Nothing's scarier than bugs.
The very first chapter will lead you to believe that this game takes after Twin Peaks, but all hell breaks lose quite quickly and quite fast. The setup has you playing as Alan Wake, a writer, who visits Bright Falls for a spell with his wife. While getting used to their new life, Alan's wife disappears and he wakes up in the middle of the forest, one week later. It only gets creepier, since as you play through the game you can collect manuscripts from Alan's book, and these pages will tell about stuff that has already happened... as well as about stuff that is going to happen later in the chapter. There's a strong component of psychological horror in this game, and it's rather interesting to be honest.
The game is fairly linear, and this is not a survival horror game. You won't hurt for ammo, and the ammunition cap on every weapon means that if you're not regularly using your guns you're wasting ammo, heck, after each new chapter your inventory resets, so there's no point to hoarding. Combat is interesting but quickly grows stale, armed with a gun and a flashlight, you have to focus the light of your flashlight on an enemy for a few seconds to make it susceptible to gunfire, rinse and repeat. You can obtain a few weapons, such as flashbang grenades and a flaregun that instantly bypasses the darkness shield, but for the most part, you're stuck in the same loop: Run towards your next objective, come upon enemies, focus the light, kill them, move on.
All that said, the last couple of chapters are incredibly exciting, it's when the story gets the most enthralling, the set-pieces get crazier and the characters really get to shine. Even when it's silly, you just can't help but smile. It's a slow burn, but when it gets good, it gets GOOD.
The shooting is fairly simple and uninvolved, the closest thing to precision aiming is focusing your flashlight, but as long as the camera is aiming in the general direction of the enemy your bullets will hit, as Alan seems to be a good shot. You don't always need to slay every enemy in sight, as running towards a light source will immediately despawn enemies and heal you. That said, it's not too long before the Darkness, the enemy that haunts Alan, will start possessing inanimate objects, including a giant tractor, and these can only be defeated with your flashlight or light-based tools, such as the flare gun.
There is some clunkiness to movement, but I'll chalk it up to age. It's not awful, but sometimes you'll come across invisible walls in awkward places or find it easy to sloppily fall from an edge. It's not too bad, really.
While it's a rather OK game, there are quite a few issues with this release that really soured my experience with it. Firstly, the game includes the first two DLCs but not American Nightmare, a standalone mini-release that advances the plot of the series. Then there's the fact that a ton of cutscenes, maybe most of them, are unsynced with the audio, sometimes egregiously so, sometimes only just so that you can tell that there's something off. How the game shipped like this is completely baffling, as you simply cannot ignore the audio issues.
And those are the least of the game's issues. By Chapter 3 I had gone through three crashes, the third one corrupted my Statistics Progression, thankfully not my in-game progression, but while I was able to continue the game from where it last autosaved, all the collectibles I found were gone. All my exploration? For naught. I even lost all the manuscript pages I had found. Ridiculous. What's more, pretty much every chapter crashed at least once, chapter 4 crashed twice in fact. This is unacceptable. And one time, the ground failed to load.
As for DLCs.... DLC #1: The Signal takes place directly after the ending, so it should be played after finishing the game,... plus, it's way harder than the main game. Pretty early on, you must visit a house, and you after triggering a cutscene... the whole house became invisible. No kidding. And of course, it crashed too, What a mess. As for the plot itself, it's... unfulfilling, Alan pretty much ends up where he started.
DLC #2 is The Writer, and it takes place after The Signal, although all things considered, you can play it after the main game and you wouldn't be missing too much! It's as challenging as the other DLC, but the story is much more fulfilling. That said, while it reuses pretty much everything from the original game, much like the other DLC, it does so in a much more surreal fashion, making it a helluva lot more interesting. Oh! And this one didn't crash, for a change.
Alan Wake is a decent game, but this remaster does it no favors. Maybe the patches fixed all the crushes, but the game shouldn't have shipped like this, and I looked online, and every single version of this game is very buggy. It's a shame, but the scariest thing about the game is dreading the moment the next crash comes.
5.0
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