I love Alan Wake. I love Remedy. I should be sucking this game off like everybody else is, but I just can't. The story's great, if even more indulgent than standard Remedy fare. The art design is outstanding. There are some fun setpieces. Those are about the only exceptional things. The gameplay is generally fine with a number of interesting ideas, but a few odd design choices and basic missteps make it feel even clunkier than the original at times. Worst of all, it's absolutely steeped in technical issues and bugs that have an inherent impact on the experience, from missing audio and visual queues to clipping out of bounds and softlocks. Did I play a different game than everyone else? Unless I'm in the Dark Place too, this game was not ready for launch. I'm sure it'll end up like Control, where in a few months all of the kinks will be worked out and it'll be more polished, but as of now, I feel pretty underwhelmed by one of the few games my jaded ass was genuinely excited for in years. I fucking hate video games.

The ultimate Remedy game: A sequel to Alan Wake featuring a character resembling Max Payne, the live-action segments of Quantum Break and constant references to Control. For a first attempt at a Survival Horror, they knocked it out of the park, making the original game seem like an accidental comedy in comparison. Of course, it wears its influences up its sleeves a little bit too much (we get it sam! we already know you love twin peaks!) but c'mon, that's already to be expected by these Finnish bastards. Walking around too much after a chapter ended trying to nab collectibles also felt exhausting, even if I quickly forgot about it when getting into a new creative segment.

Other issues included the transition cutscenes (in-between levels, alan's game over screen, character switching) having messed up audio, where it plays, then doesn't play for seconds, then plays and keeps playing even after the cutscene ended. It even affected the last leg of The One Segment Everyone Keeps Talking About for me!

I can't believe I'm going to say this but I wish this was a walking sim. The vibes are absolutely impeccable but Remedy's combat is really unsatisfying, enemy design lacking the creativity of the setting they inhabit and encounter design varied so wildly in terms of quality. Like, this is a game which features such incredible enemies like "flying barrel" and "flying tyre" and, of course, how could we forget "vibrating gate"?

Now, this wouldn't be a problem if the game offered more but all you really do is walk around a bit and shoot at these enemies - it's the primary way you interact with the game and it isn't very good. There's barely anything I'd call a puzzle and exploration is little more than "go the other way instead of the critical path". Honestly, I cannot believe the people who made the shooting in Max Payne had anything to do with this.

Remedy please just focus on the bits you do better than almost everyone else in the AAA space and leave the shooting and that to others. I love the worlds you build and want to spend time in them, but if you can't make the things I can do in them particularly compelling, I think I'd rather just have a wander around and little else.