Wakey Wakey Alan

The first game should be a memorable one, so for some reason I chose Alan Wake.

Alan Wake is really the sort of game that I should either love or hate with little leeway in between.

I love media that leans on the fourth wall and messes with the metaphysical, and also the idea of reality being twisted according to some artsy fartsy type or even just a bland everyday Jane type. I like deconstruction of individual interpretation becoming everyone's interpretation, with the mind screw chicken/egg looping of fate and choice (you know, the kind that Steven Moffat utterly fails to achieve) and the examination of why plotholes will cause a horrible shadow darkness to come from the depths of a lake to invade your small cozy town. It's also, according to the box, a "psychological horror game", and horror is far my favorite genre of video game, as it was the genre that shifted my understanding from games being smashy smashy to intricate forms of media capable of telling its own story with an unprecedented level of immersion. It's mildly Lovecraftian (though that's not quite as obvious as the references to another author in this game), which means it takes place in New England, horror homeland of misanthropic ugly jerks who all want to accessorize their axe with your face - and admittedly I find this the most enjoyable thing known about my area. So it's everything I should love.

It's also everything that I should hate. The story covering the metaphysical premise is held together by a main character who is about as charming as a whiny sack of potatoes with a face drawn on and you're completely unable to get into this mindset that the game desperately wants to push of Alan being a competent writer. Just handfuls of minutes into the game, trying to believe that Alan is considered some literary genius goes from being hard to impossible because you are basically forced to read his writing, and it is in a word: terrible, and in several words: the exact sort of terrible that graces bestseller lists for weeks for no understandable reason. The horror element is also rather poorly done, which doesn't stick in my side by just being bad, but of me seeing the potential of it being good and never quite achieving the perfection that I know it's capable of, deep inside.

That said, I love Alan Wake. I love Alan Wake in the sort of "I wouldn't trust this man to make pb&j without burning an entire neighbourhood down" way. The Merlin way, the G.I. Joe way. Charming in its complete idiocy.



At some point my annoyance with Alan began to morph from resentment into amusement, as I was led through increasingly absurd scenes in the game where I began to doubt the seriousness of everything that was happening, though I did end up feeling a bit ambiguous on that even after I was done. The game was a real rollercoaster between what it wanted to be: serious or snarky. They kept nudging me and poking me with the insanity that was going on, inputting occasional subtle humor here and there and then suddenly they would jerk me back to a scene with Alan crying about Alice for no reason like the game writers had their stereotypical portly nannies behind them, shaking fingers and saying "ah ah ah" whenever they got too smug and self referential, as if people don't like self referential.

It's difficult to play this game in general and not to get an impression of people (read: dudes) patting themselves on the back as they whip out their tablets and fill in the outlines of this game, writing Alan as this inexplicable god character whose talent and reticence (don't laugh, apparently he has that) charms in chicks, though not willingly because he's a good man who is devoted to his wife. To be fair, it is also very reminiscent of Remedy's most well known game: Max Payne, a story about a man who just wants to be good and keeps having crap slung at him. It's just that in Alan Wake, crap is actually an evil sentient darkness that wants to use his writing to spill out into our universe and devour everything that it sees. That said, the dullness of Alan was, as I mentioned, tempered by his moronic nature, his dorkish dodging, and his tweed with elbow patches. I think sometimes that the reason we, as people, gravitate towards villains or characters that are clearly meant to be annoying is due to the fact that main characters are supposed to be inoffensive to all, which tends to result in a personality that is basically a flat line. So even a negative personality trait, such as being something of a prick, or being completely surprised at a sequence that was mentioned not even five minutes ago in a manuscript we just read, causes any character seem more human, and so I took a bit of a shine on Alan when otherwise I would have needed to stop playing due to dying of boredom.

