Fear of darkness is one of man’s elemental instincts that is suppressed by the most. This is the cause why light and darkness were always the fundamental tools of the horror genre – the simple and ingenious idea is just that: forge weapons from light against opponents made from darkness.
Alan Wake, the American bestselling author became famous around the world by his crime and thriller novels. He has a seemingly perfect life with an overzealous manager, a nice house, a beautiful wife, a career going up and lots of fans – but he is troubled by what can haunt any artist at least once in a lifetime. He has writer’s block, and as a result he didn’t write a line for two years. His wife, the charming Alice arranges a second honeymoon trip to the picturesque town of Bright Falls, where she hopes Alan can find not just romantic moments but some inspiration too.
However, Alan finds nothing else but doubts, pain and terror. What’s more; these horrors come alive from the pages of his newest work in progress. Of course he – the player – doesn’t remember writing any new novel.
There is no way to tell more about the story without spoilers, because surprises are coming continuously, starting from the first moment of the game. This is one of the main aspects that defines the atmosphere and gameplay of Alan Wake. The story is living and movie-like in almost every moment; it makes you forget that you are knocking around on the levels of a game. Luckily, there is not a hint of the well-known feeling of being a jumping-jack: “go here, go there, don’t be curious at all!” It is more like an interactive novel, or with a more thankful metaphor; like a high quality series in the psychological thriller genre. Deliberately; the developers emphasized this aspect of the atmosphere with main titles and “previously on…” parts between the episodes. (At the first time I almost fall off my chair in surprise when the rich voice of the narrator said: “Previously on Alan Wake…”)
Hearing it the first time you could be averse from this episodic structure of the game, but I can tell you with an easy conscience: it creates an original mood. Furthermore, every episode ends with a punch line, and you will have a little time to breath again at the beginning of every new episode. (As it is customary in the horror genre; The most fearful scenes make place for more hopeful and brighter ones just to be surprised by the next nightmare.)
There are six such episodes with playtime between 2 and 4 or 5 hours. The difference is in being more or less exhaustive; on normal difficulty you can rush through the episodes and each of them takes approximately 2 hours – but if you want to collect the extras or roam about the bigger or hidden areas, you will need much more time. (On hard and nightmare difficulty level it is suggested to search for hidden items and ammunition!)
The game begins with a nice tutorial in Alan’s nightmare. After this he arrives at the beautiful little town (I think it’s far the most gorgeous landscape beside Skyrim). (This is a bit daring statement; I can tell some examples – Garcius) It is a very usual upland town on the north part of the US. With a fair lake and breathtaking valleys, hills and pinewoods around. At first look I didn’t think about it as a set scene for a horror story (Northern Exposure, instead), but I felt the potency in it. The town in the valley is covered by thick fog at nights, and the endless mountains bar it from the outside world. Alan was still on the ferry – Alice snapped some pics and you can talk to the elderly anchorman of the local radio station –, when the shadows of Stephen King‘s works emerged before my mind’s eye. Mostly Secret Window and The Shining. Or Twin Peaks, in general.
The environment and the town itself, what’s more, almost the whole game has a definite odor. The sound effects, the richly detailed graphics, the lifelike characters, and such tiny elements of mood as the dust particles shining in the light like diamonds or the falling leaves from the swaying leefage – all of them draws our thoughts and imagination into this piece of art. After the first ten minutes there was a big chance that a bomb exploding in my room wouldn’t grab me out of the adventure.
In the gameplay it is vital to interact with other characters frequently. The town really lives and moves, and the inhabitants are virtually real people you can talk to for long (really long) periods of time. As in real life, people are not waiting for you to press any button; they simply start talking, and not rarely they react on your doings.
If you find a radio, you can listen to it for a long time without repetition, and you can watch television that is interesting mostly in the evening, when short horror movies are screened in the Night Falls series.
