But I enjoyed his nightmares.
There are already a few reviews of this game on the internet
so I won’t really be adding any new sauce to this well grilled game. Excellent
story largely let down by gameplay.
Want to know what I shouted the most while playing this
game?
“Alan man just fucking *…*”
*shoot
*dodge
*run
*JUMP
*ANYTHING!!!!
*HURNGHH!
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I felt compelled to compare Alan with my interpretation of the Lara-split syndrome (totally a thing I just made up) apart from where as wor lovely Gameplay Lara is the bidness it seems Alan Wake suffers from the reverse…. Cutscene Alan is at least slightly clued up about his situation but Gameplay Alan is just… lifeless. He’s a monotonous drone that compelled me to think he deserved his fate to be honest. Also there was no mention in the games features that Gameplay Alan would be vulnerable to the Daniel-from Amnesia-style freaking out and dodging TOWARDS the thing that scared him. GAME. UGH. Alas, Cutscene Alan, I wanted him to reach the end, find his love and escape the evil that consumed him.
Barry.
Barry was mint. I felt there wasn’t enough about him in the first game and I’m glad you got a chance for some closure in American Nightmare, for him and some of the other characters. In fact, the only character I wasn’t very interested in was Alan himself. He was a bit of a dick to everyone around him, even more so in American Nightmare: making all those choices to affect the lives of those people and not really giving it a second thought whether they would continue to exist or not. Emma Sloan for example. He fails to save her more than once and she’s forced to remember a horrific tragedy over and over again. We only come into that reality after he’s already faced Mr Scratch so how many times has it really been? Mr Scratch has already caused trouble for some period of time to have affected reality to the point it made it possible for Alan to break through in the first place.
I get these games were meant to make you feel his
desperation, the loneliness, being self-alienated and possibly what it’s like
to know the truth of something but no one believes you. They think you’re
crazy. It attempted that anyway. I’d
played “The Cat Lady” shortly before the Alan Wake games and I think that raised
the bar for me in regards to the emotional depth of a character and feeling
what they feel. Damn that was a good game. You know I didn’t realise how much
it had disturbed me until a few weeks ago when I was telling a friend to play
it. *Shivers* [I will replay it and share what I mean with you in the near
future]
I tell ye what though, Gameplay Alan and Cutscene Lara
deserve each other. Stick ‘em in a boat and ship them off to Diver’s Isle and
fecking leave them there to jump over the logs that are capable of inflicting mysterious
psychological damage and they can sit there and cry about it.