Speaking of Max Payne, I felt like there was a huge opportunity missed in regards to Alan Wake's dream sequence. I recall Max Payne's dream sequence as being terrifying, striking, disturbing, and disorientating. For the neo-noir, the dream sequence was bordering on horror, turning the player's perception against itself and causing the very presence of such a sequence to be unexpected and unnerving. Not to mention that it was frustratingly difficult and hard to control - another frequent staple of horror games. Alan Wake's dream sequence was.... well, nothing changed. There was no fear or disorientation. Alan was Alan, but see through. Reality wasn't warped through the parameters of the dream, particularly the dream of someone who is supposed to have a lauded imagination. I still opened doors by thrusting my face into them - in my own dreams it would have at least completely dissolved into rainbow goldfish crackers or something. It wasn't memorable or scary, which is rather annoying from a game that bills itself as a psychological horror game. I'm not feeling psychologically horrified, game, I'm just feeling emotionally irritated.

That said I found the last sequence of the game to be really interesting, and brought into play a lot of what I was actually looking for from the game, which only pissed me off more because I was now at the end. The pissed-offness eventually collided with the sudden realization that I had actually enjoyed myself so far and levelled out somewhere.

Overall the metaphysicalness was flimsily connected by the general plotline of "guy tries to find wife," though I should say now that I did actually like Alice because she seemed like a decent person, rendering her relationship with Alan incomprehensible because I couldn't understand why she didn't just throw her belongings out the window and dive after it, leaving him forever. What? How dare you do something kind, thoughtful and time-consuming to try and resolve my writer's block and support me through my period of depression I HATE YOU ALICE IF YOU NEED ME I'LL JUST BE WRITING ANGSTY POETRY AND LISTENING TO SIMPLE PLAN SO HOW'S THAT FOR WRITER'S BLOCK? The writers of the game did indeed say that Alice was supposed to be portrayed as a likeable and strong character, emotionally stronger that Alan (though how exactly that is supposed to really get across in a damsel-in-distress archetype beats me), which just made me think that she was much too good for him.

It should also be stated for the record right here, speaking of Alice, that the character models for this game are hideous and I wish I were joking. There are a few that could get away with it because you didn't have to deal with them long, but in particular Alan's face was extremely disturbing to me, especially since the game kept making a point re: Alan's level of ladykiller (not literally... more or less) being very high, but again, impossible to believe because he looks like molded potato clay.

And that actually looks like a cleaned up version (left). This is a damn shame in my opinion, because I can easily believe that Ilkka Villi (his life action actor and face model, seen on the right) has broken quite a few hearts, because he's breaking mine all the time by existing, my goodness, Ijustwanttotouchhisscruff.

Several of the environments do suffer from chronic 2-Dness, though Alan's inability to jump higher than an ant can fart usually stopped me from bothering to try jumping onto things. There is a point in the game where they slap the controller from you and tell you that you're doing platforming wrong when you're only doing platforming with the worst platforming controls known to the history of fingers, but other than that, the environments are usually pretty well laid out, though there were several moments in the game where my inability to stay on a path not only rewarded me with no collectables but several axe blades to my loving elbow patches.

The thing is, I can't say that Alan Wake did horror well because there was no point in Alan Wake where I was truly scared. This is a terrible thing to say after a game like Silent Hill 2, but it's true. There was no sense of burning unease as I panted listlessly up the ninetieth dirt road with the shadows swirling around me. I always knew what was happening, and you can only be shocked by a random mook popping his head out of the corner of your screen to use his hatchet to give you a mobile spinedectomy a few times before the whole routine starts getting a bit old. There were moments in the game where I had to do double takes, when the swirling shadow storms morphed shrubbery into nine foot tall men wondering which part of Alan's anatomy would look better with a sledge hammer applied to it (I vote the face), and that was where it really seemed to shine, where I would get a bit nervous and spin my camera around. But something usually did show up, and it would usually just be the same old mook, of which there are two varieties and only two.

