Disclaimer: this article will contain spoilers on the game Alan Wake.
Alan Wake’s a pretty nice game. It has an interesting story, to say the least, but the end was quite the cliff-hanger. Alan Wake’s American Nightmare solves this... I think.
Alan Wake’s a pretty nice game. It has an interesting story, to say the least, but the end was quite the cliff-hanger. Alan Wake’s American Nightmare solves this... I think.
To understand what’s going on in Alan Wake’s American Nightmare you need to have played the prequel, in which the main protagonist, Alan Wake (duh), a best-selling thriller writer, goes on a little vacation with his wife Alice to a little town called Bright Falls, Washington, to help with a two-year writer’s block. The couple is staying at a cabin on an island in the middle of Cauldron Lake, but they barely arrive when Alice is kidnapped by some entity and Alan finds his world thrown upside down as he wakes up a week later in a car crash. He goes on a quest to solve what happened to his wife and consequently save her, but there are supernatural powers afoot, and they are hellbent on stopping him.
A core mechanic within the game of Alan Wake is the presence of tangible shadows. Enemies Alan encounters are wreathed in oily darkness, and he will need to shine light on them to dispel the shadows so that he can kill the man inside. As he progresses towards his goal he will learn more about the nature of the enemy (the Dark Presence) through manuscript pages that he doesn’t remember writing and conversations with certain NPCs. An element central to the plot of the game is the Dark Presence’s ability to turn fiction to reality, and it requires Alan’s art to escape Cauldron Lake.
By the end of the game, Alan is armed to defeat the enemy, but despite this he still isn’t able to save his wife from the darkness, and realises that to do so, he will have to maintain the balance, and thus casts himself in Cauldron Lake, condemning himself to the shadows. His wife soon reappears. Alan, however, is not doomed, and has a way of escaping the Dark Place as his novel isn’t complete yet. He sets to work.
From the start of the game, Alan is faced with the darkness, emerging from a tenebrous dimension after being swept away by exploding shadows controlled by a new antagonist. He is called Mr Scratch. We are told Mr Scratch is the opposite of Alan, the proverbial (and literal) evil twin of the protagonist, existing only to do evil and all that jazz. While his actions do reflect malevolence, I have a hard time seeing him as true evil. He actually comes off as quite charming, even when he murders people. Don’t worry though, that’s just me. He is quite wicked.
We learn that two full years have passed since Alan was lost to the Dark Place, and that during this time of ceaseless survival he has become quite the expert in dealing with the Taken (the people taken by the darkness), although he does say that the ones back at Cauldron Lake were something different, but I’m not sure how so.
Alan Wake’s American Nightmare is a lot more action-oriented and less story-driven than the previous title. The presence of a single-player arcade mode (it’s survival mode, really) and an assortment of deadly weapons are proof of that. In the case of the survive-until-dawn game mode, you fight off increasingly threatening wave after wave of Taken by running around a select map, gathering ammo and finding a new weapon and killing them as fast as you can. Killing them swiftly and successfully dodging an attack grant you a score multiplier and getting hit returns it to zero, and while this is a nice way to challenge yourself, the gameplay itself isn’t this much fun, and would have been much better with multiplayer.
As far as weapons are concerned there are large suitcases that can be opened depending on how many manuscript pages you’ve collected throughout the game, and a mere five will give you access to a sub machine gun that can mow the enemy down like crazy. Later on you can unlock a magnum, sawed-off shotgun – even an assault rifle and a crossbow – which make it all easier for you to deal with your shadowy assailants. Your flashlight is also much more potent this time around, melting the shadows off the Taken in a matter of seconds – even the big ones. It also recharges extremely fast, making me wonder why batteries are even needed (that is, until I tried Nightmare difficulty, which essentially made the enemies twice as difficult to kill, and that includes burning the shadows off of them).
Story-wise the game isn’t so much as uncovering a plot as it is concluding an existing one. Some mysteries featured in the previous title are explained in American Nightmare via manuscript pages, and radios will give you some insight as to what has happened these past two years. Television sets will on the other hand serve as ‘messages’ from Mr Scratch to you. The setting is always the same, and he’s either berating you or murdering someone, or both. It’s a fun little addition to the story-telling mechanic, but it has a tendency of taking way too long and I end up getting bored waiting for the screen to turn off. At this point I was truly convinced Mr Scratch was evil incarnate.
