Alan Wake "The Signal" DLC Review

Alan Wake’s “The Signal” DLC released today on the Xbox Live Marketplace. As the first DLC pack to be released for the game (and a free one for all purchasers of a new copy of the game), it’s a little on the short side. Nonetheless, it continues the fiction of the game in a similarly eerie way with a few new ideas and a nice overall concept. Spoilers within.

First, the good stuff. The new content really does feel like it continues the story. And it’s nice to see DLC that’s made as an intention to bridge two games. Lots of the Mass Effect 2 DLC, for example, while I’m sure it will pop up in ME3 one way or another, doesn’t really feel like it continues the story, but just adds to it. In the case of “The Signal,” and future DLC, supposedly, it serves as a bridge between Alan Wake and its sequel. It’s nice to actually play through what happens during that six months of a sequel’s introductory “six months later…” kind of thing.

Not only do we get more of the same, sometimes-frightening gameplay, but there’s been a little bit added to it. I’ll warn you now, some would probably consider the rest of this paragraph a spoiler, so read at your own risk. Or just skip the rest of this and the next one. Somewhere between a quarter of the way and halfway through the DLC, the game introduces a new kind of Taken. These Taken have no physical form so long as the darkness protects them, making them much harder to see than normal Taken. It’s not terribly different from the previous enemies, but it’s just an interesting addition that adds a little variety to gameplay that can get monotonous.

Lastly, the story. This whole paragraph will just be one big spoiler. You start out back in the Oh Deer Diner, in the same scene as the beginning of the game. But you’ll notice quickly that the people appear like holograms, slightly translucent and with no physical form. Turns out that you’re really playing what’s going on in Alan’s head as he’s trapped in The Dark Place. Moving through familiar landscapes and indistinguishable patches of woods, you make it through to the end, helped along at points by an imaginary Barry, some uncollectable manuscript pages, and Thomas Zane himself. I won’t go in to too much more detail, lest there be much less reason to actually play, but just know that it continues on the same feel of the game without feeling tacked on or pointless.

The only flaw here is the length of this extra episode, or “special feature” as Remedy calls it. I played through the whole thing in just over an hour and a half, and that was with a few embarrassing and frustrating deaths (I swore that gap in the rocks wasn’t a bottomless pit…). For $7, I’m not entirely sure I could justify a purchase here. That said, many players will be getting it free, and there’s absolutely no reason to not play this if that’s the case. If you nabbed Alan Wake used, it’ll come down to justifying an hour and a half of equally enthralling, but not really different, gameplay for that $7.

So, Remedy, if you’re reading (yeah, right), just make sure your next DLC pack, The Writer, has a little more heft to it. And for the rest of you, this has been another episode of “Night Springs” (cue creepy theme music for creepy in-game TV show).