Alan Wake (Xbox 360)
Exclusive to the Xbox 360, Alan Wake is a horror shooter game that touches on a less frequented area of the horror genre in video games : psychological. The game draws on some inspiration from a lot of modern pop culture, with a decent amount being from the works of Stephen King. But, can the game deliver on the scares as well as be a good play throughout?
On drive to the town, Alan has a dream where he is being attacked by shadowy figures until a faceless, god-like voice speaks to him and teaches him to use the power of light to fight the darkness.
When they arrive in town, they head to a diner in town where Alice, Alan's wife, drops him off to get the key from Carl Stucky, the man she talked to, while she goes to the store to pick a few things up. As Alan walks through the diner to find him, he instead runs into a woman dressed all in black who hands him a key for the cabin. He walks back outside and gets in the car, but as they drive off, Carl stumbles out of the diner trying to get their attention : they forgot to pick up their keys.
At the cabin, Alice set's things up while Alan gets the power turned on as his wife as a fear of the dark. When he returns to the cabin, Alice calls him upstairs with a surprise waiting for him. He goes up to discover a typewriter sitting on a desk. She had been hoping to trick him into breaking out of his writer's block by setting him up with a psychologist in town. Furious, Alan storms out of the cabin.
While he's outside, the power cuts out and Alice begins screaming for help. He sprints back to the cabin just in time to see her being pulled off the cliff and into the waters by a mysterious force, so he dives in trying to save her. The next thing he remembers is waking up in a car after it crashing along some rocks. He gets out of the car and starts to hike through the woods to a nearby gas station to call for help. But along the way he finds pages for a manuscript that he wrote but can't remember ever writing, talking about darkness-infested people that must be weakened with light to be destroyed. After finding the pages, they begin to come to life around him as he is attacked by things infested with darkness. He begins fighting them off like in the dream, eventually making it to the gas station and calling the police.
When they get there, he realizes it's been a week between his wife disappearing and him waking up in the crashed car, with no clue about anything that happened in between. He explains his wife has been missing and informs the police where she disappeared from (while leaving out the story of the dark-infested people he knows that nobody will believe), only for the police to tell him that there hasn't been a cabin on the lake he named for years. In disbelief, the police take him back to the lake and he falls in stunned silence as all he sees on the lake is water.
With only his agent to trust, he comes out and Alan confides the full story to him and recruits him in the hunt for his missing wife. Soon after, they receive a call by a man claiming to have Alan's wife hostage and will free her only in exchange for the rest of the manuscript that Alan can't remember writing. With nothing else to do, Alan set's out to try and discover the rest of the story, fight his way through the darkness, and save his wife and his own sanity.
Alan's movement is controlled with the left joystick, and you can look around with the right one, which also controls the direction of the flashlight beam (your one constant and great weapon in the game). The beam will weaken the darkness off of whatever is infected with it, and you can boost the power of the flashlight with the left trigger. The right trigger fires your gun. Unfortunately you don't get an option to aim closer, but with the beam of light you have an always present aiming reticle. You can sprint by holding the left bumper down, or you can tap it and any direction of the left joystick to perform a dodge move. And the right bumper let's you ignite any stick flares you have.
The X button is your weapon reload button, and the faster you tap it the faster you can reload individual bullets). The Y button lets you change the battery in the flashlight if you're in a perdicament that won't allow you to let it recharge. B acts as your action button, picking up items and turning switches on/off in the world, and A is your jump button and is also the main button used in any of the games quick time event's.
There's also a little bit of driving controls in the game, and they take after the norm for driving in almost any other game. Right trigger controls the gas, the left joystick controls your steering, and the left trigger instead of controlling the brake will boost the headlights just like for the flashlight.
Lastly, the D-Pad is your weapon wheel, letting you change between any of the four things you can carry on you at all times.
So a very quick and straightforward set of controls that you can fall into almost as soon as you start up the game. Let's break into it a little bit.
The game is divided into daytime and nighttime sections. During the daytime, this is where you are fed the majority of the narrative for the story. The pace in these sections is generally pretty slow, mostly consisting of Alan walking around in an area and talking with different people to push the story forward. The majority of the game, however, takes place at nighttime. This is where you face all of your enemies, and take action on the things you learn in the day sections.
Most of your enemies are other humans that have been taken over by the darkness, a smoky layer of blackness over them making them impervious to damage. To weaken them, you must destroy the layer of darkness with light. You can do this with the flashlight that you carry for most of the game, or with different things in the environment that give off light such as street lamps, car headlights, and flares.
