If you flip back to the beginning of the year to my year-end retrospective, you’ll find Alan Wake listed as a game to look forward to.  Well, this week I finally got around to playing Alan Wake.  And, after some serious thought, I have finally come up with a sentence that encapsulates my thoughts on Alan Wake.

Playing Alan Wake is like getting a hand job from a stripper in a strip club. You know, there is a lot of buildup, excitement, and anticipation, and while it’s going on you’re really into it but after it’s over you’re left feeling slightly sticky, and have an overwhelming sense of guilty remorse combined with an unshakeable need to bath in pesticide because you can all but feel the crabs hatching on your skin.

I know you’re a little confused by all of that, I mean, I did put the game on my list of games to watch out for at the beginning of the year.  But, hey, they can’t all be winners.

The problem here isn’t that Alan Wake is a bad game, it isn’t.  The environmental elements are well planned out, the combat is thematic and makes sense within the game world, and the whole look of the game is dark and scary.  The problem with Alan Wake is how the story is told.  It’s starts off with a good premise, a writer is headed to isolation in order to finish his novel and then some scary things happen.

The town and the surrounding woods are just flat out creepy.  The game effectively uses lighting and stillness to a surreal horror atmosphere.  The world is dark and only visible in strong light.  And even then it is heavily cast in shadows making it hard to see things.  The levels are well planned out, if a little cliché about having to move this thing to climb on that thing to get over there, but that is part of the genre.

And having the people of the town possessed by “darkness” is great. Using the flashlight to stun them so you can shoot them with a pistol is great fun.  You never really need to upgrade or switch weapons.

Those parts Remedy, the maker of Alan Wake, has put together really well.

But it is two elements in the game that really disappoint me: specifically the use of voice-over and the ending.

I’ll start with the use of voice-over.  Voice-over, for the home schooled, is where a character narrates a scene in a film, show, or game.  It’s the filmic attempt to approximate the 1^st person narrative from novels.  It really saw a lot of use in the film noir era in post-war Hollywood.  When used correctly, voice-over colors the world in. It provides a perspective of the character or imparts information that otherwise is not available on the screen.    Actually, I’ll give you an example from Memento.

Memento Chase Scene

Okay, so that scene shows us he’s in a chase, but more importantly it shows us the narrator doesn’t really know what’s going on even through he’s involved in the action.  It colors our understanding of what’s happening on screen.  It provides us with information that isn’t readily available from the action.

And Alan Wake routinely fails to do that.  Too often the voice over tells you exactly what you see on screen without giving it any sort of emotional color or involvement in what is happening.  I imagine it’s supposed to add a layer of confusion because as you play through the game you keep finding sections of the book Alan has yet to write that tell you what will happen next.  It really should be used to present more information about Alan’s understanding of the world or to add a layer of horror to what is going on as Alan adds his feelings to what we see.  Too often what really happens is Alan walks into a room, we see a dog over in the corner and the voice-over says, “I walked into a room, and there was a dog in the corner.”

Frankly, that’s just crap writing and not to be encouraged.

However, the part that really let me down was the ending.  You’ve played through the town, fighting all of the darkness possessed town’s people, and the ending cinematic is rolling when a woman’s voice says, “Alan, wake up.”

Now, I know what you’re thinking, “Um, what?”  Let me explain: in fiction there is an understanding that the whole thing is a giant lie but I’m going to believe everything you tell me so it will create a sense of tension and danger.  The suspension of dis-belief.  Stories are entertaining and have meaning based on the level of consequences for the character.  As an example, if James Bond doesn’t stop that bad guy with the funky scar the free world will blow up or end or something.  The tension (and entertainment value) comes from the belief that if Bond fails everything that’s important to him will be destroyed.  So we become involved in the story, and actively root for Bond to stop the dude or bomb or whatever.  Real and meaningful consequences make for good stories.

If nothing will happen if Bond fails, there’s no tension, no entertainment, or involvement.  Which means it’s boring.

And Alan Wake sets up real and meaningful consequences for the game. Alan’s wife has disappeared, and he’s got to find her. And there are all these darkness creatures out to get him.  So the threats are real- the darkness creatures- and the consequences are real- Alan’s wife will die- if he isn’t successful.

And at the end a voice says, “Alan, wake up.”  These three words imply that Alan was asleep, and that the whole game was just a dream.   Which is the literary equivalent of saying “fuck you.”

Why?  Because that means the whole game was a dream.  Just a bad dream.  No real risks. No real consequences.  None of it was real or meaningful for Alan.  The character development and change are now rendered meaningless.  The entire story is empty. Everything that Alan went through in the course of the story is a pointless exercise.

This is exactly like reading a short story that ends with not with a conclusion to the story but with the narration suddenly ending and a description of a new character taking the finished story from a type writer or deciding to throw the whole thing away because they can’t come up with an ending.

It’s a bullshit amateur rookie hour move, and it’s not to be encouraged or tolerated.

Remedy, well…

Overall, Alan Wake does set and maintain a creepy atmosphere using effective light and shadows but the story really fails to deliver an impactful story due to poor technique and the ending that implies that the whole game was a dream state robs it of any effectiveness.  If the ending and voice-over elements had been handled better the game would have been great, as it stands it is another example of excellent game design but very poor writing.