When I first played Alan Wake I came out of the game thinking its writing was an absolute mess that debacled what made Max Payne interesting. I thought Sam Lake had gone too much to the extreme of the tropes he was supposed to subvert that he had lost the edge.
A few years passed and a sort of reevaluation happened in my mind; this was not a game about a good writer trapped in its own piece, it was about a bad writer trapped in its own shit. Now, through the remaster I came to a new conclusion that I think relates much more to its author, and it's kind of a middle ground between those two. Alan Wake is just mediocre, but the point is that he is on a deadline.
Alan Wake is not better or worse than any of your bestselling crime authors who fills the bookshelves, he's just a guy suffocated by his own character. This of course relates to the whole Sam Lake - Max Payne thing, with Remedy working on this project for 7 years without knowing exactly what to do and how to make a whole new thing after achieving a cultural hit with both Max Payne games.
Alan Wake is both the tale of a damned common writer and of its own creation, it's nothing new to write about how you can't write, but it's quite hard to do it with enough flair to build a world that can work on this many layers. Alan is a creation by Sam Lake who also created his own hard boiled grime noir detective, but Alan is also being written inside this story by another writer, one who already passed through this cycle of fighting against your creation to get something out of it, which opens a whole new world of possibilities about the meaning and significance of the game itself as a creation.
The brilliance of Alan Wake comes from how its metalayered story resonates with the notion of it being a game itself; its systems working to help Alan and the player through the writing and design, and making collectibles or secrets in the form of ammo crates a coherent helping hand from Thomas Zane (the writer of Alan's Story), Alan itself writing the plot of the game and the whole of Remedy designing the game.
The game manages to build a world of writers and stories that mix up and explicitly (and unashamedly) namedrops a whole lot of writers that might be an inspiration or just a joke. It threads on a line so interesting and dangerous that falls into parody at times, while managing to consistently feel like a rushed yet expertly craft script where everything feels cliché, but builds on itself to metacomment about not only the cliches, but the impossibility to run from them.
And while the game talks about this, it also feels like it missteps on certain decisions on the gameplay and level design. The game is constrained to linear levels that try open up a bit but never manage to do it right, and just let's you travel trough empty spaces that sometimes help to inmerse you in the mood, and most of the times just results in wasted time. This fight inside the game to be two things at the same time, the TV show esque with its own "PREVIOUSLY ON" and musical moments to end each chapter, and a game on its own that wants to open up and give freedom to the player is weirdly idiosyncratic now for the game, but never manages to reconcile in itself. The shooting suffers from the same middle ground, it wants the spectacle but also the horror and tension, and retains the slow-mo epic moments of Max Payne but with a completely broken ammo management that only works on a few ocasions on chapter 4 and 5.
It's a fascinating game all the time, a clear case of a flawed masterpiece that stimulates when it works and when it doesn't. One of the few Twin Peaks inspired games that has manage to actually give enough depth to its message to create a world worth diving into.
A few years passed and a sort of reevaluation happened in my mind; this was not a game about a good writer trapped in its own piece, it was about a bad writer trapped in its own shit. Now, through the remaster I came to a new conclusion that I think relates much more to its author, and it's kind of a middle ground between those two. Alan Wake is just mediocre, but the point is that he is on a deadline.
Alan Wake is not better or worse than any of your bestselling crime authors who fills the bookshelves, he's just a guy suffocated by his own character. This of course relates to the whole Sam Lake - Max Payne thing, with Remedy working on this project for 7 years without knowing exactly what to do and how to make a whole new thing after achieving a cultural hit with both Max Payne games.
Alan Wake is both the tale of a damned common writer and of its own creation, it's nothing new to write about how you can't write, but it's quite hard to do it with enough flair to build a world that can work on this many layers. Alan is a creation by Sam Lake who also created his own hard boiled grime noir detective, but Alan is also being written inside this story by another writer, one who already passed through this cycle of fighting against your creation to get something out of it, which opens a whole new world of possibilities about the meaning and significance of the game itself as a creation.
The brilliance of Alan Wake comes from how its metalayered story resonates with the notion of it being a game itself; its systems working to help Alan and the player through the writing and design, and making collectibles or secrets in the form of ammo crates a coherent helping hand from Thomas Zane (the writer of Alan's Story), Alan itself writing the plot of the game and the whole of Remedy designing the game.
The game manages to build a world of writers and stories that mix up and explicitly (and unashamedly) namedrops a whole lot of writers that might be an inspiration or just a joke. It threads on a line so interesting and dangerous that falls into parody at times, while managing to consistently feel like a rushed yet expertly craft script where everything feels cliché, but builds on itself to metacomment about not only the cliches, but the impossibility to run from them.
And while the game talks about this, it also feels like it missteps on certain decisions on the gameplay and level design. The game is constrained to linear levels that try open up a bit but never manage to do it right, and just let's you travel trough empty spaces that sometimes help to inmerse you in the mood, and most of the times just results in wasted time. This fight inside the game to be two things at the same time, the TV show esque with its own "PREVIOUSLY ON" and musical moments to end each chapter, and a game on its own that wants to open up and give freedom to the player is weirdly idiosyncratic now for the game, but never manages to reconcile in itself. The shooting suffers from the same middle ground, it wants the spectacle but also the horror and tension, and retains the slow-mo epic moments of Max Payne but with a completely broken ammo management that only works on a few ocasions on chapter 4 and 5.
It's a fascinating game all the time, a clear case of a flawed masterpiece that stimulates when it works and when it doesn't. One of the few Twin Peaks inspired games that has manage to actually give enough depth to its message to create a world worth diving into.