My take on the long awaited Alan Wake
Very, very long awaited title. Five years long awaited title…
I, like many gamers, feel conflicted about the whole thing. It looked alright and played alright, but surely for five years of development it should have been more than alright, right?
I mean, the game mechanic was a very interesting and fun idea when I first heard about it, back in 2005, but now there are other games that have gone and done very similar things so this isn’t as ground breaking as it could have been if the developers hadn’t taken so long. Also, Remedy made out like the game would be quite a bit more expansive than it was, suggesting there would be a great deal of exploration. Most of the game actually takes place in an extremely linear fashion, and sure you can stop and have a peek here or there into a few places that you don’t strictly need to go to in order to complete the game, but this by no means makes it expansive. It lasts for about ten hours. Goodness me that’s a lame amount of time. That’s why I love RPGs!
I have to say, I’m also extremely irritated that a game that took five years from announcement to release already has tokens for bloody downloadable content. Are you freaking kidding me? And, spoiler alert here, when you finish the game you get the most boring cliffhanger ending, which supposedly Remedy is going to expand on in the DLC chapters soon to follow. I don’t know, but when I pay that much for a game, I want it to be bloody well finished, and I don’t want to have to guess randomly at an ending when I know that in a short time I’ll find out what’s going to happen anyway! Bah!
I think the thing that bothers me about the whole thing the most is the conceit. I felt like I was basically just walking through the inner monologue of an uninteresting and self-absorbed writer. It was like the worst of Steven King’s and Dan Brown’s novels put together. It’s so clichéd, and so… self indulgent. I really don’t like listening to internal monologues… I believe in the art of show don’t tell. I also felt the whole time that the monster in the dark was clearly a part of Alan, but I suppose we’ll have to wait for sequels and sequels before Remedy gives that gold up.
So, whilst there are some good things about the game, all in all it’s not really doing it for me.
