14) Alan Wake (2010)

After releasing Max Payne in 2001 and Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne in 2003, the team at Remedy Entertainment took some time to recover from the crunch and started coming up with concepts for a new project. Among them, a deeper narrative story influenced by the works of Stephen King and David Lynch. To further distance this new project from the incredibly linear, action style games they'd made previously, the original concept was an open world sandbox game with a heavy emphasis on survival. After three years of development, and after missing numerous publisher milestones, the team decided to refocus on what the core of the game would be. After about two months, they came to a revised gameplay loop that allowed them to break the game into smaller, more linear chapters. This was further divided into distinct day and night sections, with the daytime spent exploring and talking to NPCs, and the nighttime sections focusing on survival horror style action.

I was skeptical of the game when it first released in 2010, having been unimpressed with the narrative of Remedy's previous work and having an aversion to the survival horror genre. I am, at heart, a coward who avoids the spook 'ems at all cost. With a huge cult fanbase and a remaster in 2021, I decided to finally give in and see what all the fuss was about. What I found was a game that wears its inspirations on its sleeves, and utilizes the action horror genre in a fun and engaging way.

The story begins with acclaimed author, Alan Wake, travelling to the small Washington town of Bright Falls with his wife, Alice, at the behest of his friend and agent, Barry Wheeler. Alan, though a bestselling crime fiction author, has been suffering from writer's block, and what is sold to him as a vacation with his wife is actually an effort to help him break through this and get back to writing. When he realizes this, Alan gets incredibly mad, providing our first real glimpse into him as a character. When he and his wife arrive at a cabin on a small island in the middle of Cauldron Lake, we learn that Alice has a longstanding, deep seated fear of the dark. After an argument between the two erupts, the power goes out and Alan, in anger, walks out of the cabin, leaving Alice alone with her greatest fear. Alan rushes back after hearing Alice cry for help, returning just in time to watch her get dragged by a mysterious force into the depths of the lake. This sets up our main objective of the game, which is to find and rescue Alice.

Starting out, I was struck by how instantly unlikable Alan is as a protagonist. He has a short temper, talks down to the people around him, and is needlessly cruel to his wife. I was also confused as to how the people in the game respond to him. Barry, his agent, speaks to him as though he's a brilliant and fearless writer, the waitress of the small town diner reveres him, praising his work and damn near worshiping him, and his wife is depicted as a one note character who loves her husband without question. Initially, I saw all of this and was tempted to write it off as a poorly written story that, honestly, sums up a lot of media in the mid to late 2000's.

After Alice's abduction, things get more interesting, and by that, I mean fucking weird. Alan awakes in his car, which he's driven off the road, with no memory of how he got there. He makes his way to a nearby gas station, but along the way, he encounters murderous, shadowy figures like he's seen in his dreams. He fights these figures with the aid of a flashlight, and encounters an ethereal figure in a diving suit who leaves behind pages of a manuscript entitled "Departure", ostensibly written by Alan, who has no memory of writing it whatsoever. He discovers that the events of the manuscript are coming true, and the shadowy figures, known as the Taken, are townsfolk possessed by a dark force. After reaching the gas station, Alan tries to alert the town sheriff of Alice's disappearance, only to be told that the cabin on the lake that Alan claims to have visited hasn't existed in decades.

What follows is a tale that's presented in an episodic manner, complete with cliffhangers, teasers for the next episode, as well as previous episode synopses. This is where the game truly channels its inner Twin Peaks, with every answer only leading to more questions. The game is brilliantly paced, with each episode lasting around an hour or so and providing a refreshing mix of day and night gameplay. The daytime sections have us unraveling the mysteries of the small town, while the nighttime sections have us fighting off the Taken. The game makes brilliant us of light as a mechanic, as the Taken are impervious until they're "broken" with light, at which point they become vulnerable to bullets. While definitely leaning more toward action than horror, the creepy way in which the Taken move along with the atmosphere of the darkened regions lead to a healthy amount of tension.

As we progress in the story, what I initially dismissed as lazy writing actually gains a deeper, more nuanced meaning. Without spoiling too much, the primary force at the heart of the story feeds off of creativity, and has, over the decades, corrupted a number of individuals with a monkey's paw allure. We learn that the reason the characters appear poorly written is because that's how Alan writes them in his story, and after one particular flashback which features a live action cameo by Sam Lake, who Max Payne was modeled after, we learn that Alan is a darker character than we've been led to believe, and his relationship with his wife is much more strained than he himself presents it. It's honestly some of the best writing I've seen, which is fitting for a game about an author.

One of my favorite features in the game is how it uses light as a resource. Along with various guns, Alan utilizes a flashlight that is treated as a separate weapon with its own form of ammunition in the guise of batteries. While I would get frustrated on the few occasions I was low on traditional ammo, running low on batteries was always a stressful situation. It's a brilliant bit of resource management that constantly had me searching for my next pack of lithium ion goodness. In the original game, there was a minor controversy concerning the inclusion of in-game advertisement in the form of using Energizer batteries. While this has been removed in the remaster, I can't help but think of how hilarious the situation is in hindsight. See, the batteries that Alan uses in the game, by virtue of being a resource, have a ridiculously short lifespan. You can burn through multiple batteries in a manner of minutes, so the idea that a battery company actually paid to be represented in such way is honestly the funniest damn thing in the world to me.

All of this is without mentioning the amazing audio in the game, which features stellar voice acting from Matthew Porretta as Alan Wake, James McCaffrey as the Diver, and Fred Berman as Barry Wheeler to name a few. The audio mix for the night sections of the game is also well done and suitably creepy. And the music! If nothing else, I have to thank this game for introducing me to the amazing band, Poets of the Fall, who provide two of the most memorable songs I've heard in a video game. The Poet and the Muse was written specifically for the game and is incredibly good, and War, if only for how and when it's utilized in the game, gave me literal chills. The rest of the music in the game is great, but those songs in particular blew me away.

While I was initially dismissive and skeptical of Alan Wake, I found myself engrossed in its charm. While certainly not without flaw, the story is compelling and constantly leaves you eager to see what happens next. Alan is an unlikable lead, but this is done intentionally to set up and then subvert expectations. A lot of the writing is over the top, but there's a surprising subtlety and nuance at play that shows a true mastery of storytelling. As weird and off the wall and seemingly random as things may seem at first, almost everything is done with a calculated intention, or at least the appearance of such. I greatly enjoyed my time with the game, and look forward to not only the sequel, but the other games that make up the larger Remedy-verse.