Your weapons throughout the game aren't very plentiful, but they each pack more than enough of a punch to do the job. First, you have your flashlights. You can carry one at a time, starting with a basic ordinary flashlight. Eventually you get the option to swap it out for a mag-lite, and finally a heavy duty lantern light. The bigger the light, the faster it brings down your enemies.
For your actual shooting weapons, you can carry a handgun (a 6 shot revolver), a two handed gun, (interchangeable between a shotgun, a pump action shotgun, and a hunting rifle), and a flare gun. The revolver is more than enough to get you through most situations, but if you find yourself getting overwhelmed by enemies, having the shotgun at the ready makes for a great escape plan.
When using your flashlight, just simply aiming it at them is enough to weaken the darkness. Or, you can boost the power of the light and take them down faster, but this will cause the battery in your flashlight to drain slowly. Once you've gotten rid of the darkness, you can use any of the guns to kill them completely. Later in the game, you get the use of flare guns and flash bangs, which let off a quick pulse of light that is able to kill multiple things at once in a small area. You'll also find yourself dealing with objects in the world being consumed by the darkness that will hurl themselves at you. These can be dealt with in the same approach, with the only difference being that they don't need to be shot after the darkness is eliminated.
At some points in the game you'll experience little quick time events. They're not very difficult in themselves, but can be depending on what's going on in the area around you. One example is starting power generators. A small circle comes up with a portion of the circle being green, you must press the A button in this green area a few times in a row to get the generator going. Generally its an easy thing but if the generator is in the middle of the woods and you have some of the Taken swarming around you, it can get to be hectic.
The game itself is played out like a TV show, and is broken down into chapters. Each one begins with a "Previously on Alan Wake" segment, and they end on some sort of a cliffhanger. The chapters all follow a linear path, with some options for exploring if you're going after the collectibles of the coffee thermos's and manuscript pages. You can also interact with radios and signs you come across, giving you background on the people and places in the town of Bright Falls. And you can flip on televisions too and watch clips from a show called Night Springs which draws a lot of inspiration from Twilight Zone.
All in all, Alan Wake is a great play, between the story and the action, you'll be on the edge of your seat every step of the way.
Now, let's break it down a bit.
The enemies themselves are fairly easy to deal with, it's a matter of balancing them with any others in the area. If they come from the same direction you can sort of roll the flashlight from one to the other, taking them down at a fairly leisurely pace. Sometimes though they come in from all directions and it takes a bit more strategy to deal with them.
Your human-infected enemies come in two forms. There's your normal generic ones that usually wield either hammers, axes, scythes, knives, and they vary in speed as well. For these, boosting the power of the flashlight isn't required. If you have enough distance between you and them, keeping the flashlight trained on them will weaken the darkness in time to deal with them, typically going down in one or two shots. Occasionally you'll come across a bit of a bigger enemy, that stands taller than the others and moves a bit slower. They are tougher as well, requiring you to boost the light and keep it trained on them to weaken the darkness before you shooting them, which also requires more shots.
For the poltergeist items, you'll need to boost your flashlight for these as well. When they come to life, they'll start to vibrate before they lift off the ground, hovering for a few seconds and flying out in your direction. The best approach with these is when they start to lift off the ground, get yourself standing with something in between you and it. Anything at all whether it be a tree or lamp post or vehicle, anything. Your quick dodge won't move you far enough or fast enough if you try using it at the last second, but if you set up something as a blocker, you can render their attacks useless pretty easily.
The collectibles are optional, but a lot of them are already in your path, especially the manuscript pages. Reading these when you pick them up is a very useful thing to do. Since the pages of the story are whats coming to life around you, reading them will give you hints at what can get you out of an upcoming situation.
In the end, the game delivers pretty fairly. You can always adjust the difficulty level if you're looking for more of a challenge, and some of the manuscript pages can only be found on the higher difficulty levels. So let's look at the ups and downs of this game.
Playing a horror game where the main character is a writer, the game makes the story the driving point of it all much like a writer would do with their story, and it's filled to brim with lots of symbolism and mythology of it's own.
Homage to the classics - This game draws a lot of it's influence from classic authors and horror movies, and it makes sure the player knows this as well. One of the main sources is Stephen King, who is mentioned directly numerous times. His work The Shining is a big influence for the game too (an author suffers a bit of a psychotic break and begins hallucinating things around him?) and a couple of iconic moments from it are put into the game; the scene with the door being broken down with an ax is done with Alan in place of Wendy, and later in the game Alan escapes from a lodge that looks quite a lot like the Overlook, and his escape is made through a hedge maze.
