'Alan Wake Remastered' Review

Writer’s glock

Be it spinning scares or simply thrills, a psychological story requires a psychological execution, which itself requires what Alan Wake sorely lacks: subtlety. The story of a writer lost in an interminable series of spooky woods, hounded by creatures festering with dark energies, loses its mystique through omnipresent detached narration and a camera constantly being wrenched from the player's hands to zoom in and orbit each and every new thing, to be followed by another banal and obvious observation about the new thing and how scary it's supposed to be. 'Dread' is only a five letter word, much too small to sensationalize every letter, and even if horror isn't the goal of Alan Wake, its persistence only serves to undermine its attempts at suspenseful (and 'interactive') storytelling. Sometimes we just need to be left alone in the woods for a while, and that's that.

Still, with the game's eldritch atmosphere and surprising lean into action, if you're not an avid spook-enthusiast but are looking to steel your resolve a smidge, Alan Wake is a great point of accessibility. The core mechanic of aiming a flashlight is an unexpectedly endearing one, and breaks just enough from the otherwise typical third-person shooting to singlehandedly give the game a survival feel, and, if you're more of an action fan, give you a convincing illusion you're leaving your comfort zone, until you're deep enough in to see things through regardless. By then the only truly sinister threat left to loom will be surviving the onslaught of stiff cutscenes constantly pouncing out of the shadows to impale you with their bits of wooden dialogue - ironically, though, as the narrative stakes could hardly punch holes in paper. For a game clearly prioritizing narrative over whatever the player gets up to, Alan Wake puts more effort into looking like an intrigue instead of actually crafting it; the game reads like a low-rent Stephen King paperback, but something tells me the developers would wear that as a compliment.