Alan Wake artfully marries style and substance to produce an enthralling psychological action thriller.
You play the titular character, a famous author with writer's block who comes to the sleepy mountain town of Bright Falls for a vacation with his wife Alice, who hopes that the peaceful retreat will help him recover his creative talents. When she vanishes after an apparent invasion of their dwelling by an unseen force, and Alan comes to in the wreckage of their car teetering over a cliff in the forest outside of the town, he sets about trying to find her, setting up the premise of the game.
He begins to find pages of a manuscript authored in his name that he has no recollection of writing, a horror novel that is seemingly coming to life. He narrates the action with the air of a man who doesn't understand what's happening, nor why, but being a writer his storytelling is quite poetic at times and this adds a richness and depth to the game's plot.
As the game begins, Alan is armed with only a flashlight. He spots a service station in the distance and heads into the gloomy forest to get to it. Unfortunately, it's populated with The Taken, ghostly townsfolk who are controlled or infected by darkness and which wield pickaxes and scythes, bent on killing Alan.
What helps the game's authenticity is that Alan isn't physically fit. He can sprint for alarmingly short periods before slowing to a virtual crawl, leaving a cinematic dodge feature the only recourse of action when being chased by a hoard of Taken.
The combat is where it gets interesting though, as the enemies can only be killed by shining enough light on them as to reveal them in their weakened state, literally outshining the darkness. You have to aim Alan's torch on them, then finish them off with a few gunshots. This is all well and good, except that the enemies frequently attack en masse, and you can only really deal with one at a time. This makes for frantic sequences, as they attack from all sides and move quickly.
If Alan can make it to a source of light - a streetlamp or a floodlight in a logging area for example - he is safe from attack and his health replenishes quickly. However, these often require a generator being started to power them, which you have to time your button presses to do. Alan is exposed at this point and frequently has a pickaxe plunged into his back as a result.
There are weapons that can avert this though; a shotgun and hunting rifle can be used for greater damage but of particular help is a flare gun, which can be blasted into the midst of an attacking group of The Taken for an instant kill, and if that doesn't occur, Alan can quickly run and stand next to the flare as it burns to protect him a little longer as he engages the ghostly apparitions.
Visually the game is very impressive, with the gloomy forest where much of the game occurs well-animated and atmospheric, and serves to increase the tension felt playing. The Taken have warped, guttural speech that changes in pitch and volume whilst they lurk in the shadows taunting Alan, and the mixture of drawn-out sequences of fearful expectation and equally unexpected shocks is only enhanced by such events.
The soundtrack is excellent, with songs by the likes of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds peppering the action when Alan switches on a radio in a remote log cabin, making you doubt whether it's an approaching enemy or just background noise. Alan can also find televisions that when switched on, play clips from a Twilight Zone-style TV show that enhance the plot but mainly add to the sense of foreboding and isolation, both of Bright Falls and Alan himself. Finding these is almost always a good idea, as frequently along the way Alan will find pages of his manuscript, which often hint at events to come or what to do next.
The sense of the unknown and of malevolent forces at work permeates every pore of the game, yet there is also a benevolent presence: Alan will often reveal yellow markers when shining his torch on them which direct him to weapons caches or the means to get past obstacles.
The characterisation is another highlight if only because it's very believable in spite of the very unbelievable premise, and the debt to Twin Peaks and The X-Files runs deep here, but fortunately is more in acknowledgement than in tribute. These influences have led to something special here, because the atmospheric tension and time and attention given to the population gives the game a sense of truly being its own world. Indeed, Bright Falls takes on a life of its own owing to the absence of stock characters.
If there is a drawback it's that the game never truly delivers an outstanding moment, instead this is a journey fraught with consistent menace. You won't remember specifics because the whole game itself is the highlight. At a time when originality is frequently being overlooked in favour of flashy visuals and online multiplayer modes, Alan Wake is a timely reminder that storytelling is both a dying art and yet at the same time, the most enduring.