The levels on which the game takes place are large and open, feeling almost open-world in appearance, and there’s a reason for that which, if I tell you, would probably spoil the plot. Let’s just say that the way the story plays out means you’ll have to revisit them – and it’s well done, too. Manuscript pages are spread out throughout a level and because you need them to uncover plot elements and unlock badass weapons, this encourages you to explore. You may think this sounds tedious, but I thought it was a nice way to make you acquainted with a map without it being a bother.
All in all, Alan Wake’s American Nightmare is a nice little game which, if you’ve played and enjoyed the previous title, you should try out.
A core mechanic within the game of Alan Wake is the presence of tangible shadows. Enemies Alan encounters are wreathed in oily darkness, and he will need to shine light on them to dispel the shadows so that he can kill the man inside. As he progresses towards his goal he will learn more about the nature of the enemy (the Dark Presence) through manuscript pages that he doesn’t remember writing and conversations with certain NPCs. An element central to the plot of the game is the Dark Presence’s ability to turn fiction to reality, and it requires Alan’s art to escape Cauldron Lake.
By the end of the game, Alan is armed to defeat the enemy, but despite this he still isn’t able to save his wife from the darkness, and realises that to do so, he will have to maintain the balance, and thus casts himself in Cauldron Lake, condemning himself to the shadows. His wife soon reappears. Alan, however, is not doomed, and has a way of escaping the Dark Place as his novel isn’t complete yet. He sets to work.
From the start of the game, Alan is faced with the darkness, emerging from a tenebrous dimension after being swept away by exploding shadows controlled by a new antagonist. He is called Mr Scratch. We are told Mr Scratch is the opposite of Alan, the proverbial (and literal) evil twin of the protagonist, existing only to do evil and all that jazz. While his actions do reflect malevolence, I have a hard time seeing him as true evil. He actually comes off as quite charming, even when he murders people. Don’t worry though, that’s just me. He is quite wicked.
We learn that two full years have passed since Alan was lost to the Dark Place, and that during this time of ceaseless survival he has become quite the expert in dealing with the Taken (the people taken by the darkness), although he does say that the ones back at Cauldron Lake were something different, but I’m not sure how so.
Alan Wake’s American Nightmare is a lot more action-oriented and less story-driven than the previous title. The presence of a single-player arcade mode (it’s survival mode, really) and an assortment of deadly weapons are proof of that. In the case of the survive-until-dawn game mode, you fight off increasingly threatening wave after wave of Taken by running around a select map, gathering ammo and finding a new weapon and killing them as fast as you can. Killing them swiftly and successfully dodging an attack grant you a score multiplier and getting hit returns it to zero, and while this is a nice way to challenge yourself, the gameplay itself isn’t this much fun, and would have been much better with multiplayer.
As far as weapons are concerned there are large suitcases that can be opened depending on how many manuscript pages you’ve collected throughout the game, and a mere five will give you access to a sub machine gun that can mow the enemy down like crazy. Later on you can unlock a magnum, sawed-off shotgun – even an assault rifle and a crossbow – which make it all easier for you to deal with your shadowy assailants. Your flashlight is also much more potent this time around, melting the shadows off the Taken in a matter of seconds – even the big ones. It also recharges extremely fast, making me wonder why batteries are even needed (that is, until I tried Nightmare difficulty, which essentially made the enemies twice as difficult to kill, and that includes burning the shadows off of them).
Story-wise the game isn’t so much as uncovering a plot as it is concluding an existing one. Some mysteries featured in the previous title are explained in American Nightmare via manuscript pages, and radios will give you some insight as to what has happened these past two years. Television sets will on the other hand serve as ‘messages’ from Mr Scratch to you. The setting is always the same, and he’s either berating you or murdering someone, or both. It’s a fun little addition to the story-telling mechanic, but it has a tendency of taking way too long and I end up getting bored waiting for the screen to turn off. At this point I was truly convinced Mr Scratch was evil incarnate.
The levels on which the game takes place are large and open, feeling almost open-world in appearance, and there’s a reason for that which, if I tell you, would probably spoil the plot. Let’s just say that the way the story plays out means you’ll have to revisit them – and it’s well done, too. Manuscript pages are spread out throughout a level and because you need them to uncover plot elements and unlock badass weapons, this encourages you to explore. You may think this sounds tedious, but I thought it was a nice way to make you acquainted with a map without it being a bother.
All in all, Alan Wake’s American Nightmare is a nice little game which, if you’ve played and enjoyed the previous title, you should try out.
No comments:
Post a Comment