![]() In particular, Alan's voice actor would frequently misplace emphasis while reading manuscript pages, or make grammar mistakes while speaking lines. Part of this was the voice acting, which felt off in a lot of places. It felt like they were trying way too hard to be edgy and weird. A game that gave me a similar feeling was Bioshock Infinite, but in that game, I found myself coveting every Voxophone for more backstory, whereas in Alan Wake, I was not as interested in the Night Springs and radio segments. I found myself searching every corner of every structure I entered, on the hunt for coffee thermoses, chests, and manuscript pages. There are different weapons, collectibles, and extras to hunt down each time and it never feels stale. Passing back through parts of Bright Falls doesn't feel repetitive it feels new every time, depending on how the developers staged objects. This game also does an excellent job reusing environments. I found myself getting lost in the Twin Peaks-like atmosphere of this game: the freight trains, Main Streets, farms, mountain peaks, all of it was the Pacific Northwest to a T. By default, it's at this weird angle over Wake's shoulder, and it whips around when you're trying to see where enemies are coming from, forcing you to do a 180° whenever Taken pop out of the woods. The one gameplay complaint I have, that I can't chalk up to Alan Wake's physique, is the camera. It wouldn't make sense if he played like John Wick. He's just a normal dude in his 40s who doesn't exercise much and is put in this harrowing situation without warning. He has annoyingly low stamina, feels slow and heavy, can't jump very well. It feels like a godsend after getting through a segment where you're not provided a weapon, like in Episode 3.Īnother note about gameplay is that Alan Wake is no action hero, and that's a relief. In many other games, once you get a hold of higher-level weapons, you end up ditching the lower ones, but in Alan Wake, the revolver remains valuable until the very end. Until late in the game, you get a very limited amount of high-powered weapons like flashbangs and flare gun ammo, so I usually treated them as last resorts. Just 3 Taken feels like a lot if you're only armed with your revolver. The game does not need to throw huge amounts of enemies at you for you to feel overwhelmed. Along with this, Alan only takes a few hits before he dies, so it's incredibly gratifying when you scrape by a fight with low health, or start a generator just in the nick of time as a Taken reaches you. It genuinely feels like survival horror, with an emphasis on survival. ![]() All your guns are manually loaded, no magazines, so you have to pace your shots well and always keep an eye on your ammo. You are limited to a realistic amount (42 for the revolver for example), and you reload your weapons at a realistic speed. Unlike other games, you cannot fill your pockets with hundreds of rounds of ammo. ![]() ![]() having to light up enemies before being able to shoot them). Combat is fluid, satisfying, and follows a unique but coherent set of rules (i.e. The gameplay is solid, despite the controls taking some getting used to. The one thing that elevated the story for me was the manuscript pages―getting an eerie warning about what was about to happen from pages littered on the ground. I found Alan to be a cardboard character, indistinguishable from any other writerly, tormented man protagonist. The game often fell into the tropey WHERE IS MY WIFE thriller blueprint. However, there were some points where I found it hard to care what was happening in the story. The symbolism of a writer using light to banish darkness was cool, and lent itself to creativity because of all the different ways light appears in the story: flashlights, power lines, fire, flares, streetlamps, etc. I feel like it's rare for video games to feature a story about writing, let alone to make that kind of story fun to play. The story was just okay, but definitely unique. I wasn't expecting this to be a horror game, but it does that very well. I never heard about this game when it was released I only had a vague idea of what it was from videogamedunkey's mention of it, and I was expecting a psychological thriller with a convoluted story.
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