REVIEW: Alan Wake - American Nightmare

Alan’s back … but can he a-Wake from this American Nightmare?

Readers of this blog will understand I have a lot of time for Alan Wake, a flawed yet engrossing game with an existential crisis of a storyline that will make your brain bleed in its over the top complexity. American Nightmare tries it’s best to sum up what has happened, so that it may be possible for gamers who haven’t played previous Wake titles to drop in. However, it just becomes a stark reminder of how convoluted the whole story was anyway. The matter of fact is that I like waving my torch around and shooting things in the dark. Well, there’s a whole lot of that in this stand-alone title.

Microsoft Studios have tried to up the ante a bit by making this title more action based and less ‘survival’ than its predecessors. Wake has a whole host of weaponry and ammo and batteries are plentiful, making you a lot less aware of saving supplies and concentrating more on the killing. Where it would have been an option to flee at some point in Alan Wake, this American Nightmare chapter makes it obvious they want you to go in guns blazing – and I’m happy to oblige.

Alongside this there are new monsters, characters and a bit more about Mr. Scratch meaning the story has clearly progressed since Wake disappeared. What seems to have happened is he is caught in a time loop which is a good and a bad thing. It's good because I like Groundhog Day, but it does mean you sometimes watch cut sequences three to four times, that you get used to the locations and find yourself doing the same thing repeatedly. The storywriters try to manage it so it speeds up each time, but essentially when you find yourself repeating what you’ve already done twice, on purpose, it becomes annoying. Another factor is I didn’t get close to dying once, I whizzed through the entire game in about 4 hours (which is quite healthy for a downloadable game), but overall I enjoyed this a lot.

The action has picked up a bit, and whether this will translate into Alan Wake 2 remains to be seen, but it’s a nice stepping stone to get there and even though the story is as ridiculous as ever, it’s still an enjoyable experience. The repetition really did let it down, whether it mattered to the story or not, perhaps some liked this? But for me, it was slightly lazy.

Rating: 6/10

Alan Wake: The Writer DLC

After The Signal, Alan Wake returns in The Writer in it's final downloadable content package to clear some stuff up ... or if anything to make it all less confusing.

I don't know what it is with Alan Wake, but when I saw The Writer had been released I got really excited. Seeing as I thought the main game was average, these new chapters seem to appeal to me more and I don't know why. Instead of doing the same thing again and again one after the other, after a break the return to the gameplay and story feels like a strange 'coming home' of sorts. Except this is one strange home.

Alan is progressing through his memories more and we see the blurred line between the conscious and the subconscious. Forums are going wild for what this all means, who Mr. Scratch is and trying to assemble a linear narrative for it all but essentially they're missing out on something painfully obvious in this metaphysical nightmare. It's completely self-aware. It knows that the player is engrossing himself in this world and yet forgetting that essentially, none of this exists, that perhaps YOU are Mr. Scratch, playing with this character, controlling him. You think you're Alan, even though you're obviously not Alan - something the story keeps telling you. It's a smart, clever, post-post-modern way of looking at gaming that is different from films or a book. Films, books, TV programmes are PASSIVE, what Alan Wake draws attention to is the fact that you are the protagonist, that it is YOU deciding what happens, how far you want to take this etc. that you are interacting with this and as much as your character isn't Alan Wake, neither are you.

It's this jumbled up complexities that has put off a lot of reviewers, but what they don't understand is that this is quite a bold, enjoyable gameplay experience. In fact, this DLC chapter is one of my favourite chapters of the whole Alan Wake saga, perhaps my most favourite, because we are completely in the darkness. This is a horrible, strange nightmare where his dark memories are brought up, where the cabins turn around and around, where his house becomes some weird folding Inception style maze, where boats float through the sky and all the while making it fun to play. You can read so much into this if you want to that it could drive you mad, or you could just simply choose to play the game and still enjoy it. Luckily, it caters for both. It might be about an hour or two long, but it's enough to keep those fellow Wakers happy.