In addition, the FBI agent who begins hunting down Wake starts taunting him by shouting different classic author names at him every time the cross paths. The objects coming to life with the dark presence and hurling themselves at Alan is inispired by Poltergeist, and the town of Bright Falls itself is a reference to Twin Peaks.
Remedy also threw in a couple of nods to themselves and their previous big game before Alan Wake, Max Payne. A couple of the manuscript pages you discover earlier in the game aren't connected to any of the rest, and are narrated by the voice actor behind Max Payne himself. Late in the game, in a flashback, you wake up hung over and go to get some painkillers to feel better.
- The driving. It's just horrible. No matter which vehicle you're in it handles the same, which is very inconsistent. Sometimes you'll take a corner and you'll turn stiffly, other times you'll barely tap the joystick and you'll go into a crazy drift that you didn't know was possible in an old beat down farm truck.
Alan Wake is a must have for anyone who enjoys a good story, and one you get to experience by playing as well. The narrative of the game is done beautifully, and the pacing of the nighttime/dark areas of the game is set very well. The characters all stand out individually as well, adding their own flavors to the mix. Barry, Alan's friend and agent, get's wrapped up in fighting the darkness and at one point wraps himself in Christmas lights and straps a headlamp to his forehead for protection. This game is great from start to finish and if you own an Xbox 360, I highly recommend finding a place for it in your collection.
The Story
Alan Wake follows the story of a writer who's been hit with a batch of writer's block. He decides on taking some time off to give himself a break, escaping with his wife to the small town of Bright Falls in Washington state where there's a cabin for them to stay at. Alan's agent tells him to unwind and let the creative juices flow, but he adamantly reminds his agent that he's just taking some time off.On drive to the town, Alan has a dream where he is being attacked by shadowy figures until a faceless, god-like voice speaks to him and teaches him to use the power of light to fight the darkness.
When they arrive in town, they head to a diner in town where Alice, Alan's wife, drops him off to get the key from Carl Stucky, the man she talked to, while she goes to the store to pick a few things up. As Alan walks through the diner to find him, he instead runs into a woman dressed all in black who hands him a key for the cabin. He walks back outside and gets in the car, but as they drive off, Carl stumbles out of the diner trying to get their attention : they forgot to pick up their keys.
At the cabin, Alice set's things up while Alan gets the power turned on as his wife as a fear of the dark. When he returns to the cabin, Alice calls him upstairs with a surprise waiting for him. He goes up to discover a typewriter sitting on a desk. She had been hoping to trick him into breaking out of his writer's block by setting him up with a psychologist in town. Furious, Alan storms out of the cabin.
While he's outside, the power cuts out and Alice begins screaming for help. He sprints back to the cabin just in time to see her being pulled off the cliff and into the waters by a mysterious force, so he dives in trying to save her. The next thing he remembers is waking up in a car after it crashing along some rocks. He gets out of the car and starts to hike through the woods to a nearby gas station to call for help. But along the way he finds pages for a manuscript that he wrote but can't remember ever writing, talking about darkness-infested people that must be weakened with light to be destroyed. After finding the pages, they begin to come to life around him as he is attacked by things infested with darkness. He begins fighting them off like in the dream, eventually making it to the gas station and calling the police.
When they get there, he realizes it's been a week between his wife disappearing and him waking up in the crashed car, with no clue about anything that happened in between. He explains his wife has been missing and informs the police where she disappeared from (while leaving out the story of the dark-infested people he knows that nobody will believe), only for the police to tell him that there hasn't been a cabin on the lake he named for years. In disbelief, the police take him back to the lake and he falls in stunned silence as all he sees on the lake is water.
With only his agent to trust, he comes out and Alan confides the full story to him and recruits him in the hunt for his missing wife. Soon after, they receive a call by a man claiming to have Alan's wife hostage and will free her only in exchange for the rest of the manuscript that Alan can't remember writing. With nothing else to do, Alan set's out to try and discover the rest of the story, fight his way through the darkness, and save his wife and his own sanity.
The Controls
Alan Wake's controls are beatifully set up and easy to use. It is a 3rd person shooter game and it doesn't try and get too fancy with the controls.Alan's movement is controlled with the left joystick, and you can look around with the right one, which also controls the direction of the flashlight beam (your one constant and great weapon in the game). The beam will weaken the darkness off of whatever is infected with it, and you can boost the power of the flashlight with the left trigger. The right trigger fires your gun. Unfortunately you don't get an option to aim closer, but with the beam of light you have an always present aiming reticle. You can sprint by holding the left bumper down, or you can tap it and any direction of the left joystick to perform a dodge move. And the right bumper let's you ignite any stick flares you have.
