With no new, modern lighting tech to revitalise the game’s central light-and-dark motif, it’s the town’s alien fog that ends up being the star, cut through with localised light pollution and miasmatic, inky anomalies, or velvet smoke billowing from a hastily dropped flare.
The game doesn’t introduce many new tricks past its first hour – point torch, shoot gun, flick switch – but tense pacing and mounting dread keep the repetitive action feeling fresh nonetheless. Remedy displays a film-maker’s eye for moody set-pieces. Photograph: Remedy EntertainmentĮither way, it’s easy enough to forgive the clunkers with an atmosphere this engrossing. Is this a meta mind-melter or a hokey tribute? The Dark Tower or Ready Player One? Is Alan a fading hack, or a sharp talent starved of inspiration? If nothing else, the game elicits interesting questions about just where it stands on itself, daring you to take it seriously one moment, then having Wake’s agent Barry wrap himself up in Christmas lights for “Protection, man! Like garlic against vampires!”Īlan Wake Remastered: Alan and his wife Alice. An axeman approaches “like Nicholson in the Shining”, murderous clouds of crows have “gone all Hitchcock” on Wake’s literary agent. On the evidence of Max Payne’s indulgent noir navel-gazing and Control’s overwrought monologues, the studio is quite capable of both ironic and genuinely clumsy dialogue.Ĭlanging heavy-handedness is kind of Alan Wake’s whole deal, though. Whether you can see its stilted dialogue as a tribute to Lynchian uncanniness, or perhaps a wry wink at Alan’s own shortcomings as a writer, will depend on how generous you’re feeling to the writers at Remedy Entertainment. A well-placed round from the launcher is as spectacular as any shotgun, disintegrating Taken into chunky luminescent gibs. Flashbangs and flares deliver dazzling crowd control.
Alan can move and fire simultaneously, but enemies are swift and aggressive, so it all feels like a more fluid take on old-school Resident Evil’s spooky, stop-and-pop shooting gallery.
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