Alan Wake, as a game: ★★★★
Alan Wake's remastering efforts: ★★★
An absolutely unique gem, special for its time, and with a narrative intrigue that ages well. Alan Wake is a wonderful, contained action-adventure oozing with style. That style takes influence from a slew of television, cinema, musical, video game, and literary sources in an endearing way. That said, Alan Wake is in itself, fresh and novel. In addition to the well-crafted story, I especially enjoyed the soundtrack and the general atmosphere of the game's setting. I look forward to exploring this deeply weird world more with Control, American Nightmare, and Alan Wake's imminent sequel.
If I were to rate the remastering effort itself, my reception would be much worse. I do not think the remaster offered much in the way of updated performance or gameplay. There is a significant visual improvement, but it comes with a compromised product laden with bugs. Oddities with audio are persistent. However the most frustrating items were the progression glitches. Upon completing the game, the title deleted 2 episodes (and roughly 3 hours) of progress… disabling my ability to replay the final episode and resetting collectible statistics to their prior state. This is frankly unacceptable for a 'remaster' that has been out for as long as this one has. If such a bug is not prevalent in the backwards compatible version, I would recommend playing the game that way instead. On Series X, via FPS boost, the original can still be played at 60fps.
Alan Wake's remastering efforts: ★★★
An absolutely unique gem, special for its time, and with a narrative intrigue that ages well. Alan Wake is a wonderful, contained action-adventure oozing with style. That style takes influence from a slew of television, cinema, musical, video game, and literary sources in an endearing way. That said, Alan Wake is in itself, fresh and novel. In addition to the well-crafted story, I especially enjoyed the soundtrack and the general atmosphere of the game's setting. I look forward to exploring this deeply weird world more with Control, American Nightmare, and Alan Wake's imminent sequel.
If I were to rate the remastering effort itself, my reception would be much worse. I do not think the remaster offered much in the way of updated performance or gameplay. There is a significant visual improvement, but it comes with a compromised product laden with bugs. Oddities with audio are persistent. However the most frustrating items were the progression glitches. Upon completing the game, the title deleted 2 episodes (and roughly 3 hours) of progress… disabling my ability to replay the final episode and resetting collectible statistics to their prior state. This is frankly unacceptable for a 'remaster' that has been out for as long as this one has. If such a bug is not prevalent in the backwards compatible version, I would recommend playing the game that way instead. On Series X, via FPS boost, the original can still be played at 60fps.