The list

Games I played this week

Alan Wake’s American Nightmare

Dark Souls

Games I finished this week

Alan Wake’s American Nightmare

A Waking Nightmare

Alan Wake’s second, smaller adventure feels as much like an interesting experiment as it does a compromise of sorts. In recent weeks, Sam Lake, lead designer of Alan Wake posted a video on Youtube explaining the fate of Alan Wake as a franchise. He essentially stated that, while he feels strongly about the character and universe he and the team at Remedy had created, Microsoft did not have confidence in the business feasibility of a sequel. This means that Alan Wake is not dead, just dormant. This casts American Nightmare in a slightly different light. The game itself is fun enough, retaining a lot of the elements which made the 2010 game so unique, particularly the combat, but you can see clearly the areas where time or budgetary constraints have cut into the game’s quality.

Due to the downloadable nature of the game the experience is condensed and this leads to enemy encounters at almost every turn. Combat is basically the same as the original game with a few new enemy types which help to keep things interesting although it is a little on the easy side. I played through the entire game without dying and I only came close to death at the very end of the game. The game also features the franchise’s trademark collectibles in the form of manuscripts, T.Vs and radios, all of which serve to create a better picture of the universe and its characters. Specifically, if you bother to find the collectibles, you will learn a lot more about Alan himself and his doppelgänger Mr Scratch. Manuscripts also play a more direct role in the game by providing access to weapon crates scattered throughout the games three environments.

The premise of the game is that Alan Wake has somehow become a character in one of the stories he wrote for Night Springs, Remedy’s equivalent to The Twilight Zone. He must stop Mr Scratch by altering reality itself using instructions gleaned from a mysterious, extra-terrestrial signal. Reading that back it sounds kind of hokey, that’s probably because it is. A lot of that seems intentional on Remedy’s part and the story and narration feel like they could have come from an episode of Night Springs or its real world counterpart. The twist in the game comes about a third of the way through when, after attempting to alter reality, Wake is thrown back to the start of the game. Things have changed slightly and the characters you met originally seem to be aware of the strange shift in time. Remedy, however, cleverly change things your second time through so that it doesn’t feel like you’re doing the same things twice. This happens once more, later on, meaning you end up running through the same three environments three times each, while this in an interesting concept it also feels like Remedy are desperately trying to squeeze as much content out of these relatively small areas as possible. It can get a little tedious towards the end but the process of progressing through the environments is streamlined enough by the end that you should be able to get through the last stretch in less than an hour.

The environments are interesting but perhaps a little lifeless and the characters you meet are well written but the actual models look last gen in comparison to Wake. This leads to a clear contrast between the areas where Remedy was able to reuse assets from the previous games and where they had to create new ones on a much tighter budget. There are also some inventive uses of music dotted throughout the game which help add some intensity and, in some cases, levity to proceedings and it is that juxtaposition which is key to Alan Wake as a whole. The original game had genuine moments of suspense and tension but it was also permeated with a good sense of humour and self-awareness, American Nightmare follows that same formula. On one hand you have the creepy video diaries of Mr Scratch which and on the other you have the light hearted radio interviews with the aging members of Old Gods of Asgard, the balance between the two is what gives the franchise its unique flavour (Read: Mouth feel).

If you want more Alan Wake, and keep in mind this may be the last we see of him for a while, then I heartily recommend you go out and buy this. It’s not the best Alan Wake experience out there but it’s certainly no slouch either.

In the Depths of Darkness

Apart from guiding a troubled novelist through a nightmarish episode of a TV show that he wrote, I also found myself back in Lodran after a brief visit their some months ago. I had previously played 3 hours or so of a friends's copy of Dark Souls and I had also played a decent amount of Demon's Souls so I thought I knew what I was in for. I found my character standing in front of a fog door, the door led to a battle many Dark Souls players will be familiar with. After traversing the white light I was greeted by a Bell Gargoyle, an ugly creature with an axe three times my size, who was upon me before I could even remember what the block button was. Needless to say I was quickly killed and transported back to a nearby bonfire. It was a brutal return to Dark Souls but I would not, could not, be rebuffed so easily. After fighting my way through some lesser, but still challenging foes, I was back at the fog door. This time I was prepared. I strafed around the Gargoyle, slashing wildly at his tail. His health was halved almost instantly, I was going to kill him and it was going to be easy. I was so focused on destroying this boss that I was caught completely unawares when his companion hit me with a wave of fire from behind. I was staggered and that was all it took for the Gargoyle I had so nearly killed to turn and strike me down. I was dead. Again. One Gargoyle had been difficult, two of them seemed nigh on impossible.

It took many attempts and a host of different strategies for me to beat the two Gargolyes atop the church in Undead Parish but eventually they were dead and I could ring the bell they had been protecting. My story is probably not unique. While the Gargoyles are certainly not the most difficult enemies I faced in my 28 hours of Dark Souls, they are probably two of the most important. They taught me to never take anything for granted and to always be vigilant. It may not be the Gargoyles that provide this lesson for every Dark Souls player, it might be the Slime in the depths or the Mimic in Sen's Fortress, but it is a lesson that will eventually be learnt.

Now I can list Ornstein, Smough, and the Four Kings as some of the other enemies that I have vanquished on my journey to finish Dark Souls. As far as I can tell these are considered to be difficult encounters but I do not consider myself to be good at Dark Souls (or games in general). This leads me to surmise that Dark Souls is not a hard game, it's just different. It requires an approach which many games do not, it asks for patience and it asks for persistence.

P.S Thanks to @chavtheworld for the "awesome" banner art.