this game sucks so bad. it's really great.

fundamentally, all the pieces are there. the backdrop of something weird (and alien in nature) in chicago that's just hinted at through some dialogue and pieces of lore you can find scattered around. the conflict of "should you keep filming because this'll make a great scoop even if this makes you a monster?". the vibes where everything is just slightly off in an unsettling way, everyone moves slow and reacts even slower like you're watching a nightmare in slow motion.

i even think that the really terrible voice acting further compliments the game rather than hinders it, because it goes with the vibe that something is just WRONG. i always describe michigan as "this game feels like it was made by aliens" and it's just so true, in the best way possible.

now is this the most entertaining game? absolutely not. honestly i do kinda get bored toward the middle/middle-end, but not only is michigan short as hell, you can actively choose to speed up getting to the end by killing off the newsreporter you're with, and these moments are also pretty funny.

i do like the framing device of "you're seeing this through a camera" and occasionally you don't have control of what's happening ingame, but i'm also the biggest fan of lifeline for ps2 so what do i know, anyways? similar to lifeline though, michigan is so good because it's bad, but if this game was remade today to be better, would it even be good? for example, if the game had a strong narrative, better voice acting, better scares, and characters with actual writing... well, that would be a good game from everyone else's point of view, but i love michigan because it sucks. i'd probably like the remake, too, but nothing will beat the sheer kusoge that is michigan report from hell.

I'll admit that I haven't watched Twin Peaks. however, I have played Deadly Premonition, which is a game of such similar inspirations and unambitious gameplay beyond the core idea that I feel like qualified enough to say that this game was a classic case of the anti-genre old xbox title aging pretty poorly overall.

Alan Wake is a writer; he tells you this. he tells you the words on his pages of his nightmares, which are all completely void of the literary devices seen in Max Payne's neo-noire prose and fail to stimulate any semblance of imagination or actual horror as the main cast of shadows that attack you in this game are all the same breed of labourer that like to kindly inform you of your Vitamin C deficiency before spawning behind you in groups and stunlocking you to death.

some of these outworkers go fast and some of them walk slow, but Alan Wake deals with all of them in the exact same way of shining a flashlight on them for a fixed number of seconds, shooting a fixed number of bullets at them, and then running out of breath a fixed number of milliseconds later because Alan Wake is a writer and can't dodgeroll to save his life. what's with all the fixed numbers, Alan?

"The numbers are the individual cogs winding the greater clockwork of the Dark's endless expanse," says the writer.

then why's the first half of your game consist of walking around the same stretch of woods without any meaningful interaction with the environment besides stopping everything to watch an episode of the suspense show you wrote for and should already know the entire script of?

"The Darkness consumes such works of art and makes them mundane -- not through the tool of tedium, but the rancour of repetition. I can't fight the loop, I can only reshape it. Brush it with an thin, invisible coat of sugar that's just enough to prove there was once an idea that wasn't an immediate appendage to the base ingredients. I can only host one rock concert. I can only solve three puzzles in my downtime. I can only scavenge two hundred and forty four collectibles, ninety-one of which include the pages of my all-seeing, none-supposing manuscript."

but the manuscript is good, Alan! your soundtrack is swag! your story actually gets there eventually! why couldn't we have made it actually scary, too? why does the floor only give out when the game glitches every sixty seconds? why do we have to be so safe about it all?

The writer takes a break from typing and picks up a bottle. He walks over to the corner of the room to share it with his cardboard cutout of himself -- that damn fucking thing. Why's it always here!? Why does it have lore!? And it's giving me that fucking look, the one looks like it'd belong to Patrick Bateman if he was a Hazbin Hotel character.

The writer downs the rest of the bottle in one swig. It's not alcohol. It's sparkling water that's already gone stale, accented with sour blackberries and slowly dripping off a slimy mass of humus stuck to its heel.

"You know Stephen King?" asks the writer.

"Yeah, I know him."

Alan Wake sits back down at his typewriter. "Not like I do."