The X button is your weapon reload button, and the faster you tap it the faster you can reload individual bullets). The Y button lets you change the battery in the flashlight if you're in a perdicament that won't allow you to let it recharge. B acts as your action button, picking up items and turning switches on/off in the world, and A is your jump button and is also the main button used in any of the games quick time event's.
There's also a little bit of driving controls in the game, and they take after the norm for driving in almost any other game. Right trigger controls the gas, the left joystick controls your steering, and the left trigger instead of controlling the brake will boost the headlights just like for the flashlight.
Lastly, the D-Pad is your weapon wheel, letting you change between any of the four things you can carry on you at all times.
So a very quick and straightforward set of controls that you can fall into almost as soon as you start up the game. Let's break into it a little bit.
The Gameplay
Alan Wake is a 3rd person shooter, with some puzzle elements throughout. On your quest to find out what happened to your wife, just about everything you come across is your enemy. The main "bad guy" being the darkness that is infecting everyone in the town around you.The game is divided into daytime and nighttime sections. During the daytime, this is where you are fed the majority of the narrative for the story. The pace in these sections is generally pretty slow, mostly consisting of Alan walking around in an area and talking with different people to push the story forward. The majority of the game, however, takes place at nighttime. This is where you face all of your enemies, and take action on the things you learn in the day sections.
Most of your enemies are other humans that have been taken over by the darkness, a smoky layer of blackness over them making them impervious to damage. To weaken them, you must destroy the layer of darkness with light. You can do this with the flashlight that you carry for most of the game, or with different things in the environment that give off light such as street lamps, car headlights, and flares.
Your weapons throughout the game aren't very plentiful, but they each pack more than enough of a punch to do the job. First, you have your flashlights. You can carry one at a time, starting with a basic ordinary flashlight. Eventually you get the option to swap it out for a mag-lite, and finally a heavy duty lantern light. The bigger the light, the faster it brings down your enemies.
For your actual shooting weapons, you can carry a handgun (a 6 shot revolver), a two handed gun, (interchangeable between a shotgun, a pump action shotgun, and a hunting rifle), and a flare gun. The revolver is more than enough to get you through most situations, but if you find yourself getting overwhelmed by enemies, having the shotgun at the ready makes for a great escape plan.
When using your flashlight, just simply aiming it at them is enough to weaken the darkness. Or, you can boost the power of the light and take them down faster, but this will cause the battery in your flashlight to drain slowly. Once you've gotten rid of the darkness, you can use any of the guns to kill them completely. Later in the game, you get the use of flare guns and flash bangs, which let off a quick pulse of light that is able to kill multiple things at once in a small area. You'll also find yourself dealing with objects in the world being consumed by the darkness that will hurl themselves at you. These can be dealt with in the same approach, with the only difference being that they don't need to be shot after the darkness is eliminated.
At some points in the game you'll experience little quick time events. They're not very difficult in themselves, but can be depending on what's going on in the area around you. One example is starting power generators. A small circle comes up with a portion of the circle being green, you must press the A button in this green area a few times in a row to get the generator going. Generally its an easy thing but if the generator is in the middle of the woods and you have some of the Taken swarming around you, it can get to be hectic.
The game itself is played out like a TV show, and is broken down into chapters. Each one begins with a "Previously on Alan Wake" segment, and they end on some sort of a cliffhanger. The chapters all follow a linear path, with some options for exploring if you're going after the collectibles of the coffee thermos's and manuscript pages. You can also interact with radios and signs you come across, giving you background on the people and places in the town of Bright Falls. And you can flip on televisions too and watch clips from a show called Night Springs which draws a lot of inspiration from Twilight Zone.
All in all, Alan Wake is a great play, between the story and the action, you'll be on the edge of your seat every step of the way.
Now, let's break it down a bit.
The Challenge (or lack thereof?)
The challenge that Alan Wake delivers is really dependent on how you handle the scary situations. If you're not a fan of horror themed games and are a little tense playing them, then it could build up into a bit of a challenge for you. If you're more casual about it and it doesn't phase you, then it might not make a difference.The enemies themselves are fairly easy to deal with, it's a matter of balancing them with any others in the area. If they come from the same direction you can sort of roll the flashlight from one to the other, taking them down at a fairly leisurely pace. Sometimes though they come in from all directions and it takes a bit more strategy to deal with them.
