Last year, Remedy Entertainment celebrated its 30th anniversary along with the 15th anniversary of the release of the first Alan Wake game earlier in the year. This series has been on my "to play" list for a while, but in my typical fashion, I was a bit slow to get started. After a reminder from Amazon Luna that the game was available to play, I decided to take the time to finally get into it and check out both the series and the streaming platform.

Alan Wake is an atmospheric horror game about its titular character, who is an author undergoing a massive writer's block. He vacations with his wife in a rural spot, staying at a cabin on a lake as a way to get away from everything and reset himself. However, things go wrong as a darkness encroaches on the area, taking over. It results in his wife's disappearance, and most of the game is spent in a desperate search to find her. Along the way, Alan encounters pages of what seem to be his own writing but which he doesn't recall creating. These pages detail scenes from a novel, but as he continues on in his search, it becomes clear that what is written on each one is coming to life.

The game is told in a series of six episodes, with two bonus episodes that were originally provided as DLC.

Running through the Dark with a Flashlight

Although there are some daytime "normal world" scenes, most of the game takes place in a "nightmare world" of danger controlled by the shadows. At first, you can do nothing but run through the darkness, searching for the safety of light until you can pick up some equipment, including a flashlight and gun. The flashlight is a crucial tool because the shadow surrounding each enemy makes that enemy impervious to gunfire, so as much as you shoot, nothing will happen to your foes unless you break the shadow by concentrating the flashlight on them first. Concentrating your flashlight beam uses up a lot of energy, so, although the flashlight does recharge over time, it's a good idea to collect backup batteries so you can quickly focus the beam again when facing multiple enemies.

The game does have a warning for players affected by photosensitivity, but I found the game deceptive in just how bad this could be. Because the game is so dark, it can feel very easy on the eyes for players who generally can't stand bright screens. However, the beams of light from safe areas, flashlights, flares, and bursting enemies create a high level of contrast to the dark. This contributes to the excellent cinematic scenery and atmosphere but also makes it very easy to trigger players with photosensitivity issues even if it might not seem bad at the time.

The Surreal Reality of a Thriller Writer

One of the great draws of this game is its story premise - that of a writer possibly trapped within his own story. The story is told in an episodic fashion with gaps in time or sudden leaps of location between episodes. This contributes greatly to a surreal feel and makes a player question the truth of the situation and what is going on. However, for me, it did this a little too well. The tutorial nightmare had me viewing each transition into the bizarre as a reality to fully question and I wasn't sure if this game was supposed to be taken as given or if the entire game was just Wake himself attempting to write a story about him writing a story with none of it actually occurring at all. I felt distanced from the plot rather than being part of the plot and I think I probably would have gotten a bit more out of the game if someone had told me to just take everything he was experiencing as reality and fully suspend disbelief going into this one.

Even playing with too skeptical a state of mind, I was still able to enjoy the plot to some extent. The very cheesy writing on each of the manuscript pages scattered throughout the world certainly made me feel that Wake wasn't a particularly strong writer, but it helped to set the mood by giving a small glimpse into things to come, making me anticipate upcoming conflicts or question "is this describing something that already happened or am I going to have to face an enemy like this again?" It was a great way of adding a bit of dread and suspense to each level. Unfortunately, several of the pages only exist on the highest difficulty, forcing players into that mode if they want to read every page.

Tough Repetition

I played through this game on Normal mode, which is my typical way to try for a more "standard user experience" but I didn't do my research first and hadn't realized that the original version of the game labeled its difficulties as Normal, Hard, and Nightmare vs the PC port (and Remastered version) labeling the difficulties as Easy, Normal, and Nightmare. In this sense, I was actually playing on the original Hard mode and, though it was still at a good level for me to be able to complete the game without switching modes, there were a few spots where I was getting to the point of boredom from the tedious task of repeating a section over and over, which interrupted the cinematic flow and killed the horror mood.

Spawns were scripted to have certain enemies appear when reaching certain points, which helped me to know roughly where the enemies would appear on a retry and I found myself regularly counting bullets since each enemy type takes a set number of bullets to kill. This wasn't as helpful when it came to situations in which I knew I was going to be swarmed. I was at least grateful that Luna streaming seemed to be fairly stable even on Wi-Fi and I rarely had to deal with lag interrupting my play, but the repetition was still an annoyance, especially when a checkpoint triggered just before picking up equipment, meaning I needed to pick it up again on each retry.

I did work around this a little—if I could see a lamp coming up, I knew that was most likely going to be a checkpoint, so I could search the area nearby for ammo before stepping into the light to avoid needing to collect it again in the future. Of course, this did risk losing more progress if I got downed while going after ammo, but the game audio did a great job of keeping me aware of enemy presence, so the risk was minimal.

Quick Reference

Alan Wake is an episodic thriller third-person shooter.
Best played in a dark room with a suspension of disbelief.

Strengths:

• Gorgeous scenery.
• High-quality audio crucial to an atmospheric thriller.
• Surreal episodic plot with Twilight Zone vibes.

Weaknesses:

• Gameplay can be deceptively brutal for photosensitive players.
• Some plot-related content is only available on the highest difficulty setting.
• Checkpoint autosaves only with no manual saving available.