I’ve been meaning to write, and put that writing online for more than a decade now, for one reason or another. The years have eroded all of my motivations to do this except one, fun - so here we go.

There are no really expectations I’m going in with, there might be some gardening posts, writing about tech, thoughts about books and films and video games - I just want somewhere to write.

Anyway, video games gave me a nudge and I found myself writing this today, a Saturday at the tail end of a quiet two weeks of holiday spent alternating between being glued to my computer screen and pottering around the house. Why was I glued to the screen? Well, I was playing through a series of games that, previously, had never drawn my attention - Alan Wake. I’d heard the name before, but it had really not stuck. In my head it was somehow muddled up with the Vanishing of Ethan Carter, and a general amorphous blob of games I had no real reason to think about.

Long story short, I played the series, and it left a real mark - at least Alan Wake 2 did. The first game for the most part was ok but had some flaws that prevented it being very good and a few hints of something more buried within that motivated me to carry on with the series.

Alan Wake

I had fun playing this, there were some great ideas, fantastic set pieces, and a really cool setting. It was far from perfect, and it hadn’t aged very well but it was fundamentally enjoyable and showed a sort of raw promise that got me excited about later entries in the series.

Onto the bad

The writing was mixed, with a lot of the manuscripts feeling corny. Was this a reflection of Alan being a mediocre writer in a creative rut, under intense pressure to deliver a book draft to save his wife? Or was this just a product of Remedy having a tough time finding what worked for this new setting?

I’m inclined to think the latter, since the DLC (Signal and Writer) featured both vastly more engaging voice acting, and consistently gripping writing.

Besides the occasionally, unintentionally, comical writing this game felt dead set on wasting my time with optional collectibles. I’m not complaining about the manuscripts, which despite their mixed writing quality, were consistently rewarding - offering a new perspective on events, and giving us insight into characters we weren’t directly faced with (I love how the first game did this, better than both later games IMO). My complaint is levied against the coffee thermoses - pointless items which encourage exploration of the extents of Alan Wake’s environments, revealing them to be hollow and uninteresting all the while detracting urgency from the plot. By the end of my play through I was ignoring them out of spite, even those that showed up directly in front of me.

The middle

I won’t speak too much about forgiveable mediocrity, but I’ll say a little:

Boss fights weren’t challenging, at least on normal difficulty.
It was easy to quickly fill up your inventory and get to the point you could happily take on large crowds of Taken. I liked the tension at the beginning of each episode when Alan (usually) inexplicably loses all his gear, having a ton of ammo and lots of flares really makes the Taken not feel like a credible threat.

Still good

In its favour the core game is great fun, all the weaponry you get feels really good and the “flashlight to remove shield, gun to kill” one-two punch is satisfying.

American Nightmare

Lots more guns, better-feeling controls, fantastic acting from Scratch, an odd tonal shift from the first game, and an underwhelming plot. I don’t have too much more to say but I’m glad I played it, I had fun, but I’m also glad it was as short as it was. It acted as a good palate cleanser before Alan Wake 2.

Alan Wake 2

I loved this game, and it raised the bar for what I thought games could deliver in terms of narrative experience. It’s so glaringly obvious that the people at Remedy have put so much into Alan Wake 2, a true labour of love - from the harrowing opening where you play the role of a man washed up on the shore of Cauldron Lake, hunted by deer masked cultists, to the sheer exuberance of Initiation 4 offering a grand relief to hours of seriousness and anguish. To avoid equivocating, this game is a masterpiece.

I wrote this whole post just for the short paragraph gushing about this game.

Before diving into the details (which I might in the future, who knows) I’d want to run through it one more time. But it feels good to get words to the effect of “Alan Wake 2, it was really really good” written down.