Alan Wake: I want to live in Bright Falls

I don’t talk about gaming much, but I want to go over the best game you’ll play all year. Better than Red Dead Redemption, better than God of War 3 (it pains me to say that) and better than Starcraft 2.  How is it possible that this seemingly unknown game is actually better than every single game out there?  Well for starters, it does something that most games just don’t do anymore, tell stories.  Alan Wake has by far the best story of any game in the past few years and you’ll instantly see why when you play it. Now I know what you’re thinking, how can this game be any better than Red Dead Redemption?  I don’t know about you, but Red Dead bored me to tears after awhile.  Maybe it’s the open worldness of it, or just the blah gameplay, but I quickly sold the game back to Gamestop and found myself quickly playing Alan Wake and never looked back.
Alan Wake takes place in the peaceful town of Bright Falls (they don’t mention the state, but my guess is either Oregon or Washington).  Now I know what you may be thinking here, but Bright Falls isn’t anything like Silent Hill, I mean it has it’s own TV show called Night Springs (similar to The Twilight Zone).  The game starts out with Wake in a dream, driving down the road late at night.  He’s driving fast and out of control, next thing you know he hits a guy and send him flying.  Wake gets out of the car to find him dead, but soon after the headlights of his car go out, the guy disappears.  Alan later finds out the hitchhiker is actually a character from his book, trying to kill him.  Alan finally makes it to the lighthouse and is woken up by his wife Alice on the way to Bright Falls.  Once in town they stop off at a diner to pick up the cabin keys from a Carl Stuckey.  Inside the diner we meet Rose, the waitress who’s madly in love with Alan; the park ranger Rusty and the Anderson brothers who used to be in the band Old Gods of Asgard.  Rose tells Alan that Carl is in the restroom, so Alan goes back to find him, but instead meets a woman in all black as if she were going to a funeral.  She hands him the keys with directions to get to the cabin.  After Alan leaves the diner, Carl comes stumbling out of the diner saying that they forgot the keys!  Back at the cabin, Alan and Alice make themselves at home as Alice says she has a surprise for him.  Seeing as how she’s in her underwear, Alan thinks she’s the surprise; however, the surprise is a typewriter (as Alan hasn’t written anything in two years).  Alan blows up on her and storms out of the cabin, knowing she won’t come after him (as she’s afraid of the dark).  After he realizes he’s foolish for getting angry, he sees the lights go off in the cabin with Alice screaming.  After racing back to the cabin, he sees Alice being sucked down into the lake, with Alan jumping in after her.  Alan finally wakes up in a car accident.  Now the actual game starts, and really starts to shine.

I’m not about to go over every little detail of the story, so I’m just going to talk about the gameplay.  While I was quite excited about the game initially, I quickly changed my mind after seeing the GameTrailers review on it.  They loved the game, but I just couldn’t get past the gameplay.  I know that this game is survival horror-type, but I didn’t realize this would be so limiting.  As with all survival horror games, you’re not given rocket launchers or machine guns; but based on the GameTrailers review, all you’re given is a flashlight, and a revolver.  Didn’t look too appealing if you ask me.  My friend bought the game and told me to come over and see it, as it was insanely beautiful.  Still skeptical, I wasn’t sure what I was going to think of it.  Would it be better than I saw on GameTrailers?  Or would it be the same or possibly worse?  After watching it for a few minutes, I was hooked.  Since my friend isn’t too keen on scary things, he gave me the game to play.  Seeing as how I’m a huge fan of story-driven games, this was right up my alley.  From the opening of the game, I was hooked.  The game is 6 “episodes” long, with each being around 2-3 hours each, depending on difficulty and how much exploring you do.  Speaking of exploring, most games nowadays now have collectibles/treasures that you need to find, and this game does too.  While I’m not exactly sure the reasoning behind it, Remedy decided to use coffee Thermoses as their collectible.  There are 100 in the entire game, with some possibly being only in higher difficulties.  They also have “manuscript pages”, which explain parts of the story that you may have missed, and even alluding to things that will happen in the future.  For example, a good 30 minutes before you experience it, you find a page that says “And the bulldozer raced toward him, with every intention of killing him”.  Sure enough, you’ll find that same bulldozer a little later in the game.  There are 106 total manuscript pages, with certain pages only available on higher difficulties.  I’ve already beaten the game and now on my second playthrough and I’m actually taking the time to explore and find things I missed before.  But do yourself a favor, don’t go exploring too much; Remedy made the woods quite large, so searching over the entire woods, is going to end in a lot of wasted time.  They didn’t exactly hide these collectibles, so don’t look too hard.

About a week or so ago, the first DLC (downloadable content) for the game came out.  Simply called “The Signal”, this DLC involves Alan following his GPS signal so he can find his way out.  I’m not going to explain the story on this one, as it does contain spoilers.  This DLC is only about 3 hours long and costs a cool $7; however, if you bought the game, you received a code in the game to download the first DLC for free.  The gameplay of The Signal is very similar to the first game, but the difficulty has been taking up a notch or two.  I found myself dying far more than I did in the first game.  While that’s not a bad thing per se, they don’t give you an option to set difficulty, it’s simply at “Hard” or “Nightmare”.  A bit distracting if you ask me, but I was still able to beat it, as well as find this funny bug near the end of the DLC.

Alan Wake is a game unlike any other, sure it borrows from survival horror and the lip syncing is actually quite funny at times, but the story is simply amazing.  My first playthrough, I kind of blew right past the game, didn’t really listen to the story and mostly forgot about everything.  Now with my second playthrough, I’m paying a lot more attention to everything.  Is there anything I don’t like about the game?  Well, I honestly would have liked it to be on PS3 as well, but since I have a 360, I can’t quite complain.  The lip syncing is hilariously bad at times, but that’s truly it.  This game is by far the best game I’ve played in a long time and now that I’m on my second playthrough, I’m loving every minute of it.  There’s so much to do in this game, from listening to all the radio programs, to the TV programs and listening to all the manuscript pages; this game just envelopes you into it’s world and you don’t want to leave.  They even made a 6-part live-action “prequel”, where each episode is only 5-6 minutes long.  I have mixed feelings about this prequel, which the production values are great, it’s a bit short on story.  Though I can’t really blame that on the “show”, as how much can you really do with 5-6 minutes?  All-in-all, you should play this game.  It’s way better than Red Dead, way better than Starcraft 2 and better than God of War 3 (my second favorite game this year).  Buy this game so we can have a second and third game!

5 emphatic stars out of 5