As a novelist, I find Alan Wake's storytelling a little offensive.
Anyone who has explored an interest in literature beyond Teletubbies or Twilight will know that it should actually be called story-showing. Alan Wake, the main character in what appears to be an interactive Steven King fanfic, is a crime novelist suffering from writer's block. Naturally, this is making his publisher very nervous, and he is whisked away to take an extended vacation with his wife in a cabin located just outside of the quaint little town of Bright Falls, in the hope that a geographical will help get his creative juices flowing. Naturally, Alan is a dick to his fans and the townspeople welcome him like a messiah, even if some of them seem a bit crazy.
One domestic dispute with his wife later, an evil force kidnaps her and the next thing Alan knows, he's waking up in a car crash a week later and is finding pages of a manuscript that he doesn't remember writing.
After the first spoiler that the Manuscript Pages gave me, I decided not to read them at all (but still pick them up, I couldn't resist for many reasons), but it felt like trying to shake more suspense out of the game in the same way you'd jiggle a dead rat to help your lazy pet snake eat the damn thing - futile, and a little embarrassing.
The voice acting and motion capture is top-notch, and so is the directing, but I dreaded each and every cutscene. Because, for each twist of the plot that they would ham-fistedly deliver, I would wish that it wasn't wasted on such retarded storytellers.
It really was like they had a stock list of common tropes in Stephen King novels, and just threw them in here and there, even where they didn't fit, and hoped that the disorientation they gave you would add to the tension.
In one particularly extravagent example, Alan is being chased by an axe murderer, and hides inside a room by locking the door, which immediately comes under attack from the aforementioned axe. That would have been enough, but they saw fit to turn an homage into a shout-out by recreating the famous shot from The Shining where Shelley Duvall sees the axe come through the door. If they'd left it at that, I would have smirked and accepted the lampshaded nod (to the source material?) and moved on, but Alan f**king Wake jumps into his sound-booth and outright narrates that its just like The Shining.
I made a passing quip about it earlier, but in retrospect I am certain that this is a Steven King fanfic. It has all of the hallmarks - a Mary-Sue insertion protagonist, odds and ends from most of his best-known works, and so many nods to the author that the head is now bobbing frantically, lips firmly wrapped around his... legacy.
Also, 99.9999999% of fanfic is dross written by talentless fans who daydream about being friends with the characters of the fiction work, less often the author, but here we have it. The occasional marvel of craftsmanship using the toolset put down by an earlier work of fiction by a promising (if misguided) young author does crop up 0.00000001% of the time, but this is not it.
Irony of ironies, maybe there will be some Alan Wake fanfiction out there that would blow this thing out of the water.
People say that, in the horror genre, the darkness is a character in itself. The writers at Remedy Entertainment have taken this very seriously, and very literally - I'm looking squarely at head writer Sam Lake, who previously worked on Remedy's Max Payne titles. Those titles also suffered a little from drowning under the weight of their own storytelling, which is sometimes a requirement of "noir".
The difference between these titles is a value that's hard to put a price on. Max Payne suffered tragedy that only a Shakespearean hero could stomach, and took his revenge with the dedication of a modern Sergio Leone cowboy. He fought, he f***ed, he did what had to be done.
By comparison, Alan is an over-priviliged asshole with delusions of humanity. While Max weeps for his murdered wife in an opening scene that breaks your heart in its inevitability, there's an overarching theme that Alan brought all of this on his wife.
Let's run the scenes side-by-side.
Step one - Max returns from work and calls out for his loving wife.
Alan arrives at the cabin with his loving and emotionally emaciated wife.
Step two - Max realises something is wrong and encounters burglars. He immediately draws his pistol and opens fire on them.
Alan yells at his wife for being afraid of the dark, yells at her for getting him a remarkably thoughful gift, then stalks off to fix the generator.
Step three - Max finds the dead bodies of his wife and baby boy. We feel his agony and immediately want revenge.
