Please don't feed the animals
Alan Wake is both a story-driven horror story and a third person shooter, and takes it upon itself to really blend the atmosphere and horror themes with the gameplay in a way that hasn't been done a whole lot in video games. With a generally likeable cast and pretty decent writing and voice work, Alan Wake gets pretty darn close to the desired effect of creating a Stephen King style story that also works as an interactive video game.
The plot revolves around the writer Alan Wake, who has managed some fame from his sci-fi/horror novels. He is visiting a small town called Bright Falls with his wife to try and find some inspiration in order to overcome his recent onset of writer's block. Of course, things quickly get weird as Wake loses a large period of time from his memory, finds his wife missing, and begins to stumble upon pages from a manuscript written by himself - although he doesn't remember writing it. If you think I've just spoiled the game for you, don't worry. The pacing of Alan Wake's story is based around piling mystery after mystery atop one another, and resolving one question only leads to more.
The town of Bright Falls becomes a pretty hostile place once Wake's wife vanishes, and it's inhabitants are overcome by a dark presence that makes them homicidal maniacs who shout nonsense about their various professions at you. This is where you start shooting. Despite the guns you find throughout the game, Wake's real weapon is light. You'll use a flashlight, flares, huge spotlights, explosive barrels, and whatever else you can find to generate light, all so that you can burn away the darkness protecting your enemies - and then you give them the business with your firearms. It's a pretty fun gameplay mechanic, and a really neat way to meld the idea of the evil, overwhelming darkness into the gunplay.
The only real issue with combat in Alan Wake is that I've just described what is pretty much the breadth of what you do the entire game. Enemy types are very limited, and while the environmental aspects you can use in a fight change from one to the next, there are no real advancements in the combat itself after the first couple of episodes. You could also say the same for the look of the environments throughout the game - you spend most of your adventure in spooky forests at night, which is great at first, but by the end it gets a bit old.
But Alan Wake is really a great game because of it's narrative chops, and the way the game is broken into episodes like a TV program actually works really well. For me, the real reason to see this game through to it's end was for answers, and the way everything ended left me satisfied without ruining any of the magic.
