Alan Wake Remastered
PlayStation 4
Nostalgia Factor:
I've known of Alan Wake for a very long time, and it has always appealed to me. The problem? It was an Xbox exclusive. For the last ten years I've been a PS3/PS4 kind of guy. The only way I was ever going to play Alan Wake was if it was ported over to another system.
And wouldn't you have it. This game is now available for the PS4. I finally get to see what all the fuss is about.
Story:
My one glaring flaw as a player is my uncanny ability to zone out and completely lose track of what is happening as I'm playing. It was just never going to work out between Alan Wake and me. It started out promising, but by the time the ends credits began to roll I had no freaking idea what I had just played.
Things begin like something you'd read in a Stephen King story - and I love Stephen King. Alan is an author who comes to a small town with his wife for a retreat at a lakeside cabin. She's taken by dark creatures in the middle of the night. The lake house disappears into thin air. The police don't believe Alan's story. He discovers manuscript pages that are describing what is happening to him as it is happening. These pages seem to be written by him, although he doesn't remember writing them.
That's the basic premise of the game, and that's really all I can say about it. Alan fights forces of the dark, which have taken over this small town. He has some allies in the sheriff and his friend Barry. We never really know if this is all happening in Alan's head, or if it is real. I completely lost track of what the heck was going on very quickly, and only focused on the gameplay and on surviving from objective to objective.
I understand that some people may enjoy this game's ambiguous storytelling and how it is open to interpretation, but I've never enjoyed this kind of thing. I'm an answers guy. That's why I'm not a huge David Lynch fan. If you like him, you'd probably like this game. It's much more Lynch than Stephen King. Sai King's storytelling is much more straightforward and coherent. He'd never write something this messy.
Gameplay:
My expectations for this game were way off. Maybe it was because I knew coming in that this game was episodic, but I expected it to be something like a mixture between Silent Hill and a Telltale game. Alan Wake is neither of these things. If I had to compare it to anything, it would be a faster paced behind the back shooter such as Resident Evil 5 or Shadows of the Damned.
Most of the action consists of simply making it from point A to point B, while you fight enemies in between. Don't let the first hour or so of the game fool you: this isn't survival horror. In fact, I didn't even find this game to be scary one tiny bit. It is way too action oriented for that.
The main twist in Alan Wake is that you can't simply shoot your enemies. Each foe you fight is protected by a dark shield. In order to damage them, you have to shine your flashlight on them until the shield breaks. Then you can begin firing at them with your weapon.
There's a bit of a learning curve, here. I don't think I quite understood the whole shield mechanic my first few attempts at playing this game. I was shining my flashlight and firing my gun at the same time. That's just a waste of bullets. Firing your gun does nothing until that shield is gone. As a result, I kept repeatedly running out of ammo and getting demolished by the enemy. It was very discouraging. I kept thinking: what the heck am I doing wrong, here? I don't give up on games, but I was starting to want to with Alan Wake.
I pushed through it and eventually I got the hang of things. And once I began to fully understand the game's mechanics, I began to enjoy it a lot more. Running through stages, shining enemies with your flashlight, throwing flashbangs, and using flares is a lot of fun. I began to feel like the ultimate badass. Every once in a while, however, the game will throw some cheap deaths at you to keep you on your toes. Nothing worse than getting caught in a combination of enemy attacks and dropping from full health to dead in two seconds flat.
You know what else is annoying? How quickly Alan runs out of breathe. He has to stop and rest very frequently as you're playing, which can be a major pain when you're in the middle of battle or trying to put some distance between yourself and an enemy. I get why they do it, to make it more realistic, but it is totally unnecessary here. This seems to be a common complaint about the game online. Another online complaint is how quickly the flashlight runs out of batteries, but I didn't mind this as much. I viewed the flashlight almost as a secondary weapon next to your gun, and I didn't mind having to "reload" it as much I did.
As I said earlier, the game's story quickly became secondary to me. I stopped paying attention and instead just focused on enjoying the combat and having fun. It's a little disappointing, because I really wanted to like the game's story, but it is what it is.
I felt a sense of satisfaction when I finished with Alan Wake. The game can be tough at times, and I won't lie it is repetitive with the constant enemy ambushes. All in all I can say I enjoyed it. It's not going to go down as an all-time favorite, but I certainly enjoyed my time with it.
Graphics:
For a game that was initially released over ten years ago, it holds up very well. I know that this is the remastered version, but aside from making everything "sharper" I can't imagine they changed too much of the game's design. The diner, the cabins, the woods, the whole "up north" motif of the game is very well designed and authentic. Details abound everywhere.
My one complaint? Everything is too dark. I think they fell in love with the whole flashlight gimmick a little too much. There were times I literally couldn't tell where I was or where I was going because it was so dark and I couldn't see a dang thing.
Sound:
The voice acting is good, I suppose. Alan Wake doesn't strike me as a game that takes itself too seriously. The dialogue is campy and fits the tone of the game perfectly. It's not Resident Evil for the PS1 levels of campy, but you can tell the voice actors are having fun and really digging into their roles.
I wish I could tell you anything about the game's music, other than that I enjoy the little folk tune that plays at the end of each chapter. As far as actual in-game music, I got nothing. It does its part.
Overall:
I've been going back and forth with how I feel about Alan Wake. If you had asked me when I first started playing this game, I would have said it was terrible. But the more I played, the more I liked it. By the time I was done, I was a pro at this game.
All the pieces are here to create an epic game, and I can see why it has such a cult following. I feel like it didn't quite fit together as well as I would have wanted it to, however. The gameplay is fun. I liked the combat. I liked running around and finding hidden things. I liked the creative ways you have to dispatch your enemies, like using explosive barrels and focusing spotlights on them.
I feel like the game whiffed horribly on its storyline. It started out like something I really thought I was going to enjoy, but then it quickly fell apart into a twisty, convoluted, and confusing mess that I feel was attempting to be too clever for its own good. Like I said before, this game feels very heavily inspired by Stephen King. It's shame they couldn't keep the story on the rails, or we could have had something truly great.
Instead, I feel as if Alan Wake is just something truly good. Not great, but good. It's definitely too good to fall into the C range on my grading scale, but it simply can't go any higher than that. This is a fun, entertaining game that definitely falls into the top 50% of games I have played in my life. I just don't ever see myself coming back to it.
THE GRADE:
B-
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