Alan Wake

[Aeron]

The survival horror genre is all but dead in contemporary gaming so it's nice to see something like this come along. It's an interesting mix of Silent Hill, Twin Peaks, John Carpenter's "In The Mouth Of Madness" and an assortment of Stephen King works. Each chapter is broken up into episodes making it feel like a horror mystery television series you're watching as well as playing. There's televisions you find in the game that play short episodes of a Twilight Zone style tv show which is amusing. The way the lighting and shadows play across the environment when you explore the forest is very cool, feels like a very realistic nightmare, lots of blurry shadowy characters wielding axe and chainsaws and weird tornado things chasing you around.

[gryeates]

I think that Alan Wake has some very interesting ideas as noted in the article about darkness and the nature of horror. Having had one long play on the game, I commend it for this and the atmospheric night-time battle sequences.

My main problems with the game stem from the constant voice over and other story-telling devices like the manuscript pages, which are littered with a number of spoilers, and these kept sabotaging the atmosphere for me.