Eyes Wide Open: Alan Wake Hands-On

Finnish developer Remedy has a history of taking its time putting its games together. Its big debut, Max Payne, proved well worth the wait, with its richly pulpy atmosphere and John Woo-inspired acrobatic gunplay that, at least for a while, was oft imitated but never matched. It's been almost five years now since Remedy first debuted Alan Wak e at E3 2005. The psychological thriller aspects of the game, and the specific influence of David Lynch's Twin Peaks have been pretty clear, but solid details, or even a sense of what kind of game Alan Wake would end up being, have been, for the most part, quite scarce.
 
Microsoft, which is publishing this now Xbox 360-exclusive title, showed some gameplay of Alan Wake at E3 last year, and it was just as surprising to see how heavy it seemed to be on the gunplay as it was to see that Alan Wake was an actual, playable game. I finally got my first hands-on with Alan Wake at Microsoft's X10 event last week which corroborated the impression that the E3 2009 presentation left and gave me a decent sense of the mechanics, though it was a brief and out-of-context enough that the fiction and the pacing of the game are still pretty well obfuscated--perhaps deliberately so.
 
Before getting into my personal experience with the game, a little backstory. Alan Wake, a best-selling suspense writer, heads to the quirky, sleepy berg of Bright Falls, Washington with his wife to escape the writer's block that's been chasing him. Once he's there, though, things go bad fast, with his wife going missing and the building sense that either Alan is trapped in one of his own thrillers, or the objects of his imagination are becoming manifest. The demo was thick with the misty creepiness of the Pacific Northwest, and the dread of being alone, in the forest, in the dark, with a flickering flashlight and something chasing you that you can't comprehend, or don't want to comprehend. Alan has a tendency to narrate his own story, as though it were a novel, a voice he also uses when he finds the scattered pages of a manuscript that he clearly wrote, but has no recollection of.
 

I spent a fair amount of my time with the demo wandering in the forest near an unsettlingly quiet logging camp, though the solitude was regularly broken up with encounters with the locals. The locals are acting crazy, attacking Alan and screaming invectives at him. But they're clearly not just crazy, since they're basically impervious to gunshots unless Alan shines his flashlight on them first, and as we all know, psychos don't explode when light hits them. Alan's flashlight, and whatever other light sources he finds in the environment, are just as critical to his survival as the weapons he brandishes, which made for a mini panic attack every time the flashlight started to flicker, which was surprisingly often. In an on-the-nose, if not entirely setting-appropriate, bit of product placement, all of the battery packs in the game are Energizer branded.
 
After eventually finding safe haven in a gas station, Alan was able to contact the local police, who came to the rescue, though that just staved off the most immediate threat to his well-being. It didn't take long for Alan to learn that the nearby island he was staying on with his wife disappeared years ago after a freak volcanic eruption. Obviously not a good sign for things to come. While the first part of the demo was fitfully paced, the second section was pure action, with Alan and another character defending a county-fair stage from wave after wave of encroaching locals, using guns, stage lights, road flares, and pyrotechnics. As a third-person shooter, Alan Wake feels competent enough, but, at least for me, this is clearly not the draw of this game. 
 
The demo then cryptically ended with David Bowie's “Space Oddity”, which fit the eerie tone of what I had just experienced, if not the exact subject matter. Then again, considering how little knowledge of the nature of Alan Wake's story I came away with, who can say? With the game's May 18th release date just around the corner, perhaps I'll finally get the answers I'm looking for.