Last night I put the wrap on Alan Wake, and I have to say the longer I played it the more it grew on me. I still don’t love the conceit of shining a flashlight at shadow demons in order to drop their invulnerability and then having to figure out some other way to actually kill them. I think the game should have gone for one or the other. Either we kill them with mechanical means… or we use the flashlight to burn them away but the combination of both just feels awkward. When you get to needing to burn away shadow manifestations like possessed objects and the ever present shadow goo… that feels way more synchronous with the setting.
I think my biggest complaint is still the sheer number of times the game resets any advantages you have and forces you to go fumbling helpless through the dark. Now I get what the game was going for. This is literally a horror story being acted out by you the protagonist and the game tells you that directly. The story is about all of the near misses and times you were placed in danger along the way, and in order to do this the game keeps taking tools away from you only to force you to fumble around until you replace them. However… holy crap Alan… learn how to secure your gear because exiting a vehicle should not cause you to lose all of your shit. You would think if you need these things to survive you would be less careless than most toddlers.
The thing I am learning about Remedy through playing these games is that they are really damned good at setting up some pretty cool visuals. There are a lot of sequences in the game that are very memorable and designed in such a way as to give you an interesting vista while you are struggling through them. This is very much the case with Control, and given that I somehow completely missed playing any of the games from this studio. In theory I should have played Max Payne, but I think at the time my PC wasn’t quite sturdy enough to really tackle it and I had strayed away from consoles. All told it took me about eight hours to play through the main campaign of Alan Wake, and I am glad that I did. I have no real interest in playing through the two DLC episodes however.
I do this thing where I hyper fixate on a specific franchise, or connected franchises. Two years ago I burned through almost all of the games by the developer Spiders, and now I am seemingly revisiting anything that might be connected to the Control universe. I wrapped up Alan Wake pretty early last night and started Quantum Break which is the game that came between those two titles (three if you count Alan Wake’s American Nightmare… which does not appear to be canon). First up it is a gorgeous game, and dealing with some very different subject matter. However it appears that Alan Wake is a television show in this universe which I find interesting. I have no idea if this one is going to grab me but I figured I would give it a shot.