Hey all!
I’m finally back, after a short interruption… this was due to the move from my old blogspot blog to my own webspace. This way I get more control on themes and can add some new stuff…
One example is my new gallery at http://gallery.shadowcovenant.com, where you can see some screens of stuff I’ve worked on…
So this entry isn’t just about the website, let me tell you about Alan Wake… 🙂
I picked up the game two weeks ago and played through it in 3 days… not that the game is short (although it’s not JRPG long), but because I found it enthralling…
First, let’s get the bad stuff out of the way… it’s a game that shows its age… Being in development for 9 years wasn’t kind to it in some aspects, mainly the animation (especially the facial). Character movements seem stiff and unnatural and lip-synch and facial animation is terrible… maybe Heavy Rain spoiled me, but for a game so dependent on story development, it kind of fails in the human emotion department…
Thankfully, the atmosphere of the game is amazing, with the forest (where you do spend most of your time) settings looking brilliant, with the interactions of light and darkness giving rise to fantastic tense moments…
The game follows the story of a writer suffering from writer’s block that goes to a small American Midwest-like town for some vacations with his wife… and then his wife goes missing and he finds he has written a book he doesn’t remember writing… Convoluted plot, but completely in synch with Stephen King’s finest… and this is the major flaw of the story of the game, to be honest… I always have the feeling I’ve read this before… but if you’re doing something similar to something another one has done before, do it with style, and that’s what Remedy has done…
The action segments are very well done, I genuinely got nervous every time an axe murdering Taken appeared, and even when they weren’t on screen, sometimes even bushes gave me a scare… The combat system, with the light+bullets approach, works well to enhance this feeling, and the only failure of this system was that the cutscene system always showed where/when the enemies were approaching, which deterred a bit from the “what the hell is that” feeling.
All in all, although the game has lots of faults (including a kind of WTF ending, missing boss fights, terrible facial animation, etc), it was a very good game and I enjoyed playing it very much… Remedy once again that they’re the only ones to be trusted with psycho-plot creation and development…
Unfortunately, I’m not seeing Alan Wake becoming an iconic figure in videogames like Max Payne was… We liked Max Payne, we wanted to be Max Payne… Alan Wake is just a big pansy that writes and whines a lot… 🙂
Anyway, time for numbers:
Alan Wake
- Gameplay: 8/10
- Story: 9/10
- Graphics: 7/10
- Sound: 9/10
- Stephen Kingness: 10/10
- Overall: 8/10