“God I hate writers sometimes!” I thought as I made Alan run around in circles and leap head-first into his wife while she continued to talk to him without skipping a beat. “When will they realise that nobody wants to hear stories about writers?”
These were the thoughts I narrated out loud while playing Alan Wake because I have no inner monologue ‘cos I’m thick!
Alan Wake is a horror/action game by Remedy that follows Mr Wake as he goes to an unusually sinister looking village in the countryside in order to get away from the terribly hard life of being a writer… You know I said I hate writers? I hate it when they think the audience will have sympathy for their problems despite having a job where they literally sit around in their jim-jams and make stuff up. Alan Wake is a best-selling, highly respected author who seems to have the problem that people always recognise him and tell him they love this work… boo, bloody, hoo! He gets in a spat with his wife because she turns out to have brought a typewriter with them on this holiday in case he wants to, you know, do his job, and while storming off he blacks out and finds her gone. And it’s your job as the player to resist throwing this bastard off the nearest cliff, which I failed… several times, satisfyingly. All the while you will be listening to him narrating his own story like a running commentary. Yes Alan, we know you saw the guy swinging an axe, we saw it as well, we were there.
The gameplay is actually not that bad. Remedy have designed an extremely nifty lighting engine that makes some of the best shadows I have ever seen in a game, and most importantly they realised how pointless this would be in any other game so they designed the rest of the game around it. The evil force that has possessed the town of ‘Bright Falls’ (subtle innit) is afraid of the light, so when the darkness possesses the townspeople or inanimate objects you have to find a way to shine light on them, making it possible to kill them. It’s very atmospheric and the game does a brilliant job of capturing the feel of being lost in the woods in the dark. If only there was a way to turn that bloody narration off.
Maybe that’s the real reason there isn’t a PC version? I mean, yeah, everyone says it’s because PC gamers would just download it like the thieving little sods they are, but what if it’s because the modding community might have tried muting Alan’s narration and realised it made the game so much better? Alan’s constant narration reminded me of Max Payne, and it turns out it’s even from the same writer. But while Max’s monologues added flavour to the story and were entertaining to listen to, Alan Wake just feels like you’re playing the game with a voiceover for visually impaired players!
Another twist in the plot is that Alan keeps finding pages of a manuscript he doesn’t remember writing, and they seem to narrate events that happen later on in the story… I’m already ignoring them because I prefer to not have my stories spoiled ahead of time, it would be different if Alan obviously took notice of these and tried to defy them, but no, he just accepts his fate and somehow manages to be surprised when these things happen exactly as they were written! The only time I’ve ever seen this plot device actually work was in Chuck Palahniuk’s Diary which managed to be genuinely chilling and compelling, here it just feels annoying because nothing surprises you.
The combat in the game reminded me of Resident Evil 4 with the lights turned off, except not as good. I’ve only faced three or four enemies at a time so far and they’ve only been a threat to me when I get blindsided or my magic torch ran out, which rarely happened because I just calmly walked away from the minions of darkness while waiting for my batteries to recharge, not exactly spine-chilling terror. I’m playing on Hard and the only time I’ve used anything other than the pistol you start with was by accident. Resident Evil 4 made you use everything to hand in a desperate struggle to survive, and it wasn’t trying to tell a good story, it was trying to be a good game. I think we can learn something from that.
All in all, Alan Wake makes me feel much the same as Mirrors Edge did. It looked great in the trailers, it had a ton of potential to be brilliant and had a load of great touches, but ultimately it fell flat on its face due to poor writing and a few weak elements. Worth a tenner, but not much more.