So Bright Falls is a living and breathing town. At least when Alan arrives…
Maybe the most exciting draw of the Alan Wake is the (active!) use of lights. The story tells about a dark power enslaving the locals to turn them to its own side. The abyss takes Alice, and waking up after a car crash the writer finds himself in an altered settlement, while he is haunted by the shadow and voice of a woman dressed like a widow. By the start the story seems very simple, almost conventional, but the first episode falsifies this more than one time. Soon the darkness starts to chase Alan, as it is, full blown, and you realizes again and again that he can “trust anyone in the darkness!”
But there is the light! Besides its gameplay, lots of readable and watchable content, the game is still belongs to the survival horror, or as it calls itself, the psyhological action thriller genre. Your main weapon is light, because the opponents are conquered by darkness itself. That means a flashlight serves not just as a tool of orientation but as a weapon too. (Later you can use bigger lights, handheld or fixed dazzle lights, streetlights and firecrackers.)
The people ruled by darkness (they are called Taken), as the most frequent opponents, can be defeated only by light. Your flashlight will be your biggest help in this, because you have to focus the light on your enemies for a time to “discharge” their dark defense (it’s like an energy shield or field around them). This happens with a spectacular explosion of light, after which Alan can shoot them with a handgun. Because of this importance of the flashlight you have to watch the status and amount of the batteries as well as the ammo. There are not too much types of enemies and there are no huge monsters (if an animated harvester doesn’t count), but combat is bloodcurdling and exciting even for the hundredth time.
Doubtless, the arsenal of weapons adds to this, because you can use a flash bomb like a grenade, you can keep Takens at a distance with a torch, and a signal flare works like a riot control rocket launcher. Besides all of these, dodge is another important element of combat. It is spectacular – they screened it with movie-like slowdown, and it is simply cool –, but it also has some practical benefits, because without good reflexes you won’t bear for long in the darkness. It came into my mind more than once that Bear Grylls should make an episode in the new season of Extreme Survival titled “Survival Tactics in Bright Falls”…
Besides portable weapons Alan can use his environment too. In the game you can find dazzle lights, lamps and other light sources on several locations. These can make a real massacre among the “black ones” and the animated vehicles.
So the combat scenes are movie-like, and using light makes it a unique showpiece. I always cared about the story much more than about fighting and action, I have to admit I had an ear-to-ear smile more than once while I cut myself through the mass of enemies (mass means 10 opponents at most, and more would make you an underdog). I can’t imagine more exciting action scene than when there are shadows closing on in all directions, you light a red torch and drop it to make the darkness backing away with a loud hiss. You grab your flashlight and a handgun, shotgun or any other weapon, then you can win the match unharmed and almost without a move. Of course, it is the rarest case, because you have to spare the ammunition, especially the ones for the stronger firearms. Anyway, there were some moments when I was feasting and threw light and lead around beyond measure…
As I mentioned, light is a tool for orientation too. Checkpoints are generally under the bigger light sources, and Alan can also regenerate at those points. There is no ‘save’ option in the game, but luckily there are reload points after every 10 or 20 minutes.
By all means, it is worth to mention the Alan Wake’s external references in respect of both games and literature. The story says Alan is a bestseller author, so it seemed unavoidable to feature a few real and famous horror writers at least indirectly. The whole story begins with a quotation from Stephen King, but later you can meet the legendary bush labyrinth from The Shining, the most famous piece of the master. Another famous writer, H. P. Lovecraft is not just mentioned (not once) in the game, but there are references to his short stories. (Joke is; I never felt myself this close to the world of Lovecraft, even in the Call of Cthulhu game.)
It seems a bit overwrought to mention Hitchcock in a horror game, principally in relation with The Birds, but in this case it was almost unavoidable. The crow is a symbol of darkness almost everywhere in the world, so you will meet huge crowd of crows. (I must make a remark; I think they are the most fearful and annoying opponents in the game – and it still works.) These clouds of crows are really big. What you could see in the Resident Evil or in any other game can be only a group of nestlings compared to their amount in Bright Falls. Sometimes you can see them from far away as they are flying on the sky in hundreds, enshrouding the full moon and blacking the air above.
