Reviews// Alan Wake

It's perfectly adequate for the perceived video games-playing market. Actually - as I've pointed out - given the competition from the likes of Modern Warfare 2, Drake's various outings, Heavy Rain, and Grand Theft Auto IV, it's not to be sniffed at. That said, it's no Edge of Darkness, The Wire, Twin Peaks or a host of other of the TV series it seeks to emulate. “Yes”, as Roger Moore/Dr Hartman would surely intone, “Indeed it is very adequate; very adequate indeed, Alan. Or is it?” Well, yes Roger, yes it is. It's certainly not pushing any dangerous boundaries that might stop it selling.

In terms of the lucrative episodic nature, well there we have a problem. The mainstay of episodic fiction is the cliffhanger ending. This is the key to making you the consumer come back for more. When viewing a piece of cinematic or televisual action or character-lead fiction – be that classy drama or straight-out soap ; when reading comics/graphic novels or literary page-turner, it's the cliffhanger that has you coming back.

The reason it keeps you coming back is that you care about the characters. I struggled to give a fig, let alone two flying figs, about any of the characters in [i]Alan Wake[i].

When playing a video game, if you've completed a game, you want that sense of completion. So, I'll be generous and compare episodes to levels. Yes, let's drop the pretence of game-changing storytelling, cliffhangers delivering value and excitement to the consumer.

This is a game aimed at getting new people to play lengthy video games. It's a perfectly understandable vehicle for using well-accepted devices from old media to make new gamers feel at home. That's fine. It just doesn't work because this is a video game.

So, although I see the necessity in terms of marketing push to include the 'Last Time on Alan Wake' slices between levels – episodes – in order to acclimatize you to them, it's already been done in Alone in the Dark. One down on the original concept front.

The fact is that you – a SPOnG reader - want to play the next level/episode because you play video games and you want to finish a game that you've purchased. There is a challenge innate in gaming that is different from passively consuming fiction. The difference is that you know that you are being lead through a story, and while feeling something more than mild disdain for the character or characters you're playing is a bonus, it's not absolutely necessary. I'll cite any of the characters from the highly successful and dreadfully threadbare in terms of character or plot, Modern Warfare 2 single-player.

Why do you want to play/purchase the next episode? Simple: the gameplay is compelling. It's not difficult to understand as a concept for publishers, yet they don't want to grasp it for some reason. The clue is in the name of what they sell: 'Video Game'.

The gameplay in Alan Wake is utterly satisfactory. It's totally acceptable. It is not going to make you drop the controller, gasp and say: “Blimey to the moon! That's a game-changer!”.

Basically, during the day, everything is 'quirky' but not terribly dangerous to the overall health. But during the times of darkness... well, you've seen 30 Days of Night, Pitch Black, any story where darkness is bad and evil, while the light is not dark or evil. You get the idea.

This brings into play the “game mechanic” that is the original piece of thought in this outing. As you'd expect, the bad guys (and creatures and household furniture) have the bad darkness within them and they are afeared – sorry, the way Alan Wake is scripted begs for words like 'afeared' – of light. So, what you need to do is burn the dark out of them with a torch (limited battery life) before blowing their heads off with a gun (limited ammo).

Yes, aiming with the torch to burn their badness then pulling the trigger several times results in death of bad. You may also like to chuck flashbangs or flares at them before blowing their faces off with your weapon.