After leaving her alone in the dark, Alan hears his wife's screams and rolls his eyes, before seeing his wife being kidnapped by a shadowy sea monster. He dives in after her, but we secretly want her to have gotten away from him.
See? Take Max's initial loss (family) and add some heavy handed phobia-related game mechanics. Castrate Max's gun skills and leave him with a starting pistol and a small flashlight. Hell, go the extra mile and perform knee reconstruction surgery so that instead of leaping through the air to avoid attacks and strategically hit the enemy where they least expect it, make Alan only able to stagger drunkenly to avoid attacks.
Not that I had any trouble involving with Alan - I just found myself actively disliking him.
Most, if not all of the violence happens offscreen and/or in a bloodless fashion. Ordinary people with one or two character traits will appear, have a few lines of dialogue, then the Darkness will befall them and they'll look pretty dead. One scene later, they are a miniboss spouting (admittedly creepy) lines in a creaky voice that sounds like a cross between a house settling and wind blowing through branches. Nothing actually scary, though; this is rated ESRB T.
I guess that's my main problem though. It spends so long wearing a skirt and jumping up and down saying "HEY LOOK AT ME, I'M DERIVATIVE! REMEMBER TWIN PEAKS AND STEPHEN KING? BECAUSE I DO!" that it doesn't put a lot of stock into being an actual videogame. Level design is nice but without variation, shadow-men do a good job of flanking you but quail under your cellphone's screen light (how do they survive in the already very bright moonlight?), and the motion capture animations are quite good. Even throwing down a flare when you're surrounded has a nice feeling of power.
The downside is that any studio could have done all that, and done it better. Maybe they could have added some difficulty, some more game mechanics. There are some cute new gameplay elements in the first downloadable chapter, heavy with psychological meaning, that would have made the main game a lot more exciting.
If I wasn't a writer, if I could appreciate the cheesiness of the storytelling in a game that put so much emphasis on it, I would have enjoyed it so much more. Maybe I'll play back through on Nightmare difficulty, if they send out an update to turn off Alan's narrating. And maybe the cutscenes.
Or any trace of the main character.
Anyone who has explored an interest in literature beyond Teletubbies or Twilight will know that it should actually be called story-showing. Alan Wake, the main character in what appears to be an interactive Steven King fanfic, is a crime novelist suffering from writer's block. Naturally, this is making his publisher very nervous, and he is whisked away to take an extended vacation with his wife in a cabin located just outside of the quaint little town of Bright Falls, in the hope that a geographical will help get his creative juices flowing. Naturally, Alan is a dick to his fans and the townspeople welcome him like a messiah, even if some of them seem a bit crazy.
One domestic dispute with his wife later, an evil force kidnaps her and the next thing Alan knows, he's waking up in a car crash a week later and is finding pages of a manuscript that he doesn't remember writing.
After the first spoiler that the Manuscript Pages gave me, I decided not to read them at all (but still pick them up, I couldn't resist for many reasons), but it felt like trying to shake more suspense out of the game in the same way you'd jiggle a dead rat to help your lazy pet snake eat the damn thing - futile, and a little embarrassing.
The voice acting and motion capture is top-notch, and so is the directing, but I dreaded each and every cutscene. Because, for each twist of the plot that they would ham-fistedly deliver, I would wish that it wasn't wasted on such retarded storytellers.
It really was like they had a stock list of common tropes in Stephen King novels, and just threw them in here and there, even where they didn't fit, and hoped that the disorientation they gave you would add to the tension.
In one particularly extravagent example, Alan is being chased by an axe murderer, and hides inside a room by locking the door, which immediately comes under attack from the aforementioned axe. That would have been enough, but they saw fit to turn an homage into a shout-out by recreating the famous shot from The Shining where Shelley Duvall sees the axe come through the door. If they'd left it at that, I would have smirked and accepted the lampshaded nod (to the source material?) and moved on, but Alan f**king Wake jumps into his sound-booth and outright narrates that its just like The Shining.
