Alan Wake is an Xbox 360 survival horror game released in the long long ago time known as 2010. It did not do very well when it was originally released but was a bit of a cult classic and went on to sell over 3 million copies. Survival horror is a dying genre in video games and I heard that Alan Wake was not the worst game on the market and it is currently $4.99 on XBLA so I promptly bought it and began to play.
Let's begin with the story, oh and spoilers. Alan Wake is a best selling author who is suffering from writer's block. He and his wife Alice decide to go to the small town of Bright Springs for vacation. They have to take a ferry ride over Cauldron Lake to Bright Springs and on the ferry they meet a local radio personality who admits to being a fan of Wake's. Here we see Alan's famous bad attitude as he blows off the man saying that he just wants to be left alone. Something this game does really well is that every character in the game feels like a real person. Alan occasionally seems like a stuck up celebrity and will fight with his spouse at times, he is far from perfect but that kind of makes you root for him more. Also while on the ferry, Alice mentions a creepy man watching them and Alan gets a call from his agent Barry. All of these people become important characters later on in the game. Later, when the Wakes get to the cabin, the power goes out and we learn of Alice's fear of the dark. Alan goes and turns the generator on by way of a quicktime event that will be used many more times throughout the game. (Now let me just take a moment here and say that I know it seems that I am focusing a lot on the first hour or so of the game but that is just because they did a brilliant job of setting up future character interactions.) Alan makes his way back inside and finds out that Alice has set up a typewriter in the hopes of getting him writing again. She has been speaking to a local doctor, Dr. Hartman who specializes in artists and wants to see him. Alan is offended and storms out. He then hears her scream and returns to the cabin to find it empty. He makes it down to the lake and sees Alice sinking. Alan jumps in after her and wakes up a week later in a car with no memory of what happened.
This is where the game really begins. Alan begins finding pages to a manuscript that he has no memory of writing but it is titled Departure which is the same title that he was planning on using for his next book. What's even stranger is that the pages seem to predict the future. The police are after Wake and he begins seeing these shadows in the shape of people that are attacking him. Wake is not even sure if he is sane anymore but the one thing that he does know is that Alice is still alive somewhere. Alan begins to hear tales of another writer who went through something similar named Thomas Zane.
Alan discovers that there is a dark presence living in Cauldron Lake and it does something to the artists here. It uses their work to become real and gain power. It did this to Zane years ago and it took his wife in order to make him write and now the darkness was doing the same to Wake. During the week that Wake could not remember, the darkness came to Wake and told him to write a story and that would bring back Alice; but in reality all it would do would make the darkness stronger. Somehow Alan realized this and wrote Zane into his story. Zane busted into the cabin in his awesome big daddy flashlight suit and freed Wake. Wake crashes a car escaping from the cabin and that is the game's beginning.
Since Wake never finished his manuscript his and Alice's story doesn't have an ending. Alan fights his way back to the cabin and sits at the typewriter. He tells us that the reason Zane never got his wife back was because a sacrifice must be made. Zane just tried to write a happy ending where he and his wife walked off into the sunset but it was never going to be that kind of story. Wake realized this and wrote something that would bring his wife back. We then see Alice swim to the surface of Cauldron Lake and climb onto a nearby dock. She struggles for breath and asks for Alan. The last scene of the game is Alan typing away at the typewriter surrounded by darkness. He then seems to come out of a trance and say, "It's not a lake it's an ocean."
Wow this was a long one but thanks for staying with me those of you that did. While playing this game, I knew that I was going to write this blog. And I thought after I summarized the story I would talk about what the game got right and then go through the long list of things they got wrong; but the longer I played that list of this they got wrong got shorter and shorter and the list of right got longer and longer.
So first off what did they get wrong. This game is supposed to be a survival horror game where you play as a regular joe. As I said before the story line does a really good job of making you feel like your just a regular guy; the gameplay, however does not. At one point in the game Alan says he has never even carried a gun before a few days ago. If that is true why is it that whatever he points his flashlight at he hits without issue. Alan Wake is the greatest natural marksman in history which also takes out a lot of the horror. The enemies or, the taken as they are referred to in the game, are decently scary looking but they are not threatening in the least since Alan never misses any of his shots. And the last thing that I disliked about this game was the way the voices matched up with the facial animations. The graphics still looked great today which is saying a lot since this is a 2010 game but when it came to editing in the audio, it's like they didn't even try.
Which brings me to the voice acting. At first I hated it and rightfully so, it's awful but I think it's supposed to be terrible. You need to remember, the entire game you are playing through a horror novel written by a man who has never written a horror novel and who hasn't written anything for a couple of years. The dialogue is corny and it sounds like something you would hear in a bad movie or horror book. A good example is the Night Springs television show that you can find on TV sets scattered throughout the world. They are essentially homages to old Outer Limits episodes except they are laughably bad. At one point when Alan puts on an episode of Night Springs Barry will say that Alan used to write for the show. At another point in the game, Alan comes across a man who is dying. He tells Alan that it was his best friend who did it to him. He then says something along the lines of, 'this is like a bad movie sequel, when they make the best friend the bad guy. Who writes this crap anyway?'
Maybe I'm giving remedy studios too much credit but for $4.99 I had a lot of fun. I know that this post wasn't very funny but there really wasn't that much for me to joke about. The story is complicated as hell but it still fit the tone of the game well. I don't know what else to say. The game is five bucks if you haven't already go and buy it... GO!
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