In regard to games we cannot let alone a certain title or series; Silent Hill. There is no straight reference to the great ancestor, but the developers could not deny inspiration, mining of ideas and deep respect. The inbred atmosphere of the town, the fog, the car crash and the motivation of the main character – he is searching for a missing girl, his wife in this case – are all elements reminding me to the Silent Hill series. It’s said stealing from the good source is not a sin, and the Alan Wake is a school example of this. In the first half an hour I thought it simply a Silent Hill clone with a main hero being mixed from Harry and James, but luckily the game showed me a fig, then by being independent and unique it pitched my misbeliefs.
Among today’s great titles it is almost necessary for a game to be somehow epic and/or monumental. We may ponder on what titles started this tradition (and I have some ideas), but it’s unnecessary to brood on this. In fact, this can be done ridiculously, for its own sake or very ambitiously. Question is; how does the Alan Wake do it?
Luckily, the game does it on the latter way. It is epic and meant for effect just as a similar TV series would be. To tell an example; chased by a crazed axeman (if you don’t understand the reference, Alan mentions Jack Nicholson‘s famous scene from The Shining) I reached a seemingly safe house at the beginning of the game. After Alan more or less collects himself, the bulldozer in front of the house comes alive and comes at the house totally of itself.
This is a massive house, I told myself, so there will be no big trouble. However, the house was built on the edge of a chasm, so – why not – Alan and the whole structure start falling. You have only seconds to save his hide, and after Alan jumps out, you can see how the building topples with a big crash and kisses the ground at the foot of the mountain. (Later you can walk past the ruins.)
Such and similar scenes happen in every episode, more than once, so (and this is most exciting) you will never feel yourself safe.
And there is the fact that just as the above mentioned bulldozer, any object can attack Alan, if it is gripped by the darkness. The first time I saw a wrecked car going up and towards me with horrible speed, I could hardly cling to the dodge button before it made minced meat from Alan. I’ve never thought that once I will write something like this down: A floating refrigerator can be dreadful too…
Whoa, it seems everything is perfect! The game is epic, the story is full of twists and excitement, the action is blood-boiling. But really is everything all right? After five years of development this is a perfect game? Of course, not.
It is not perfect, but I need to add that I’ve never met any other game in this genre so close to perfection. The most annoying error was the animation of certain movements. The animations of running and fighting are amazing, but if Alan wants to jump over a fence or up to a box, it is far from the nice movements of Resi’s newest or Shattered Memories. He simply appears on the box – if the move is successful at first time. If not, he just will be popping before the obstacle with two feet closed for a time. It is like jumping high without hands and with two feet closed. All right, sometimes Alan uses his hands, but after five years of development it is simply lowly.
Another similar thing is door opening. Alan doesn’t grab the knob; he just crashes into the door headlong. It seems as if using the doorknob is too much for a bestseller author of many trials.
However, it may be unbelievable, but these errors don’t spoil the experience. I’ve tried to be very evenhanded and objective, but still… I couldn’t find any more failures. More than once I had to force myself to stop playing, because I was afraid of not having it tomorrow. I was so embarrassed I must have looked around for reviews in the world press, but I found the same. And the game got shamelessly high points.
By videos and screenshots the Alan Wake would seem some kind of tube-crawling, but it is true only if you rush through the events on the main paths between the checkpoints. However, in the woods you can go off the path anywhere, and sometimes you can find surprisingly big areas. Wandering about these areas is both exciting and worthwhile in the same time, because Alan can find lots of extras. The most important hidden items are the pages of Alan’s lost novel, properly so called the novel version of the game’s story.
As I mentioned – and I tell no secret, because it was in the trailers –, Alan recognizes the horrible events as scenes from his own novel (moreover, other characters realize it too). Accordingly, parallel to the story you can find parts of the book that help to discover the forgotten memories, and sometimes events of the future too. These pages of the novel get an active role in the game, and if you want to find all of them, sometimes you surely must make detours and walk into the thick and dark unknown.
