Alan Wake

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Alan Wake

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Alan Wake is an efficient horror game that manages to build an efficient atmosphere, tell a compelling story, and introduce an interesting – if a bit repetitive – combat system.

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With Alan Wake, Remedy Entertainment Games, responsible for the successful Max Payne series, shows that it spared no effort to create a horror game that is successful both in the story and the gameplay departments.

Alan Wake’s story may seem cliché in a first glance, but as soon as the events begin to intensify, it unfolds into a considerably thought-provoking, imaginative, and well-crafted narrative, revolving around the idea of ​​retribution. The plot is simple: Wake is a successful writer who is suffering from writer’s block. To clear his mind, he decides to move away from his everyday life and spend a vacation with his wife in the far small town of Bright Falls. However, it doesn’t take long for him to witness troubling events and realize that a recent nightmare has turned out to be true: his wife disappears and a sinister presence hidden in the shadows begins to possess the locals and make them potentially dangerous.

The game is structured in episodes such as a television series – with even a “Previously on Alan Wake” at the beginning of each one – which helps tell the story at a good pace, as it allows to alternate moments of great tension present at the end of each episode with the calmer ones at their beginning.

The game’s story, contrary to what the quote at the beginning may make us believe (“Stephen King once wrote that nightmares exist outside the field of logic and that there is little fun found in his explanations“), makes considerable sense at the end, even borrowing elements from H. P. Lovecraft’s short stories, such as the unspeakable evil presence, as well as from King’s novels, such as having a writer with creative block as a protagonist. The narrative moves at a fast pace since every moment has a mystery being introduced o solved – while Wake begins to find in its way pages that belong to a book that he never wrote but narrates his life, the subplot involving a kidnapper is resolved quickly, for example.

The writer’s goals are innumerable: he needs to save his wife, defeat the shadowy entity that apparently inhabits Bright Falls, save the lives of the people it possesses, and understand why he finds pages of a book he never wrote, and, at the same time, he must also run away from an insane FBI agent, and try to appear normal to ordinary people. The character of Alan Wake is an interesting one because he is not an infallible man. His words seem to create life and destroy everything they touch, people die around him, and his wife is missing, and he doesn’t treat everything casually: he rarely laughs or makes jokes just relieve the tension. He is fully aware of the situation he is in. In the end, he’s only a disturbed writer who is always trying to not lose his sanity. He is not one of those characters who perform miracles and impossible stunts and for which everything is fine and dandy. Wake feels more human and, therefore, the events make him more melancholic, bitter, and serious.

The pages he finds serve as the game’s main collectibles. As the player explores the environments, they will encounter some pages scattered in hidden spots – read: they are always on the alternate path when not in front of Wake. They belong to the book entitled “Departure”, which seems to narrate the events of the game. Therefore, as they also help tell the story, these pages are divided into four groups: 30% tells what will happen and spoils interesting moments, 30% tells what has happened and are redundant, 30% tells what the player never sees happening and enriches the narrative, and the last 10% is only available on the Nightmare difficulty. Nonetheless, they are all infinitely more interesting than the dozens of thermal coffee bottles that the player can also collect and that only serve to unlock achievements.

Now, enemies are one of the main attractions of the game. The Taken, as they are called, are the people possessed by the evil entity that haunts Wake. They are enemies that can arise from any dark place, have the unfriendly habit of carrying axes and scythes, and are also invincible: simply unloading a weapon in a Taken will do no harm to it. As they are shadow creatures, what the player needs to face them is light, which gives the combat system some interesting elements.

The player’s main weapon, for example, is a flashlight. When the writer points it to Takens, the enemies are eventually released from the shadow that protects them, becoming vulnerable to conventional firearms. The basic rhythm of combat, then, is something in these lines: a Taken appears, the player points the flashlight at them until the creature is released from shadows, takes out a revolver or a shotgun, and keeps shooting until the monster fades away. As the camera follows the writer from behind, almost over his shoulder, the combat resembles that of Resident Evil 4 – and there is even a “chainsaw guy”.

The factor that makes the light an important element in the game and not just an empty gimmick is the level of strategy that it requires when the player is faced with a large group of enemies and has to decide when to use light and when to use firearms, There are also some unique elements related to light: flares keep enemies away momentarily, forming a safe zone around Wake while they last, for example.

And the Lovecraftian entity doesn’t possess only people. Any object in the environment can also be dominated by it, opening up numerous possibilities of enemies, such as chairs, cars, logs, screws, and barrels. This unpredictability about what can suddenly become hostile generates one of the best action sequences in the game: the amazing battle on a farm with a huge tractor.

The level design also deserves praise for creating environments that rarely “look like” stages of a game. Their size and the natural disposition of their elements – the paths are not ridiculously linear to the point of looking like hallways – can convince players of the existence of that city and its forests and lakes. This design, on the other hand, limits the existence of elaborate puzzles, since they would remove the verisimilitude of the environments. Another factor that also helps increase immersion – and it’s hilarious – is the parody of  The Twilight Zone, here called Night Springs. Any time the player finds a television, it will be available a short episode of the program, which is shot with real actors. These episodes contain bizarre, sinister and, at the same time, funny narratives, which increase the sense of strangeness in the game.

The soundtrack is also one of the game’s best aspects. With the help of the band Poets of the Fall, the developers use songs that feel like they are a part of that universe. The lyrics of one of them, called The Poet and his Muse, for example, chronicles the events that led to the incident at the beginning of Alan Wake, and is even used by the character himself in a particular scene to find out what to do next.

The aspects in which the game falters are few but noticeable. Its ending, for example, is too sudden, leaving some subplots completely open, like anything related to the FBI agent, Nightingale. Some minor characters are too stereotyped for the player to care for them, like Wake’s editor who, even in situations of grave danger, shows to be nothing more than the group’s comic relief. The game also reduces the tension during combat by always revealing when and where the enemies are appearing, ruining the surprise. And the protagonist’s off-screen narration is also annoying and fails to add anything to the story.

Alan Wake is an efficient horror game that manages to build an efficient atmosphere, tell a compelling story, and introduce an interesting – if a bit repetitive – combat system.

December 04, 2018.

Originally published in Portuguese on March 11, 2015.

Overview
Developer:

Remedy Entertainment.

Writer:

Sam Lake, Mikko Rautalahti, Petri Järvilehto

Composer:

Petri Alanko

Average Lenght:

11 hours.

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About The Author
Rodrigo Lopes
I'm a book critic who happens to love games as well. Except Bioshock Infinite. Ugh.
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