I made a passing quip about it earlier, but in retrospect I am certain that this is a Steven King fanfic. It has all of the hallmarks - a Mary-Sue insertion protagonist, odds and ends from most of his best-known works, and so many nods to the author that the head is now bobbing frantically, lips firmly wrapped around his... legacy.
Also, 99.9999999% of fanfic is dross written by talentless fans who daydream about being friends with the characters of the fiction work, less often the author, but here we have it. The occasional marvel of craftsmanship using the toolset put down by an earlier work of fiction by a promising (if misguided) young author does crop up 0.00000001% of the time, but this is not it.
Irony of ironies, maybe there will be some Alan Wake fanfiction out there that would blow this thing out of the water.
People say that, in the horror genre, the darkness is a character in itself. The writers at Remedy Entertainment have taken this very seriously, and very literally - I'm looking squarely at head writer Sam Lake, who previously worked on Remedy's Max Payne titles. Those titles also suffered a little from drowning under the weight of their own storytelling, which is sometimes a requirement of "noir".
The difference between these titles is a value that's hard to put a price on. Max Payne suffered tragedy that only a Shakespearean hero could stomach, and took his revenge with the dedication of a modern Sergio Leone cowboy. He fought, he f***ed, he did what had to be done.
By comparison, Alan is an over-priviliged asshole with delusions of humanity. While Max weeps for his murdered wife in an opening scene that breaks your heart in its inevitability, there's an overarching theme that Alan brought all of this on his wife.
Let's run the scenes side-by-side.
Step one - Max returns from work and calls out for his loving wife.
Alan arrives at the cabin with his loving and emotionally emaciated wife.
Step two - Max realises something is wrong and encounters burglars. He immediately draws his pistol and opens fire on them.
Alan yells at his wife for being afraid of the dark, yells at her for getting him a remarkably thoughful gift, then stalks off to fix the generator.
Step three - Max finds the dead bodies of his wife and baby boy. We feel his agony and immediately want revenge.
After leaving her alone in the dark, Alan hears his wife's screams and rolls his eyes, before seeing his wife being kidnapped by a shadowy sea monster. He dives in after her, but we secretly want her to have gotten away from him.
See? Take Max's initial loss (family) and add some heavy handed phobia-related game mechanics. Castrate Max's gun skills and leave him with a starting pistol and a small flashlight. Hell, go the extra mile and perform knee reconstruction surgery so that instead of leaping through the air to avoid attacks and strategically hit the enemy where they least expect it, make Alan only able to stagger drunkenly to avoid attacks.
Not that I had any trouble involving with Alan - I just found myself actively disliking him.
Most, if not all of the violence happens offscreen and/or in a bloodless fashion. Ordinary people with one or two character traits will appear, have a few lines of dialogue, then the Darkness will befall them and they'll look pretty dead. One scene later, they are a miniboss spouting (admittedly creepy) lines in a creaky voice that sounds like a cross between a house settling and wind blowing through branches. Nothing actually scary, though; this is rated ESRB T.
I guess that's my main problem though. It spends so long wearing a skirt and jumping up and down saying "HEY LOOK AT ME, I'M DERIVATIVE! REMEMBER TWIN PEAKS AND STEPHEN KING? BECAUSE I DO!" that it doesn't put a lot of stock into being an actual videogame. Level design is nice but without variation, shadow-men do a good job of flanking you but quail under your cellphone's screen light (how do they survive in the already very bright moonlight?), and the motion capture animations are quite good. Even throwing down a flare when you're surrounded has a nice feeling of power.
The downside is that any studio could have done all that, and done it better. Maybe they could have added some difficulty, some more game mechanics. There are some cute new gameplay elements in the first downloadable chapter, heavy with psychological meaning, that would have made the main game a lot more exciting.
If I wasn't a writer, if I could appreciate the cheesiness of the storytelling in a game that put so much emphasis on it, I would have enjoyed it so much more. Maybe I'll play back through on Nightmare difficulty, if they send out an update to turn off Alan's narrating. And maybe the cutscenes.
Or any trace of the main character.