Alan Wake: The Writer

released on Nov 12, 2010

DLC for Alan Wake

The Writer is the final episodic chapter of DLC for Alan Wake, Remedy and Microsoft's harrowing horror action game. The game features the song "The Darkest Star" by Depeche Mode.


Released on

Genres


More Info on IGDB


Reviews View More

Better than the base game and by far the best episode. The combat feels more fresh due to relying on wordplay more than the normal shine light then shoot action weve seen in the last 7 episodes. The final boss is fun and the ending is cool.
I love Insane Wake's design.

A lot more imaginative with the environment breaking down and word-based interactions than the previous bonus episode, but the combat continues to wear thin and I'm still left wishing this embraced just being a 3D adventure. That wheel portion was brutal, too. It's been a while since I've had a game trigger my motion sickness so badly.

I really appreciate how much they're playing with how little we actually know about Alan, Barry, and Alice's relationships before the events of this story, making it difficult to take the horrible things we see in the dark place as entirely deceptive or just manifestations of self-hatred. It drags the story back into encouraging interpretation and active engagement instead of the rather straightforward final sections of the base game which wrapped things up a little too nicely for my liking.

I blew through this one in one sitting. This is much more of what I was hoping for from the first DLC. It even surpasses the base game in a lot of ways. Fully utilizes the dream logic of the "dark place" to put the player in novel combat and exploration scenarios that are disorienting and visually striking. The giant rusty compartmentalized wheel that you run through is the closest this first game comes to nailing the Silent Hill vibe, but the real highlight is that last run to the lighthouse with the extreme light/dark contrast. Breaking down the cover and luring the enemies into the open areas, hoping the spotlight swings back around in time to kill them before they can kill you, is a really satisfying little gameplay loop. This also does a good job bookending the story, taking you back to Alan's original dream from the beginning of the base game.

You can see Remedy leaning into the dream logic that would come to define their next big Wake-verse game Control. It might be a little while before I get to Alan Wake 2, but I hope it's more along these lines.

quality stuff. can't wait to play alan woke ii

An introduction to how the next decade of Alan Wake material will be consisting of spinning tires narratively