It is a shame that a video game is used as a platform to convey an emotional, and even artistic story so seldom. Lucky for us, that the swedes (fins? polish people?) who developed Alan Wake decided to grace us with something closer to a digital Stephen King novel than another re-skinned Quake. There have only been a few times before now when I truly felt not only that I was lost within the pages of some great story, and as a character in that story, had to make my way through it. Like a choose your own adventure. sorta. Off the top of my head that PS2 game Shadow of Destiny is the only other game that not only presented a great story (RPGs do this all the time) but also thrust the narrative fully into your hands, and involved the player complexly.

The game does such a good job making the setting feel … well just downright evil at times. And when it doesn’t feel like the woods themselves are out to get you, it still conveys such a strong sense of unknown terror, and threat, that I found myself a nervous wreck after every play session. Now I don’t know if I am just super-manly, but I never found the game frightening per say, more of like a vague nauseous terror had crept upon me. Like I was being suffocated by unseen hands. The point I am getting at is I don’t think I jumped more than once the entire game, if that. Some reviews I read rambled on about how frightening the game is, and how many scares you will have, but I didn’t really see that. I was too busy being sucked into the extremely well divulged storyline to be frightened.

Now yes, the graphics are… well bad kinda. And yes, sometimes the controls didn’t do what I wanted them to do. But I’m gonna let those both slide in the face of the enormous achievement the dev team made in terms of raw storytelling. This is quite simply, the best immersive gameplay I have ever seen. Yes, better than Bioshock.

I truly love what they did with Alan Wake, and plan on buying all the DLC for it I can get my grubby hands on, high praise from someone who usually avoids DLC like herpes (as much as possible in todays crazy world).

So yes,
is good.

-kidc

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