This is probably old news to most of you, since Alan Wake came out ages ago in gaming terms and was surrounded by hype and chatter; but I still want to have a look at it and put in my own two pence worth, as I only just played it myself. Also, I'd like to suggest to anyone who stopped playing it after the first chapter, as I almost did myself, that it is worth continuing with - you just need to think about it differently. And that differently is different even to the way that the game would like you to think, which is itself consciously an attempt to be different to the majority of the survival horror games that it ostensibly shares a genre with.
I'm not going to be an apologist here; as a game Alan Wake is sorely lacking: there are fundamentally four enemy types all of which tend to just rush at you and other than increasing numbers and greater shielding there is little further variation as the game progresses. The game is also completely and entirely linear, and except for a few collection-based side-quests you're basically on rails the whole time. There is some variation in environments, but for the most part you are in the forest, running along a path. Everything looks lush, but its the same thing again and again.
And yet.
And yet it is still quite a compelling game. It is, on the surface, quite badly written. While the underlying plot is very generic and at times rather obvious it is robustly put together and pretty fun, it's the dialogue that really grates. Alan himself is supremely unlikable, however, while his wife is basically a plot point and the scary monsters' verbal ticks often lack in impact through being overplayed. Having said that, I did like the sheriff, Sarah and Alan's so-cliche-it-actually-worked new-york agent, Barry.
One of the problems with the writing is that it spends its time referencing the writers it wants to be compared to, but it does it so heavy-handedly that it becomes quite painful. A character repeatdly refers to Wake - whose novel is an important part of the story - as Chandler or Lovecraft. Lovecraft gets a few shout-outs elsewhere as well. Unfortunately there is very little Lovecraftian* about the horror in Alan Wake, nor Marlowesque about the protagonist. (The other big reference point is Stephen King, but I haven't read enough of his stuff to be able to say whether it is a comparable style of story.)
The thing is, as annoying as I found this approach, it was actually the key to my enjoyment: Alan Wake (and possibly Sam Lake, who wrote the game as well) is so convinced of his own brilliance, his own importance, and his own macho skillset (he runs around firing off shotguns while telling other characters to run and hide) that he is actually a rather brilliant parody. When I realised I was actually playing Garth Merenghi: The Game I started to get into it, cheese and all. Actually, having thought about it further, the real-world writer whose works Alan Wake most resembles is Robert Rankin - even down to the imaginary best friend with a New York accent and a strong line in sarcastic side-kickery. Rankin has long written the sort of horror/action parody involving clueless but narcissitic protaganists and horrendously meta-textual plotting.
Once I'd made these shifts in perception the whole thing became a lot more engrossing, and I started to actually enjoy the game. Like I said before, it isn't hugely taxing, but there is enough variation to keep you interested, and as I said before the plot is interesting enough that you want to know what happens next. So, it isn't the best game ever, but despite everything, I did end up falling for its charm. And at the very least, it is trying to do something different to the majority of the big game releases.
*As a side note, I am truly bored of the number of times I've seen something claiming to be 'Lovecraftian' in horror terms, only for it to be nothing of the sort. I think a lot of people truly misunderstand what his horror was all about: it isn't that the tentacle beast eats you, it's that the tentacle beast doesn't give a shit about you. There are two things Lovecraft was scared of (apart from seafood); degenerate humans (i.e. foreigners) dragging civilisation backwards, and the fact that we are tiny, fragile organisms on a tiny, fragile world in a universe so incomprehensibly vast that even the greatest thing we could possibly ever do will always be functionally meaningless.
No comments:
Post a Comment