Alan Wake
Preview
Breathes Next Generation
by Marko Susimetsä
previewed on X360
Next gen gaming
I'm sure most of us have had those dreams in which we try to imagine games and gameworlds that the next generation computers, or the generation after that, will allow us to play. Well, you don't need to dream any longer. Alan Wake is coming. And, quite co-incidentally, he also has dreams. Pretty bad ones.
Remedy Entertainment and Microsoft Game Studios are currently working on one of the biggest game projects of our time, named after the hero, Alan Wake. Remedy Ent., known for their Max Payne games, have left the action genre behind them (having sold the character and concept to Take Two) and are working on a game that will be a genre of its own: a psychological action thriller that takes place in a a vast, open-ended environment.
Nightmares of a horror author
Alan Wake was a writer who had tried to make it in the business for several years without any big successes. Then he met a girl called Alice and started having strange nightmares. Despite the nightmares, his life was good and he eventually wrote a best-selling novel, using his disturbing dreams as an inspiration. But after he had finished his book, Alice suddenly disappeared without a trace, in a manner that bore a strange resemblance to what had happened in the book that Alan had written. Thinking that he might be somehow responsible, Alan starts to suffer from insomnia and feelings of guilt.
Enter a famous sleep clinic in the out-of-way town of Bright Falls, which is Alan's last hope of getting some actual sleep. After signing in on this sleep clinic, Alan is once again able to get some sleep, but the story is far from over. He also starts hallucinating, seeing visions of Alice, and waking up to find notes in his notebook that are written in his own handwriting but that he could swear that he has never written. And, what's more disturbing, these mysterious notes seem to be prophecies of what is to come. This Alan learns when he picks up a hitch-hiker who dies violently only a few moments later, as predicted by one of the notes Alan has written.
Gameplay
The game is presented in a third-person view that is wholly taken up by the main character and his surroundings, meaning that you will not see any conventional HUD on the screen, telling you about the equipment that you have or your current health or any of the nonsense that might make the game less immersive. Instead, all your attention will be directed to what happens in the world around Alan Wake, as he tries to understand what his dreams and hallucinations are really about - if they are about anything. It is the character's introspective voice and brief written notes on the screen that tell you all that you have to know in order to play the game.
The storyline is divided into episodes. Whereas the Max Payne games played like feature movies (and were often accused of running too short), Alan Wake resembles a modern, continuous-plot TV series with separate episodes. Some of these episodes end in cliffhangers, while others explore the character and background of Alan Wake himself. However, the episodes themselves are very free-form and non-linear, so that you can spend time exploring the game world instead of feeling that you are merely looking at an episode of a TV series.
Much of the adventure takes place during nights, and this is when the game will be at its creepiest. During daytime, Bright Falls may seem like the veritable American dream town, but during nights the shadows themselves seem to come alive, and all of them are coming after Alan Wake. The borders of hallucinations and reality seem to break and only light will show how things truly are. Light is the only thing that makes the monsters that follow Alan vulnerable. Interestingly enough, Alan himself has been hyper sensitive to light since he was born...