Story wise, Alan is just trying to get out of this nightmare with Thomas lending a hand, but at the same time confusing things further. The story is brought to a conclusion somewhat but essentially setting it up for a sequel, one which looks like he must try and write himself back to reality. It's an interesting concept of what is real, what isn't real and the idea of existing. Why are we watching someone trying to create a story where he can get back to the real world, when this isn't the real world anyway? Alan Wake is clearly a troubled man and I'm actually looking forward to seeing where it goes, I'm just not hoping for much of a conclusion.

DLC Rating: 8/10

Alan Wake

Microsoft's psychological thriller is finally completed in what can only be described as one of the strangest games to be released on the Xbox 360.

It has taken over 5 years for this game to be completed. Think about what you have spent the last 5 years doing - think about what you were doing in the Summer of 2005 and that was when this game was started. Unfortunately, it just isn't really worth the wait.

The initial concept is great, a renowned writer visits a small town and suddenly gets caught up in a nightmare scenario where his wife is missing and the little island they were staying on has suddenly vanished. There's a lot of nods here to TV series' such as Twin Peaks, The Twilight Zone and more, but the overall experience isn't quite as satisfying.

The game is divided into 6 chapters which play like episodes ('Previously on Alan Wake...') but each one is essentially the same thing over and over again. You start with nothing, pick up some ammo, a flashlight, then get more and more ammo as you walk in a linear fashion towards the next light. Enemies come at you and sometimes objects fly at you, but essentially it's the same thing again and again. It's also way too easy - this takes away any concept of 'survival horror' and instead you just end up throwing all your firepower at everything because it is very rare that you will find yourself short handed when you need it. To kill enemies is somewhat original, but essentially you shine a torch on an enemy until it's weak enough to shoot it and move on. That's it.

There's about 3 or 4 different types of human-like enemies (some move fast, others are slow and a lot stronger, some have chainsaws) but really, you will be hard pressed to be in a situation you can't get out of. Baring in mind a flare, which are dotted frequently around, is the same as an old-school 'invincibility potion', because they won't come near you and you can wait for your health to revitalise, it almost feels like you're cheating. It's a shame because it could be quite freaky and scary seeing as it's all about staying in the light, but it feels like a washed out Silent Hill. I was very rarely freaked out and at no point was I in a situation I felt like I couldn't handle leaving any tension at the door.

Saying that, the graphics look great and the scenarios kept me entertained enough. The length of the game was probably about 9 hours or so but there's more DLC to be had in the near future (one of which is already released). Why can't they have released this in the main game? Why should I pay out even more? Anyway, I don't want to give away the plot, but let's just say ... it's confusing.

The main pull of this game was that it was an adult interactive thriller as such, but released as the same time as Heavy Rain, there was no way this was going to push any boundaries like the PS3 hit did. Instead, Alan Wake continues a tried and tested formula and concentrates more on plot. But even after completing the game, I still have no idea what really happened. After some online research I was relieved to find others didn't either and there are a number of theories about it all swimming across the Internet which I did enjoy reading. But in order to keep the audience consistently entertained, the plot should maybe have been more grounded or the gameplay more experimental. The mix of quite boring, formulaic gameplay with such a weird story jarred with me and I was left feeling somewhat cheated.

A lot of hype went into this game, the online mini-series prequel looked promising and the trailers looked incredible, but really this was let down by the fact that rather than being cool it instead was quite boring. I hate to say it because I did enjoy playing it and glad I completed it, but I feel it could have been so much more. It's just not Heavy Rain. Sales figures also show that it didn't quite do as well as Microsoft wanted, and as you can probably see in any electronics shop, it's come down significantly in price. A little tip as well here, don't call a game Alan Wake - it was never going to fly off the shelves with a titles like that. Why not just 'Wake'? That sounds better at least - or 'Bright Falls' like where it's set and the mini-series?

I would like to think that given so much money and time thrown at it, that a team of creatives could do better and even though it looked good and the story, though confusing, was somewhat enjoyable in it's post-post-postmodern way, it's just let down by repetitive gameplay. A lesson for all I think.

Rating: 7/10