So disappointing
Alan Wake disappointed me so much I could get shouty about it. It’s the third game to do that in any genuine fashion, after Ubi’s Prince of Persia reboot and Bioware’s Jade Empire.
Alan Wake gets nearly everything wrong. The writing is atrocious; This dude is supposed to be some sort of Stephen King dude, yet every single page you collect of his writing is some of the most awful shit imaginable. Alan Wake the author is August Derleth to Lovecraft, a simulacra. The notion appears to be that pulp writers have got it easy; Remedy treated pulp fiction with the most superficial of respect.
The game initially seems to offer a slow burn, but instead turns into a corridor crawl against the same four enemies around the same annoying mechanic for the duration. When the game resorts to randomly flinging physics objects at you I couldn’t take it anymore. It was just so damn lazy. This is a game that wants to be a horror game but hasn’t the faintest idea what horror is.
You know shit has hit the fan when I remember the most recent Alone in the Dark reboot as a superior version of a similar idea, or that Deadly Premonition was a creepier and more well-rounded game.
Alan Wake is easily Remedy’s weakest. It messes about with the aesthetics of cheap paperback literature and becomes just that.
