I played through Resident Evil in a single night and found it thrilling. It was an experience completely unlike anything a game had offered before, and I jumped every time I ran down that hallway with the windows those dogs jumped through. Sure it was laden with bad dialogue, terrible voice acting, and a plot not fit for your worst b-movie. Playing it at night with all the lights turned off was a thrilling new experience.
It’s been 15 years since the first Resident Evil and the survival horror genre has had many many releases, almost every one of them having at least two of, if not the entire trifecta of their great grandfather’s problems, but almost none of it’s innovation. Not only that but they’ve even invented a few new things to suck at. It was with this in mind that I received Alan Wake this weekend through Goozex (thanks dieseljoe!) and found myself nonplussed. An hour or two into the game, I started wondering to myself if this game wasn’t the innovation the genre had been dying for since Capcom first invented it 15 years ago.
What you already know…
At this point you’ve already seen, read, or heard enough about the game to have an idea of it’s story but, to be thorough: Alan Wake is a New York writer suffering from a bit of a blockage. He decides to take a vacation with his wife to Bright Falls, a small town in the Pacific Northwest, and get away for a bit. Not long after arriving in town, Alan and his wife discover the town has some terrifying secrets. And that is all I’ll give of the details of the plot.
The meat of the gameplay is centered around Alan’s trek through surprisingly moody and brooding forests, being attacked at various points by people possessed by a shadowy evil. Light is Alan’s weapon of choice. Rather than just shooting them, Alan must first strip away their dark barrier with various forms of light (flares, flashbangs, and flashlights) before being able to mow them down with his weapon of choice. When you the player, find yourself surrounded and overwhelmed by too many bad guys, pop a flare and their shields of darkness collapse all at once as they cower away from you in fear.
Enough to make you forget impending doom…
Interspersed between Alan’s hikes are daylight sequences in Bright Falls. It’s in these sequences that you feel the greatest weight of Remedy’s development period. Every towns-person and character is distinct and feels alive, their personalities all painted with a careful brush. It’s extremely immersive, unlike like say Oblivion’s town’s people with the same 5 faces and the same 4 voice actors. Rose, the Tor brothers, Barry. All of them have their own heart and soul in the story.
Not to be outdone by it’s residents though, Bright Falls looks amazing, and is a character on it’s own. This is definitely a later-generation 360 game, and is pushes the system to it’s limits. The town is incredibly detailed in every window, doorway, and rooftop. Unlike a game like GTA, I never felt as though I was seeing a “store front” texture used over and over again. Every location was unique as it’s individual residents. And on all sides of the town are forests, lakes, and incredibly picturesque mountains. There were numerous times during the game that I would stop just to take in the view of the awe inspiring Sierras, which looked like something out of an Ansel Adam’s photograph. When Doctor Hartman spreads his arms halfway through the game and tells you he never gets tired of that view, I think you’ll agree with him.
Homage and self-reference woven into bliss…
Wake’s video game contemporaries are considered adult because of their violence but have plots that seem to be written by gothy hormonal thirteen-year-old boys. Here, Remedy has attempted to construct a story that is not only mature because of it’s themes and deeper meanings, but also in the way it’s told. The story not only understands itself and what it’s about but uses that understanding to accomplish even greater depth in the narrative. It’s all extraordinarily self-aware. But unlike a lot of games where if you took the cut scenes and showed them back to back would loosely hang together as a complete movie, Alan Wake is told in a way that can ONLY be told as a video game.
For instance there’s a brilliant collectible item in the game that is used to foreshadow upcoming events and works only as well as it does because Alan Wake is a writer going through what he is going through. The item, which starts as a tangential mystery, evolves into the most important thread of the entire story. And, rather than just ending in an anticlimactic fist fight between the hero and his antagonist, the last act of gameplay is surreal, thoughtful, and very meta. It works because Alan Wake is who he is and the town is what it is. Like every tree, bush, and doorway in the game it’s all achingly well designed and just as it should be.
The game also pays respects to it’s parallels in other genres. While it puckers it’s lips a little too often for Steven King, there are so many other recognizable homages here. I expected to see the Log Lady through a window as Bright Falls which was obviously founded by the same settlers of Twin Peaks. There is a wonderful little detail in the game with some televisions and an homage to the Twilight Zone. Do yourself a favor and stop to take in each radio and TV broadcast. There is more but to say anything else would be a spoiler.
Survival….Thriller? A little bit of welcome subtlety
Perhaps Alan Wake is not a survival horror game. I think it’s mechanics and the nature of it’s story are so similar to others in the genre that it would be hard to say it wasn’t. It took me a while to clearly distinguish for myself why I can say I love being scared but am not a big fan of horror games. The distinction can be understood in the difference between Hostel and Silence of the Lambs. Both are scary. But while watching a woman get her head sawed off may be terrifying, it lacks the – lets say – finesse of the dread I feel watching Buffalo Bill advance on Agent Starling in the dark with his night vision goggles. That and it’s absolutely disgusting.
