Alan Wake is not a bad game. What I mean to say was that if I were to judge it on a ten point scale it'd probably be up the top somewhere. It's also to say that, in the current culture of video games, Alan Wake is pretty good by a lot of standards - I mean, it doesn't feature any hideous bugs, and the combat has a nice feel to it. The production values are good and...
Actually, fuck this. Fuck this pussyfooted 'here are the good points' bullshit. Alan Wake is an absolutely despicable game. It's a game that I'm glad sold terribly and lost money. It's a game whose creative leads I wish I could tie up in an old submarine and whip their testicles with a knot tied in a length of old rope. That last one was a joke but when someone says they want to commit suicide, even if they don't mean it, you better look into it.
So here's the first level of Alan Wake: Alan Wake arrives in the town of Bright Falls on a ferry with his beautiful and lovely wife. Then he gets out of his car and his wife tells him that she wants to take some pictures of him standing on the far end of the boat. But then something curious happens: Alan Wake starts running around in circles. He runs to the opposite end of the boat and stands uncomfortably close to a guy in a trucker hat, before running to where is wife wanted him to go and standing uncomfortably close to an old guy who is a radio host or something. Him and Alan have a conversation about his radio station, but Alan refuses to make eye contact, revolving in circles and bumping into the sides of the boat. The old guy talks to him as if he were just standing there normally, and even Alan's wife doesn't seem to notice that Alan is acting like a weirdo. It's almost like they're suffering from some kind of brain disease that only allows them to recognise certain specific actions that Alan performs. Now THAT's some creepy Stephen King shit there.
So Alan and his lovely wife get off the ferry and drive to a local diner, where they were told to meet the owner of the cabin they are going to be staying at. Alan gets out of the car and walks into the diner. Immediately, he's acting like a weirdo again, running around the diner as the waitress tries to tell him how fucking wet she is for him. You see, Alan is a famous and well-respected writer, who's so famous and well respected that even people in this rural american town have cardboard cut outs of him in their windows. Alan then runs to the back of the diner in the middle of the waitress talking, before stopping running and then walking again. While he is walking, he comes across a creepy old lady that gives him some keys to a cabin. Who cares if it's the right one. Alan, not making eye contact with anyone, then runs out of diner. Well he would, but Alan suddenly suffers from a crippling brain disease that renders him incapable of moving faster than a slow walk. I mean, that's some scary Stephen King shit right there.
Alan and his wife get in the car and drive off, but then the guy they were supposed to meet runs out and yells 'Mr. Wake, you forgot your keys!', and the audience is supposed to go 'OH FUCKING SHIT THEY'RE GOING TO THE WRONG CABIN', but Alan was actually in the car and didn't see the guy running out of the diner. He is probably not worried about it then. I think, if he did see the guy, he could have just got out of his car and walked up to him and straightened things out. They could have talked about the crazy bitch who dressed in all black and hung out in a dark corridor at the back of the town diner who gave Alan the wrong key. Then Alan would have gotten to the cabin and had a nice holiday. Him and his angelic wife would have gone home and, instead of having experienced countless untold horrors, told this super creepy story to other couples at dinner parties in their trendy New York apartment. 'And this old woman knew we were going to a cabin and totally gave us a fake set of keys. Yeah, I know, that's some proper Stephen King shit, isn't it?'
But he didn't see it. If only you were in control of Alan Wake, you probably could have gotten it all straightened out, huh.
Okay, so then Alan and his wife arrive at the cabin. Suddenly, the lights go out and Alan's wife begins to have a panic attack. She says she won't go in until Alan turns on the lights, because she's afraid of the dark. At this point, Alan, thinking that the fact the cabin is open means he's supposed to go in there, starts running around it with a flashlight. He goes through it and finds a pier, which he runs to the end of, thinking maybe it was there for a reason. So then he runs back into the house and gets lost. He goes upstairs and looks round all the rooms for something to turn the power back on for a good 10 minutes before going back outside to see if he missed something on the way in. Turns out he'd missed the generator, which was like, just outside the front of the cabin. Alan's wife was standing outside the cabin, and the generator was directly in her eyesight, which is why it's weird that she just stood their while Alan was looking round the rooms for all that time. It's almost like she had some kind of mental illness, where her vocabulary was limited to a few select phrases, none of which could adequately communicate that Alan was going the wrong way, and that the generator was right there. At this moment Alan feared greatly for his wife's mental health. Or he would have, but he had to go and start the generator. He did so and Mrs. Wake moseyed on in to the house and proceeded to strip off into her undergarments and lay suggestively on the bed. At this point she starts having a proper conversation with Alan. Back to normal then!
Oh, but then they have a fight, because Alan hasn't written anything in 2 years, which is super bad because they only have enough money to live in a trendy New York apartment. I mean Wifey works as well, but Alan is the man of the couple so his working regularly is super important. I am not suggesting that Alan Wake is a game that perpetuates restrictive gender roles. I am just saying that Alan's life doesn't make a lot of sense and I don't care about it. Oh and then Alan and Wife get attacked by a bunch of scary crows (?) and Alan's wife gets dragged away (?) and thrown in the lake (?) and Alan dives in and then wakes up in a car several miles away (?).
