below to read our final thoughts on Alan Wake.
