Hopes are high for Alan Wake, the latest long-in-development property from the makers of Max Payne. It made a huge splash back at E3 2005 with a creepy storyline and a jaw-dropping new game engine, but Remedy has pulled back all press coverage since then, refusing to discuss the game at all until it's closer to its release. Only a scant few screenshots and trailers have trickled out of Remedy's Finland offices since that early E3 demo. I was fortunate to be among those who got to view the behind-closed-doors demo of Alan Wake back in 2005, and what I saw took my breath away. Because it's as much about getting the player to invest in the story and the characters, as it is about offing enemies and staying alive and stunning new gaming technology.
The story follows bestselling horror novelist Alan Wake, a man who writes stories based on his own dark dreams. He began having these dreams when he first met his future fiancée. When she disappears, Wake begins suffering from insomnia and finds himself unable to write anything new for two long years. He travels to a sleep clinic in the idyllic mountain village of Bright Falls, Washington, where he encounters a woman who looks exactly like his lost love. He begins writing again almost immediately based on the sudden onset of new dreams, but soon this new story of his starts to become real, right before his eyes. The worst of it comes at night, when a group of mysterious, shadowy figures appear, intent on capturing or killing Alan Wake for reasons unknown.
When I first saw the game back in 2005, it offered many innovations, perhaps most profound of which was its unique use of light and darkness inside the game. The light/dark motif not only serves as a major plot point in the story, but it's used as a crucial component of the gameplay as well. Yes, you'll get to wield weapons as Alan Wake, but you'll also make use of things like flashlights, which will help you push back or even cause harm to the shadow men when no other lights are available. The game is structured like a season of a television show or a novel, with various "chapters" or "episodes" that you interact with. Though the story is episodic in nature, you can wander freely throughout the vast 36 square miles of Bright Falls and the surrounding countryside at your leisure -- and you just might find plenty of secrets along the way. The catch is that the story won't advance if you do nothing but explore or hunt for secrets.
But a discussion of Alan Wake resembling a series of television must inevitably lead to a logical question: will there be more than one "season" of Alan Wake? Remedy says yes, that they're intent on producing more than one game in this franchise, and each game will build upon the events of the last one, just like seasons of a TV show. You'll find Alan Wake to have plenty of action sequences, but the real emphasis is more on intense, spine-tingling adventure and exploration more than anything else. Remedy has chosen to focus solely on creating a masterful first-person game experience, so there will be no multiplayer component to Alan Wake. We can only hope it won't be much longer before Remedy decides to end its media blackout, and we start seeing new information and media from this incredible-looking game. Alan Wake will be a Microsoft exclusive, available only for PC or Xbox 360 and currently has no solid release date, stay tuned for more coverage on the game during E3 2009.
