A few hours into Alan Wake, you are going to wonder if you are playing a video game or watching a TV show. And somehow, this isn’t the least bit annoying. That is the best one-line explanation I have on this game being a few episodes in. But Alan Wake might be legitimately the best game you’re not playing right now.
Alan Wake is a game that flew under my radar a little bit, and this was largely because the game took around 5 years to develop. In an age where games are cranked out rather frequently (sometimes companies will hire two separate sets of development teams so they can release two games of the same series in the same year), the fact that this game took so long to develop made it an interesting prospect in my mind. After reading some very positive reviews of the game, I decided it might be worth my money, and finally gave me an excuse to trade in Final Fantasy XIII (which if anyone from Square-Enix is reading this, you owe me 45 hours of my life back).
Plot wise, you are Alan Wake, a bestselling fiction writer with a 3 year case of writers block. You are taking a vacation with your wife to a very scenic, quiet town in No-wheres-ville, USA to escape the pressures of pumping out your next best seller, and trying to escape the nightmares of crazy shadow people attempting to kill you. (Who hasn’t been there before, right?) Unfortunately, your dreams start to merge with reality, and you wake up in a car crash having missed a full week of your life. Your wife has been kidnapped, and stranger yet, you are finding pages of a manuscript you don’t remember writing. A manuscript that seems to be coming true minute by minute.
Alan Wake is extremely engaging, which is probably what makes the large quantity of plot/cut scenes tolerable. The first few hours of the game is very scant on game play, and even tries to compensate for this by having brief bits of pointless busy work, mainly to teach you the controls of the game, which are pretty simple. But I cannot stress enough, the storyline is engaging enough where you really won’t care. If anything, I’d recommend popping some popcorn before you sit down to play.
Game play wise, the game is a hybrid of Max Payne and Silent Hill. Your character, Alan Wake, has regular voice-overs much like Payne, it’s a third person shooter much like Payne, and creeps the hell right out of you like Silent Hill. Basically imagine the game being Max Payne with the plot written by Stephen King and you might start to picture what you are dealing with. Instead of shooting drug addicts, you’re shooting people possessed by Darkness in the woods.
In an odd bit of development, the game is set up as though you are watching a TV show. The chapters in the game are called episodes, and at the end of each episode, they have a cliffhanger plot hook…and then it cuts to what would be the credits screen if you were watching TV, complete with a music outro. At the beginning of each new episode, they give you the “LAST TIME, ON ALAN WAKE!” plot recap, like if for some reason you had the memory of a Labrador Retriever and didn’t remember. Initially I thought this was a just a little bit of neat development to compliment the fact the game is so plot intensive, however, since your character is a writer who is trapped in his own story…I’m not entirely convinced the actual game isn’t set up this way as some kind of plot point…however that’s a bit of conjecture on my part and time will tell on that one.
On the downside, the game taking so long to develop, a little of the game is outdated. The graphics are good, but not great. The controls are good but not great, and the game play is good, but not great. All in all I would give the actual game play an 4/5. But that’s not too shabby in my opinion, and as odd of a thing as it is to say about a video game, the game play isn’t really why you should pick up the controller and play this one.
Alan Wake so far as proven to be a game where I dare say you actually care about the main character. Those action junkies out there may not really like this game, so if your cup of tea is sports games or racing games, you might not be all about this game just because of the hours of plot involved. However I have really been starved for a game that sucked me into the story and Alan Wake has met my appetite. Any RPG fan or any fan of the horror game genre will love this game, and I’d dare say even the casual video gamer who likes psychological thrillers in the movie theaters should also pick this one up. This game is at least an 4.25/5, and in a year flooded with solid video game releases, this is a must play for almost everyone.
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