I’ve come to find the gruesomeness and gore of typical survival horror games less scary – more dreary and tiresome. When the camera cuts away from an act of violence in a frightening film, what we don’t see becomes the product of my imagination and nightmares. Seeing my character repeatedly sawed in half every time I fail to properly execute a Quicktime Event in a video game turns that act of violence academic and insignificant – I now may as well be having to find my keys at the bottom of a biomedical waste bin at a hospital.
There is violence in Alan Wake but when it is against humans, the camera cuts away and leaves the act to our imagination. And because the demons in the game are humans consumed by shadow, when they split apart from your gunfire they bleed light. The frights in Alan Wake are accomplished more often as the implication of the things you’re seeing and hearing rather than the direct result of them. As you walk through deserted houses you hear footfalls from the floors above you. The enemies in the game all screech things at they might have said when they were still alive, and as demons are terrifying – their voices echo off in the forest long before you get to see them. There are jump scares but no cheap shots. When you turn a corner and an enemy is standing in front of you, the game drops into slow motion and the soundtrack screeches it’s strings, but they never get a hit in unfairly. It all makes for a very moody and creepy experience that feels a bit more elegant than anything similar.
Quibbles and Bits
As I played through the game I found my attention diverted by a number of annoying little details that I think deserve a mention if not their own section:
- Some of the story in the game is told in the traditional cut scene-gameplay-cut scene format. Since the 360 doesn’t do video all that well and Wake’s cut scenes favor fast swooping camera angles, the annoying pixelation from the video compression made many of the cut scenes look decidedly WORSE than the in-game cut scenes – defeating the purpose of having a rendered cinema to begin with.
- Likewise, many of the in game fog effects caused a very Matrix-y pixelation on trees and plant life off in the distance.
- Some of the lip sync is just terrible. It’s like watching a film that’s been dubbed where the voice actors are saying things that are kind of close to what the actors on screen are saying but not totally. Sometimes this is deliberate (as in when you’re watching the television scattered through Bright Falls) but I think we’ve reached the point where the cut scenes of a triple-a title like this shouldn’t be this off.
- In God’s name why is there platforming in a game like this? There are only a handful of sequences where I needed Alan to successfully execute a jump (all of a foot and a half most of the time.) HOWEVER, since the game takes it’s cues from Silent Hill here and makes him handle like an obese baby elephant he ALWAYS plummeted to his death a few times before I got him to successfully execute the jump.
- I realize that this was probably another homage but mazes aren’t fun. Period. STOP it.
- Neither are scavenger hunts. I’m a big fan of achievements and trophies. They create a game within a game and push me to explore things the designers might have put weeks into and I would have missed totally were it not for “Achievement Unlocked: Try On Different Hats.” Then there are the achievements that feel like they’re in the game just so the game can have achievements. That would be Niko Bellic’s pigeon hunting, Altaïr’s flag finding, and Alan Wake’s coffee addiction. Scattered throughout the game are 100 coffee thermos’ that Wake collects as he goes along. In a game with so many thoughtful details, without a single tree feeling like it didn’t belong there, these 100+ identical coffee thermos’ everywhere sapped some of the immersion. What’s strange is the game has another collectible that is actually done really well, with value beyond just the achievement you get for collecting it.
Bright Falls: An even bigger hell hole now that Alan's been stealing everyone's coffee.
Ultimately, working up to B-Movie status
Does it all work? Yes and no. There is a lot here to love but it feels like the ingredients are all in the wrong proportions. The game is pretty short. I made it through on Normal mode in about 8 hours and got a little more than half the achievements without really trying. If you’re not an achievement monkey or one who isn’t going to replay a game multiple times then the total hours here aren’t the greatest value for your 60 dollars. Unfortunately until the last two chapters, the best parts of the game occur during the periods with the least amount of “gameplay.” The game is at it’s best during the day time around the town but there is also the least to do. Once you begin having partners though the quality in the night sequences jumps considerably.
But the majority of the 8 hours occur when Alan is alone running through dark forests shooting bad guys and collecting items. While the forests here are moody and gorgeous, Alan is not a very good fighter and there isn’t a lot to do with the combat that you can’t already do in the first five minutes. After a couple of chapters these segments start to become repetitive and I found myself waiting for more time with the towns people and Alan’s friends. Maybe the whole package would have been better as an adventure game rather than as an action-survival-horror-thingy.
The plot is ambitious and unique among video games. This is another step toward a medium in it’s infancy being able to tell a story that is as moving and captivating as one you might see in a movie or read in a good novel. However it’s still a little flat and silly in comparison to average entries in either of those two.
Still, there is a lot here that I adored. Trying something new goes a long way and if you’re getting bored of space marines, looking for a good game to play with the lights out, and are tired of playing ones that seem like they were made for someone half your age and then repackaged 5 times, you can’t do any better. Remedy has created something really special with enough bright spots to wash away it’s few shadowy flaws.
I give it 4 thinly-veiled Stephen King’s out of 5
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