The eponymous lead character certainly isn't your typical video game hero. Wake is a wildly popular Stephen King-esque horror writer whose three-year bout with writer's block has lead him and his wife Alice in search of creative inspiration, taking them from a posh Manhattan condo to the sleepy Pacific Northwestern logging town of Bright Falls. The couple has scarcely arrived in town and checked into their cabin before Wake finds himself abruptly short one wife and one whole week's worth of events in his memory. In exchange he finds plenty of terror, courtesy of a pervasive dark being that's moved into town and targeted him for reasons that become clearer as the game wears on.
He might sit behind a word processor during the day, but Wake sure knows how to handle a revolver. And a shotgun, a hunting rifle, a flare gun, and flashbang grenades. Those are your tools against the demonic residents of Bright Falls who are "taken" by the dark thing infesting their town and turned against Alan Wake and his efforts to find Alice and get the hell out of Dodge. The game has that unusual combination of loose, free character movement and fast but precise aiming control that to me defines the best third-person shooters. No twiddling of sensitivity settings required. Other than a few wonky jumps from time to time, Remedy's pedigree as a maker of action games is plainly evident here.
There's a lot of gloom. Bright Falls and its dense forests form a supporting character all by themselves. Remedy does the forest primeval really well; the outdoor areas are packed with stifling foliage and dense fog, the tension rises along with fast-moving shadows, and ambient sounds heighten dread and obscure the movements of your enemies. These guys understand the simple value of silhouetting a crazed maniac with an axe against a misty, backlit tree line, though they find ways to arrange plenty of more complex but equally creepy scenarios. Alan Wake is a disturbingly great-looking game from top to bottom.
The game is also relentlessly linear, though, a price I feel like you have to pay for that kind of tightly packed design. You can rarely stray far from the critical path, and there isn't much to do on either side other than find a huge host of collectibles. There are scores of coffee thermoses hidden around for the achievement-seeking completists, but there are also just as many mysterious manuscript pages strewn around that do tie into the story. Each one foreshadows events to come or clarifies those that have already passed, and these are well worth seeking out as an enhancement to the game experience itself.
Alan Wake isn't an overly long game at maybe a dozen hours, but in the last quarter or so I found a sort of fatigue set in with what I was doing. It might be the very limited variety of enemies you face; there are only four or five types repeated almost ad nauseam throughout the game. Or maybe it speaks to the storyline's high level of intrigue that I just wanted to get on with the combat so I could uncover the next wild piece of the mystery. Earlier in the game, the nighttime action is broken up by expository daytime sequences that almost feel like an adventure game, but the pacing suffers a lack of brevity in its last couple of hours. A more condensed final act would have wrapped this package up a little tighter.
That's small potatoes in the grand scheme, though. Alan Wake is on the whole a propulsive, thrilling, and downright spooky action game from start to finish, quite unlike anything else on the market in visual style and storytelling format. It might take Remedy forever and a day to get from one game to the next, but Alan Wake proves once again their toil is well worth the wait.
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