Your human-infected enemies come in two forms. There's your normal generic ones that usually wield either hammers, axes, scythes, knives, and they vary in speed as well. For these, boosting the power of the flashlight isn't required. If you have enough distance between you and them, keeping the flashlight trained on them will weaken the darkness in time to deal with them, typically going down in one or two shots. Occasionally you'll come across a bit of a bigger enemy, that stands taller than the others and moves a bit slower. They are tougher as well, requiring you to boost the light and keep it trained on them to weaken the darkness before you shooting them, which also requires more shots.
For the poltergeist items, you'll need to boost your flashlight for these as well. When they come to life, they'll start to vibrate before they lift off the ground, hovering for a few seconds and flying out in your direction. The best approach with these is when they start to lift off the ground, get yourself standing with something in between you and it. Anything at all whether it be a tree or lamp post or vehicle, anything. Your quick dodge won't move you far enough or fast enough if you try using it at the last second, but if you set up something as a blocker, you can render their attacks useless pretty easily.
The collectibles are optional, but a lot of them are already in your path, especially the manuscript pages. Reading these when you pick them up is a very useful thing to do. Since the pages of the story are whats coming to life around you, reading them will give you hints at what can get you out of an upcoming situation.
In the end, the game delivers pretty fairly. You can always adjust the difficulty level if you're looking for more of a challenge, and some of the manuscript pages can only be found on the higher difficulty levels. So let's look at the ups and downs of this game.
PROS
Plot - Alan Wakes plot might not be one of the best in gaming in general, but it's a gem in the world of horror games. Nowadays, a lot of horror games to focus their push on either over the top gore, or jump scares. And with your main enemy in Alan Wake being the darkness itself, you would expect a decent amount of focus to be put on scaring the player at every corner, but it's not. Don't get me wrong, it is definitely a factor, but it's not the only one, nor is it the deciding one. Especially when you compare it with other games around the same time like Dead Space which put a heavy amount of jump scares in it with the aliens literally popping out at you from what felt like every wall, Alan Wake is a much tamer game.Playing a horror game where the main character is a writer, the game makes the story the driving point of it all much like a writer would do with their story, and it's filled to brim with lots of symbolism and mythology of it's own.
Homage to the classics - This game draws a lot of it's influence from classic authors and horror movies, and it makes sure the player knows this as well. One of the main sources is Stephen King, who is mentioned directly numerous times. His work The Shining is a big influence for the game too (an author suffers a bit of a psychotic break and begins hallucinating things around him?) and a couple of iconic moments from it are put into the game; the scene with the door being broken down with an ax is done with Alan in place of Wendy, and later in the game Alan escapes from a lodge that looks quite a lot like the Overlook, and his escape is made through a hedge maze.
In addition, the FBI agent who begins hunting down Wake starts taunting him by shouting different classic author names at him every time the cross paths. The objects coming to life with the dark presence and hurling themselves at Alan is inispired by Poltergeist, and the town of Bright Falls itself is a reference to Twin Peaks.
Remedy also threw in a couple of nods to themselves and their previous big game before Alan Wake, Max Payne. A couple of the manuscript pages you discover earlier in the game aren't connected to any of the rest, and are narrated by the voice actor behind Max Payne himself. Late in the game, in a flashback, you wake up hung over and go to get some painkillers to feel better.
CONS
- All fight, no flight. A lot of horror games give you optional combat, you can choose to take down everything in your path, or scoot around them, save ammo, and leave them behind. With Alan Wake, you don't get the choice. If you run on ahead, the game will slow down and pull the view back, showing all the enemies you're forgetting closing in on you and forcing you to face your fears and the darkness.- The driving. It's just horrible. No matter which vehicle you're in it handles the same, which is very inconsistent. Sometimes you'll take a corner and you'll turn stiffly, other times you'll barely tap the joystick and you'll go into a crazy drift that you didn't know was possible in an old beat down farm truck.
Final Verdict
Alan Wake is a must have for anyone who enjoys a good story, and one you get to experience by playing as well. The narrative of the game is done beautifully, and the pacing of the nighttime/dark areas of the game is set very well. The characters all stand out individually as well, adding their own flavors to the mix. Barry, Alan's friend and agent, get's wrapped up in fighting the darkness and at one point wraps himself in Christmas lights and straps a headlamp to his forehead for protection. This game is great from start to finish and if you own an Xbox 360, I highly recommend finding a place for it in your collection.
