I have not been writing much this year, to the point that I didn't talk about the second part of Alan Wake, which came out a year ago.
The first game, I remember it with mixed opinions. The story was spectacular, but the gameplay was not very fun, up until you reached the dark place where strange things started happening and was very interesting. But the previous sections, which comprise most of the game, felt....long. You were traversing woods at night and enemies came at you, the same enemies always, and you had to beat them to get to the next point, another wood section.
Also, for some reason, you tended to travel by night, when the enemies were more powerful. I kept wondering why not take a good night's sleep and continue in the morning when it was sunny and safe....in moments when you were stranded it's ok, but every time to go out at night seemed unnecessary...
Nevertheless, the story was very good. It was very smart to connect an evil entity with the power of stories, and to indicate that you could modify the story but had to beat it in a way that made sense, if you gave yourself superpowers in writing the evil entity could do the same with itself, so you had to respect the story.
Since the first game, these people had made Control though. And I'm a big fan of Control and know these people can make great stories, so I was for sure very interested in this second part, even if I'm more interested in Control 2. So, of course I had to play this.
And I have to say that Alan Wake 2 is so much better than the first game. Still not as fun as Control, but Control is about action, and Alan Wake 2 is about horror, and it does it quite well. Horror is based on making you fear for your safety, for what will be next after the corner, for thinking you're running out of bullets. And Alan Wake 2 manages this extremely well, much better than the first part.
First, let's talk graphics. This game is gorgeous, detailed and realistic. It's amazing how good it looks, it feels like you're playing a movie. The scenarios are very detailed and unique, and feel asphyxiating somehow, in a good way for a horror game. How light work and influences the environment is also very well done. And it's worth mentioning that they've abandoned the "only going out at night" approach and follow a much nicer and scarier method: Considering that overcast north-pacific weather can make areas quite dark, that's what you get in plenty of areas, just the inside of buildings with no power or cloudy areas or rainy areas. This gives a greyish dark look at the game that matches well with its themes.
The plot is complex: Seems like Alan Wake disappeared years ago, and there's people that also disappeared in the lake that are reappearing and getting murdered by a cult, and you need to investigate this as an FBI agent called Saga. You start playing as Saga, who's a very interesting character that seems to have something more than intuition when resolving crimes, and you start investigating the latest murder. The game includes a special mode where you write down clues and follow up logic threads to figure out what happens, which I found quite cool, especially because later on there's threads that you might not find or complete fully, depending on your findings.
Soon enough things turn to worse as Alan Wake's pages appear and indicate future attacks by shadow creatures, which keep happening as described. Without spoiling much, eventually you also play as Alan Wake, but it takes a while to get there, and then you can switch between these two characters as you advance their plots in parallel.
In the middle there's also the FBC involved, and Ahti, the Janitor from Control plus other characters from previous games, connecting everything together.
When you play as Saga you find possessed shadow people that you need to light to burn their protection and then shoot, while if you play as Wake there's plenty of shadows around, some are harmless but some of them attack you and need to flash with light to reveal as monsters to attack back. Each character has slightly different weapons and abilities (instead of investigating cases, Wake can do fixed reality alterations of scenes and places), but the gameplay is basically the same. Saga needs to deal with occasional boss fights while Wake just has lots and lots of enemies depending on the area.
There's a bit of free-roaming aspect in the game, where you can revisit areas and affect their status (the water level is important in this game, since the dark presence lives in the water), but if you're progressing the plot you don't need to do that, this is just for the bonuses and hidden items and logs (and there's plenty of those).
The plot is amazing, although I called several of its twists in advance, but that's just a well-made story with foreshadowing, not a fault of the plot. It feels quite epic and deep, with scary, weird and even funny moments all thorough the game. The use of real-video actors mixed with everything else makes it a very cinematic experience, but very artistic. There's even a short movie you can watch completely at a certain point, which is not required at all for the game and you can skip and miss, but it's cool that they recorded everything in case you stay to watch it. The developers are Finnish and this is an aspect heavily referenced and shown in the game, which I think it's a nice touch.
The game is not long, as with most horror games, but still may take 15-20 hours to finish. It's quite unforgiving, to the point that I ended up reducing the difficulty in the last part of the game to avoid repeating the same scene time and time again.
The only flaw I found in the game is that, after all of it, it feels the progress we've made in Alan Wake's global story is...not much. There's progress yes, but there's a lot of unsolved things left for a third part, or maybe a second part of Control, not sure. But this ties well with the internal world, since in the dark place affected areas you tend to have to go through the same place three times before being able to finish them for real....
Recently there was 2 DLCs added to the game. The first one is a lot of fun, with three independent stories a la "Twilight Zone", with a very light-hearted tone and lots of humour, with the last story being genre-bending about what's a game and what you do in it. The second DLC is more serious, following one of the main characters, a FBC agent before she appeared in the main game. The tone is also quite sarcastic too, poking fun at AI and content-generation farms and declaring them evil, plus introducing really really scary areas and concepts, making it a very scary but nice addition to the game.
Remedy (the developers) are really doing great games, interconnecting everything and creating a very interesting world, and I'm sure to try and buy whatever they produce next.
No comments:
Post a Comment