Alan gets out of the car and wonders aimlessly through the forest. He runs around, sprinting, waiting 'til he get's his breath back, and then sprinting again. He does this until he runs into the guy from the diner who was going to give him the keys but didn't (though Alan doesn't know this (actually he says in the monologue who he is. Maybe he was sent a picture of the guy before he came out to bright falls? Ummm... I don't know)). The guy is immersed in this thick black smoke, his body contorted into an odd stance, and his speech incomprehensible and panicked. He approaches Alan with an axe: OH NO! Alan dodges and runs into a nearby building, locking the door behind him. Alan finds a revolver and a flashlight, which he says he'll use if he runs into the guy again.
Actually... ummm... I forgot to mention there was this dream Alan had in the car journey to Bright Falls. I didn't mention it because it was a tutorial for the player on how to fight enemies. So I or Alan or both are standing in this building with a mad axemen outside, and the very tools I can use to kill a mad axeman are in my possession. Alan goes over to the door he ran through and leans on it to open it, but then says he doesn't want to go through the door because he doesn't want to be killed by the axe guy. That's weird; Alan walked over to the door to open it, but then he said he didn't want to open it. I mean, if I started doing things like that, I would be seriously freaked out. If I started reading Stephen King novels and then I thought 'I have never liked reading Steven King novels', I would be super creeped. That's some proper Stephen King shit there.
So Alan then runs out the other door of the cabin, the door he wants to go out of, and faffs about a lumber yard for precisely forever. In the process, he comes across some bad guys, who are like regular people with black smoke around them, who yell creepy and throw an endless supply of axes at Alan. Alan shines a torch at them and the smoke goes away. Then he shoots them with two revolver shots, or one shotgun blast and they die. Alan remarks that he has never fired a gun before.
I have fired a gun before. I mean, not in real life, but I know how to move and shoot with a dual analogue controller. Good thing I can help Alan out with that huh?
Alan eventually kills like 20 monsters, including the key guy, before making it to the gas station, where he sees a sign and realises that a week has passed since he arrived in Bright Falls. He phones the police and tells them his wife has been kidnapped; sheriff arrives and asks if Alan's seen the key guy; Alan lies; big letters flash up saying 'end of episode'. End of episode then. End of level.
Okay, so at this point I'm not impressed. Like I said, the combat is okay; nothing special, but okay. I mean, I can tell the game is trying to scare me, but the mechanics are so straightforward that I am never really on edge. It seems like they started from the perspective of 'how do we make an action game that's scary', rather than 'how do we make a game that's scary', which ultimately ends up hindering it's efforts. The tropes an action game uses are there because they feel fun and empowering. Good horror thrives on making you feel powerless - the quasi-post-modern monologue even says as much! Using flashbang grenades to make bad guys blow up is cool, but knowing I can destroy everything around me in a single button press compromises the mood somewhat. It gets better when you have to run away and dodge attacks rather than fight, but I only ended up doing this when the game forced me to, I was out of ammo, or the sheer number of enemies made combat impractical. Not hard or scary, mind you, just potentially tedius.
But then the despicable thing happens. More letters come up: 'Episode two'. Then, Alan comes in voice over: 'Previously on Alan Wake'
Just the first minute or so...
That's fucking bullshit! Did you hear all that? Not only does the game constantly remind you that you and Alan are completely separate (Alan possesses agency in his actions; you blindly following whatever it is he says he wants) but the game then actively re-writes itself AS YOU ARE PLAYING IT, to remove your involvement. There's absolutely no mention of the stupid darkness monsters I spent like an hour shooting. There's no mention of the fucking Thermoses I picked up or the weapon cache I found. In short: there's no mention of all the video-gamey stuff. The game thinks that it's story is not only the principle draw, but that your presence is hurting it. It needs to get rid of you and does so.
It's the ultimate symbol of why these 'story games' are fucking bullshit. Games are a medium defined by agency in a system. If you are going to control that system as much as you can and use it as an engine for your fiction, what good are you doing the medium? What good are you doing people who want to play games? You're trying to make games into something they're not: receptacles for an authored narrative, rather than celebrating or innovating on their strengths.
Apparently Alan Wake was an open-world game when it was first announced, and then it was scrapped and changed into the linear action game that is sitting in my xbox right now. I'd wager the thing that survived the creative upheaval was the story. Already in their minds, the developers were taking this story, this extended fiction that they had spent a great deal of time and resources fleshing out, as the base and building a different game from it. In their minds, the story was a transcendent quantity: the core of the project.
Sometimes I say that I would like to see games tackling more adult themes than they usually do, like maybe a basic human relationship. Alan Wake as a product tackles those subjects, but as a game it shies away from them. There's some interesting stuff about writers and writing and insanity and whatever, but the mechanics don't reflect that in any way. I loved Kane and Lynch 2 because the mechanics of the game reflected the nature of the story and it's characters. In Alan Wake these two elements are kept at arms length. The story is mildly clever, and the game is the same dumb shit as every other video game.
Fuck Alan Wake.
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