As it goes, finding the missing pages (I think) is one of the most exciting game challenges of all times. Of course, it is not too hard to give this title, if you have to go off the safe path so frequently to find a page, and the game bombs you with interesting information all the time. This way, “achievements” and the story details are motivating the search equally. However, some pages can be found only on Nightmare difficulty, which unlocks after the first playthrough. This gamer-annoying collecting makes me mention that, personally, I found the funniest and seemingly most reasonable achievements of recent times in this game. I didn’t feel like – in spite of a lot of other games – the developers programmed a heap of crappy achies into it just because they had to put together that magical 1000 points.
It’s strange but I almost forget the visuals. I think it carried me with itself, so it’s time to live down. No doubt, the game is beautiful, but its beauty has two sides. The landscape is amazing, and all the time I had the feeling I can see things kilometers away (in some places, it is exactly the case). The developers built a gigantic and unbelievably detailed world for the six episodes. Watched closely, perhaps some textures are a bit rough, but I’ve never seen such a living and thick forest and shrubbery in games before. The animation of the trees as the wind tears into their foliage gave me the creeps more than once.
I think it’s not surprising if I tell the visuals of the lights are almost perfect. I’ve seen such realistic light effects maybe never before. It also adds to the atmosphere, and you can feel yourself like a half-god with a long-range dazzle light in hand – and with a few flash grenades in the other hand. Of course, they do nothing against humans, but in the Alan Wake survival may depends on treasures like these. Besides, they look hell good. As a special characteristic of the landscape – as I mentioned – nothing blocks your view, so you can see the location you want to reach even in the beginning of the given episode.
On the whole, the Alan Wake is gorgeous and dazzling, but not the most beautiful game I’ve ever seen. I must repeat myself: Bright Falls and its environment are living. There is no trace of sterility and illogical events like in some other games. The build of the “levels” is rational, and you can always feel the presence of wild nature. The streets of the town, the thick woods, the mountain paths, the mines and the abandoned, ruined mining towns make the locations believable and likeable. Earlier I’ve felt the same only in the town of Silent Hill. The closed, tube-like and ‘optimized for video gaming’ build of Racoon City is far away from the little town of Bright Falls.
I have to mention the car-scenes that are little but atmospheric elements of the game. They are nothing like the horrible, pre-rendered scenes in the Alone in the Dark; you can get on or off the vehicle at any moment when there are no six shadows around it, or Alan not just knocks them down with his car.
These action scenes make the game a survival horror, but it is only half of the truth; the story is more like a psycho-horror series in the television. Instead of monsters Alan fights against the shadows of (virtually) real people and meets real people whose are attentive only to their own pity and selfish desires. They hate, lie, fear and love as their goals dictate it. Unfortunately, this is missing from most of the survival horror games released in the recent years.
So, it’s a multilayered game, a real rarity nowadays. On the whole, I don’t know what took five years of development in this game, but f*ck, it was worthwhile to wait!
A lot of people says it is short and unfinished. I can’t agree entirely, because it wasn’t short for me. I spent app. 4 hours with each episode (I wanted to get the pages of the novel; and I did it!), but this mainly depends on the player. If you have no time, you can rush through the episodes, but I don’t advise it. I think you are not used to jump over pages in a good book, and if you are watching a good TV series, you will wait the ads break to go out and do a leak.
However, the story may be whole, but it’s still unfinished. On my part, I wouldn’t call it a fail at all, because it was announced before the release that there will be new downloadable episodes expanding and advancing the story, till the second part comes. (It is not a question!) If you feel like something is missing at the end, perhaps you would be glad to know that no half of Bright Falls was explored, and the enigmatic landscape still hides some mysteries.
The Alan Wake is a matured, adult game that gives long-lasting experience. Not to mention the fact that if H. P. Lovecraft’s and Ozzy Osbourne‘s name stands beside each other, then it fundamentally should be a good game.
No, Alan, don’t wake up now! I hope we may wander in the world of your bloodcurdling brainchildren for years.
—Árnyék—
Title: Alan Wake
Publisher: Remedy Entertainment
Developer: Remedy Entertainment
Homepage: http://www.alanwake.com/
Style: horror, psycho-thriller, action
What I liked:
great atmosphere
interactive movie
bloodcurdling story and gameplay
What I didn’t like:
lame moves here and there
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