#alan wake remastered
Bread’s Game Journal 01/11/22: Alan Wake Me Up Inside (Can’t Alan Wake Up)
Ignoring my legendarily bad title joke, I’ve been getting back into Alan Wake. My best friend bought me the PS5 remastered edition for my birthday a month or so ago, and let me tell you, this game is still wild. Remedy is obviously well known for a lot of things, but I think my favorite, and something that shines through a lot in Alan Wake, is their absurd sense of theatricality.
Alan Wake, famously, is structured like a TV show. Proceeding in “Episodes” that all end with cut’s to “credits”, complete with music playing over them. As far as TV shows go, though, this is a dense one. From the start of this game Remedy is pushing the old “Developer Foresight” trop to it’s maximum limits. The amount of foreshadowing to later parts of the story is matched only by the amount of cheeky voice lines where Matthew Poretta essentially says “nice try” directly to the player.
This theatrical motif even extends into the gameplay. There’s something I’ve never been quite able to articulate about Alan Wake’s actual flow, but I can try. Everything in this game has this sort of awkward weight, stiff movement, or obsession with looking cool that I think is brilliant. I think that primarily because this is a game about a New York City writer in a tweed jacket with leather elbow pads, picking up a gun and fighting monsters. If Alan Flowed like Jesse Faden in Control, for example, it wouldn’t feel right. It’s much better that he just sort of lightly jogs through the woods, just as out of shape as I am, losing his breath after every stiff jump or ten second job.
There’s way more to talk about Alan Wake, but given that I’ve only played the first chapter tonight, I’m gonna hold off on trying to fit all that into one post. Plus, I should really start looking for Alice, you seen her? Well, let me know if you hear anything, I’d hate it if she was, say, kidnapped.