Alan Wake
This a great game. However, it's not an horror game. They tried to make one, but it's essentially an action game with horror elements. Even Sam Lake admitted it. My biggest grip with it is the storytelling. I don't know why Remedy is always making games with non linear stories that are very hard to grasp. All their games are like that. It's clearly better than the Max Payne series in terms of pacing and flow, because there is much less disruption with graphic novels for example. They retained their style with TV shows and texts to read, but the game flows better than Max Payne. I can't say that I'm a fan of their mini series included in each game. They are cool, but at the same time, in each game, they force the player to halt their progress to watch something that tells some less important story.
It's a good story, but a very hard one to understand. For example: the game begins in the middle of the road, right after a car accident. The game doesn't begin at the island with a lodge where Alan stays. In the end you see that the island is gone. There are so many flashback sequences and shifts in time from present to past and vice-versa that it's really confusing. The same "out of order" narrative adopted in Max Payne. The plot seems to draw inspiration from multiple sources. Twin Peaks is one that I can't say anything about because I never watched it. The other references include Silent Hill 2, F.E.A.R., The Shinning, Poltergeist, Pet Sematary and there must be more that I didn't notice.
I can clearly notice leftovers from their attempted open world design. A lot of constructions have nothing to do inside and there are buildings scattered, with roads connecting places, with no big events happening. During day time all you do is walk from A to B, sometimes you have a car to travel longer distances. When I reached the Anderson Farm I was able to jump over a fence and walk up a mountain, just to suddenly fall under the terrain. Another sign of an environment that was left there, meant for some open world game that didn't happen.
There is one pattern that I noticed that is shared between Max Payne 2 and Alan Wake. The level design and the plot too always include multiple points in which you are going to some destination, but something happens to block the path, forcing you to take a detour and traverse a longer path to reach the destination. I don't have enough experience to analyze this aspect, but compared to other games from other companies I think that Remedy applies this "take the detour" twist more frequently than others. Another common pattern that I've seen reused from Max Payne 2 is the twist where the main character is knocked down, to wake up hours later without any guns or weapons. I can't say that I like the main character losing all its weapons again and again during the course of the same game.
The concept of using light to fight the darkness wasn't created by Remedy, although I wouldn't know when or who had this idea for the first time. Their concept for this game works. The flashlight, the paint that glows under the flashlight's beam, the usage of light to indicate the path to follow, all this in Alan Wake is a lesson in level design. The combat design is surely the weakest part of this game. Apart from some bosses and some stronger enemies, it's the same repetition from start to finish. Use flashlight to wash away the darkness, then a firearm to kill it. They tried to make some interactive elements such as powering up a lamp or a strong spotlight to fight the darkness without a flashlight. But I wanted more interactive elements such as traps. For example: turn on the lights inside a room to kill multiple enemies at once.
In the whole game I counted two puzzles, one at the Anderson Farm and another at the dam. I don't know if they wanted more, but the development sure was troubled. For comparison, Control had much better combat design and many more puzzles.
I conclusion, Alan Wake is a great source of inspiration and design lessons. However, for me the game seemed to have been dragged in some parts. It doesn't offer much beyond going from A to B, using light to fight the same darkness and the same enemies over and over, till you reach the end of the game and has a hard time connecting the pieces and understanding the whole story.
About The Signal and The Writer: for me the best thing about the DLC is that they expanded the gameplay with some interactivity that I really missed in the main game. For ex: you use the flashlight on a "boom" word to create an explosion. Another thing that I liked was the return of the surrealistic environments from Max Payne nightmare sequences. In the DLC there is a part with a lighthouse and if rocks fall creating an opening, then the lighthouse can shine its strong light over the enemies. It was a very creative idea that I wish it had been used in the main game. From all the moments, I should mention that when Barry shows up and he and Alan remember the Anderson Farm and the fireworks. That was cute and brought in some nostalgia feelings. Seeing two friends remembering some good memory was heart-warming.
About the cinematics: they made all of them run at 30fps which is the same framerate of the game on Xbox 360. On the PC and remastered versions though, the fact that the game runs at 60fps creates a strong disruption in immersion because the discrepancy between 30 and 60 fps.