This repetitiveness does get to be a bit of a thing with Alan Wake. It had such a consistent rhythm that I could almost be lulled to sleep from it, the bzowngnnn of the flashlight followed by the BANG BANG of my revolver. I was never out of batteries or ammo, and couldn't be - it was littered around like a gun fanatic who also really hated the environment had run through the game several minutes before me. There were about two situations where I actually panicked about ammo and I no longer remember if it was due to my inability to have less than full items on anything or actually suffering from low ammo. Besides which I would end almost every section with full flashbangs and flares. ... And then start the next section without them.

I would and do consider the latter one of the more frustrating aspects of the game. I feel as though it doesn't even have the excuse of Siren Blood Curse, which was cursed (har) by the idea of having one section released every few months or so, where losing all of your guns and ammo would have been more or less understandable. More so, at least, than playing a game all the way through and every few hours being kicked to the stomach and losing everything you own. It's all rather inexplicable anyway, considering Alan has no visible pockets or inventory in which to keep his giant gun armory, so it's not as though we see it fall out of him like change from an upturned pair of jeans, so when you are given control again after the cutscene, a quick overview of the inventory usually prompts a reaction of "FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUU-." I felt this particularly hard, because I play a game like the worst episode of Hoarders and lost about six hundred flashbangs and flares because I kept waiting to use them in a moment of dire need that never came.

Almost everything that I mentioned here was improved upon in Alan Wake's American Nightmare, which really and honestly gave the impression of being free. It was free to be as ridiculous as it wanted because it had no reputation or pretension of being anything else. Granted, the game was also about as scary as me sitting here eating this banana, but then, I wasn't expecting it to be anything more than that. It wasn't a "psychological horror game" and that is made absolutely clear after the first section.

The gaming and combat is much improved, with the inventory being a lot more limited than it was in the original Alan Wake. You can have five flashbangs and five flares in total rather than the 20 limit of the last game, meaning that I could no longer just spam them and run away when it got a bit hairy, especially considering that their power is extremely nerfed and won't destroy all the enemies in one go anymore. The enemy variety is spiked, the freaking birds have gone from those freaking birds to something you can actually shoot with happiness, and the health system is much improved from Alan sitting in a corner somewhere and crying as all of his health regenerates. In American Nightmare the health bar is split into three sections, and losing an entire bar means that your health will not regenerate beyond it unless a safe haven is found. The combat is also infinitely more varied and manuscripts are more useful than merely being a collectable gimmick, as it allows you access to different weapons throughout the game (the combat shotgun quickly became a fast friend). Not to mention the fact that the writing for the manuscript pages have drastically improved and Alan's writing seems to have finally graduated high school.

Then of course, the crowning glory that is Mr. Scratch, who is everything that Alan isn't, which is charming and genuinely enjoyable. His presence in the game is a really great touch and really makes me look forward to the (increasingly improbable) future of Alan Wake Season 2, where I hope he'll have a bigger role. He's seen almost exclusively as a life-action character in cutscenes as played by the roguishly handsome Ilkka Villi, who hams up these hammies like Brian Blessed in a pantomime. Mr. Scratch is an extremely fun character with implied depth, and it's a bit of a shame you have to defeat him at the end of the game, where I think he's basically beaten by the power of love. He really makes the game something to look forward to, and watching his little videos was much more fun than trying to find the television sets that played the extremely dull episodes of Night Springs.

The fourth wall and metaphysical aspect is actually done rather nicely in this game and is a consistent presence throughout as opposed to getting occasional bursts and then really getting interesting when everything is almost over. However, the set is rather limited - it's a 1GB game and it shows because you basically traverse the same three maps three times, though the concept behind that is interesting and well done. I was a bit perplexed as to why all of the interactable characters are women, though they aren't sexualised or objectified, though they are abused in their different ways, so it's a confusing area for me.

Overall, I think Alan Wake is a game that deserved to be played, though it needs to stop pretending to be a horror game and actually be one. Once you stop expecting it, however, the game becomes extremely more enjoyable and I'm probably going to work through the Nightmare mode once I'm in a state of mind to do so.