Alan Wake

Rating: T

Score: 8.5/10

Every now and again a game focuses on Nyctophobia (acute fear of darkness) as a portion of the game to lock onto the fears of gamers, but few games (if any) have used Nyctophobia as the basic premise and worked backwards from there. Alan Wake certainly is a rare case, which isn't a bad thing overall. Some of the weirdest things are the most successful. This game is available exclusively for the Xbox 360.

Welcome to Bright Falls, host to a getaway vacation for Alan Wake and his wife Alice. It’s an opportunity to clear his head after the two-year writer's block this novelist has been suffering through. The vacation turns dark when Alice is kidnapped and Alan must work through the backstory of this little town, find out who (or what) kidnapped his wife, and why.

And to go along with the story, you'll need the perfect atmosphere. Say hello to what may be the eeriest little town ever, one that the "Dark Presence" can turn into a moonless night in a flash. Between shadowy figures attempting to turn Alan into an Alan sandwich and the strange happenings in the show "Night Springs" that are shown a lot throughout the story on TV sets (that, oddly enough, will parallel your own eerie encounters), you'll be immersed in a world of shadows.

Along with those strange happenings, Alan will find some manuscript pages throughout the game describing exactly what's happening, even before it happens and to people you wouldn't know about yet, all written by Alan who has no recollection of writing this new manuscript. Other characters in the game will stumble upon these pages and their questioning of Alan's actual knowledge is interesting, to say the least. Hearing characters read a page describing them reading a page of a manuscript that describes their page-reading is odd enough; this scenario presented by a person who should have no knowledge of other people's page readings makes it all the better.

So your main reason to continue from point to point, to beat the game once and for all is the same reason Alan wants it all to end: answers. You both want answers. How could he have known when he remembers so little? Why was Alice kidnapped? What exactly dragged her away and for what reason? If a video game can put you in the mindset of the main character so nicely, it truly deserves some applause.

However, the ending to it all is...abrupt, to say the least. It leaves more questions than answers, along with some plot holes and oddball quotes to be decrypted and analyzed, but most gamers will have too many unanswered questions to be able to (without just guessing). It leaves room for another game to be sequeled. In spite of the probable sequel, the story leaves nothing to grasp onto for another game (unless they pull some heavy strings and make a ridiculous jump that would be generally an abnormal leap for this series).

The combat deserves a quick mention. It's quite easy overall, so much so only the particularly cheap shots will be the ones to kill you. The interesting aspect is that you fight with light as a weapon. The dark figures you fight, called Takens (because their bodies have been taken by the Dark Presence and are now being controlled like puppets), have shadowy shields protecting them from bullets. Light, from a flashlight or flare, will drain and destroy these shields quickly, leaving you with a vulnerable enemies.

There's some added comic relief, mainly from your best friend and sidekick Barry. There's also some driving sections. Neither are particularly memorable, but both worth a mention.

This game is indeed like no other game you probably ever played. It focuses more on being a psychological thriller/action game along with sporting a novel-like story. Although it does rock the atmosphere perfectly, and the storyline is great (although confusing at times), neither are enough to make it an amazing game in itself. It's gameplay is the sore thumb in this, and not even the shadows can hide that.