Alan Wake: Post Mortem.
By trulyalive 5 Comments
Alan Wake review is up: Enjoy here.
I have more to say about Alan Wake than I could honestly express in a review, so here's some additional thoughts.
It's worth mentioning that I've only really been playing horror games for about two years...it started with Bioshock. Sure, it's not really a horror game, but it has pretty specific horror elements to it. To someone who had no idea what Bioshock was and had never played horror games, it left an immediate impression on me. Despite the fear, I enjoyed it.
From then, I moved onto the Condemned games. They had a certain frantic energy to them as well as a twisted perception of humanity in general. It was more a conceptual nightmare than an action-based one. It was nigh-on nihillistic.
Dead Space was next and I will happily fight anyone who exclaims that it is Resident Evil in space, I have always despised the Resident Evil games for pressing the panic button, by restricting the ammunition and resources and forcing you to scavenge desperately just to get by. To some it may sound like I'm bad at the game and looking for excuses, and although to a degree that's true it's also true that for a survival horror series of games, there's really nothing scary about it. It seems too bland for me in that respect. Dead Space however was a better game, providing enough ammo and scares to earn it's place as a great horror game. As well as that, it took full advantage of its space setting by putting you out there in space; that silent floaty horror resonated for a long time with me after playing.
I've tried Silent Hill. I've failed at Silent Hill. There's something about the tone of those games that is literally too much for me. I have seen some remarkably twisted things in my time and Silent Hill seems somehow worse than all of it. I'm trying to get through Shattered Memories right now, with little luck.
And now there's Alan Wake, which literally taps into my worst fear.
I have Nyctophobia, fear of the dark. It's a subject explored extensively in the game and I felt almost comforted by the games acknowledgement that the dark is sheer terror for some of us. It didn't take long for me to realise that the game was using that fear against me, quite subtly at first and extremely later on. I'm not going to make any absurd claim that Alan Wake helped me get over my fears...lock me in a dark room, or cause a power cut at night and I'll still freak out. But playing through the game did feel helpful in a way. It allowed me to reflect on my phobia in a number of ways.
B[o]ut.