Alan Wake review

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Above: Memo to prospective Alan Wake players: Hope you like woods.

I was quite looking forward to Alan Wake, partly because of my admiration for the Max Payne noir-shooter diptych by the same creators, and partly because it promised to borrow narrative inspiration from pulp thriller novels and TV rather than the standard video game muses (respectively: Aliens and other video games). Briefly, Alan Wake is an action game in which you play a famous author who retreats to a hermetic community in the Pacific Northwest to cope with a chronic case of writer's block. Shortly after his arrival, his wife is kidnapped under mysterious circumstances, and he blacks out for a week. When he comes to, he finds that he has written a manuscript that he has no recollection of composing, and further discovers that the town has been taken over by a shadowy presence that possesses people and objects and imbues them with murderous intent. As you might guess, the player's role is to take control of Alan Wake, confront these people/objects, and shoot your way to the truth.

The gameplay hook in Alan Wake is that the possessing force renders the enemies impervious to injury, so you can't just shoot them outright. You first have to use a flashlight or other light source to burn away the darkness that protects them. This isn't the most mindblowingly original conceit, but it's a clever way of fulfilling several gameplay functions. Most significantly, it amps up the tension by increasing the amount of time between spotting an enemy and being able to kill it, and does so without gimping the controls, which is the route that most other horror-shooters take. It also allows your flashlight beam to double as a crosshairs, which goes a long way toward minimizing the HUD. Thirdly, it gives a gameplay excuse for the constant showcasing of Alan Wake's lighting graphics, which are quite impressive.

The thing about Alan Wake is that it's such a solid and well-crafted game that the few shortcomings it has seem all the more nagging as a result. Gameplay-wise, there isn't a whole lot to be mad at: the balance between burning away shadows with your flashlight, shooting, and keeping track of multiple enemies is fun and challenging, and the controls are very solid. The dodge button, which needs to be combined with a directional press, is very well implemented - when you pull off a successful dodge, which takes enough skill that you can't just spam the button, the game shifts into slow-mo for a second to showcase just how close you were to getting nailed by an axe aimed at your head or what have you, which leads to any number of memorable close-call moments. The graphics are great and do a lot of heavy lifting in terms of creating a spooky atmosphere. It's an enjoyable game, and has a lot to recommend it on that level.

Alan Wake, however, has set its sights a bit higher than "enjoyable game." This much is clear from the unique structure that divides the game into six episodes, which being with 'previously on' recaps and end with cliffhangers. This is a narratively-focused affair that wants to be a bold statement of purpose for gaming as a storytelling medium. And it's actually fairly effective in doing so; I liked playing the game half-an-episode at a time, and the plot twists and wanting to find out what happened next was a big part of what kept me engaged. It is refreshing to see a game put a clear emphasis on story and pacing.

The problem with Alan Wake as a narrative is that it can't balance its aspirations toward originality with its desire to pay homage to its influences, and the latter too often overwhelms the former. As reviews of Alan Wake never fail to note, the game is heavily inspired by the works of Stephen King and David Lynch. The Stephen King angle isn't really so bad, even though King is actually mentioned by name at least twice in the game's dialogue, but the constant cribbing from David Lynch in general and Twin Peaks in particular becomes actively distracting very early on in the game. Now if this were limited to the 'unsettling things happening in a bucolic Northwestern town' aspect, I'd say fair play and leave it at that. However, Alan Wake has the gall to deploy naked facsimiles of the characters of Shelly Johnson and the Log Lady from Twin Peaks. It uses coffee thermoses as hidden collectable items, with the inevitable associated Achievement being titled Damn Good Cup of Coffee. There was a part early in the game where a character told me to go to a lodge that made me groan audibly, although fortunately the lodge in question proved more concrete than the one from the show. The game's boner for David Lynch is such that the song soundtracking the first end-of-episode title is "In Dreams" by Roy Orbison, and although I'm sure I probably don't need to jog your memory as to why that's relevant, I'd be seriously remiss if I didn't take the chance to embed:


This is probably substantially less of an issue for the vast majority of Alan Wake players, who likely don't care about the subtle line between a deft professional homage and a vaguely embarrassing fanboyish one. My issue with it is less about Alan Wake trying to punch above its weight class and more about a serious missed opportunity to incorporate its influences on a deeper level. The brilliance of Twin Peaks was the way that it placed its unsettling and avante-garde elements within a wholehearted embrace of the formal strictures of the primetime soap opera format. Given the fact that video games live and die by convention, there was a huge opening for Alan Wake to do the same thing within the milieu of third-person shooters. However, instead of balancing the base gameplay against sometime more experimental that takes advantage of the interactive form, Alan Wake too often opts to cut-and-paste David Lynch. The only point in which I felt Alan Wake was really doing something truly different comes in a playable sequence that closes out the game, and that's tucked safely away after the final boss fight, causing it to feel set apart from the "real" game.

To be fair, there's a lot to applaud about the way Alan Wake approaches the narrative-gameplay fusion; for one, the game actually works a subtle, non-superfluous rationale for the existence of scattered ammo and supplies into the narrative as it progresses. There's actually a significant aspect of the plot which struck me as inspired by Diary, one of Chuck Palahniuk's best novels; if this is intentional, it's carried out with the kind of grace I wish had been used in incorporating the influences I mentioned above. Secondly, although the final boss is rather limp, Alan Wake has one of the better endings to a game story I've seen in a while; it goes out on an ambiguous note without skimping on a sense of resolution. Granted, the former has probably more than a little to do with the impeding DLC bonus episodes (of which the first is free to retail buyers who keep the voucher packed in to the box, classy move there) but it still works within the context of the core game.

All told, Alan Wake is a worthy game. Given the focus on story and atmosphere, it seems like it might be one of those games that's fun to watch as well as play. Despite my quibbles with some of the choices, I'm looking forward to checking out the downloadable bonus episodes later this year, and I do hope that it does well enough to fund a sequel where the designers can hopefully broaden their palette some more.