I know, the title promises of a pun and doesn’t really deliver. It’s just a statement.
I really like survival horror. I had bought Alan Wake on a whim during one of my game shopping sprees but hadn’t managed to bust it open yet. Then Time Magazine named it Game of the Year, and I had a day off, and the DLC was all on sale, and my intrigue at the title was suddenly renewed.
Be aware that this article will have spoilers, if you are interested in experiencing this for yourself.
I liked the game well-enough, as a game. It was a polished experience, well-crafted and I didn’t encounter a single bug, which is honestly kind of a big deal in 2010. The acting was solid and I was really charmed by the integration of the live-action bits. For someone who plays a lot of survival horror, the story of Alan Wake is not particularly convoluted. It’s logical and ties together very well, with no real missing pieces by the end of the main game (I haven’t cracked the DLC yet). The light-and-dark mechanic also tied together well and combat was satisfying without being too easy.
Some people have said that they don’t really buy in to the idea of Alan Wake as an amazing super-writer because the scraps of his own manuscript that you find are not particularly well-written. But that, to me, is exactly why I do buy in to the idea of Alan Wake as a famous super-writer. If you look at what generally sells, what is generally mainstream, it’s simply written and accessible. That is how I would describe Wake’s non-flowery suspense prose, and probably how I would describe the horror story of the game itself.
Alan Wake is no Stephen King, it’s true.
And I guess that’s the crux of what I really want to write about, which is that the problem with Alan Wake is how much it wants to be something that it turns out to be slightly lesser than. There are copious references to Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, Stephen King. The TV channels show a Twilight Zone homage (when they aren’t showing commercials for Verizon, anyway). And yet in calling up the specters of these things, it is held up to the light of them, and found wanting.
The first thing that struck me along these lines was that Alan Wake was oddly bloodless for a horror game. So I double-checked the box and realized it was rated T – a teen-Ok classification. Some great horror films haven’t been particularly bloody, so this wasn’t a problem, but Alan Wake also loses out on any opportunity to be psychosexual a la Silent Hill or Half-Life by spurning this approach. It also loses the opportunity to be like Stephen King with this approach, as one gets the constant feeling that it’s pulling its punches, something King is not known to do. Silent Hill was actually the first game I can recall to reference King, and though it has its own J-horror bend, I think it does come closer to the source in that regard.
Alice, Alan’s wife, has a fear of the dark, which seems to be a metaphor for… fear of the dark, since darkness in the game is bad. The enemy of the piece is “the Darkness,” whose sinister goal is to — I paraphrase, but this is basically correct — swallow everything up and make it dark. If you’ll forgive me, this is less Stephen King than it is Kingdom Hearts.
The promise of the premise of a writer creating his own world starts to unfold in the final segment of the final chapter — memorable, but a bit too late to have a strong impact on the full experience. I’d have liked to have seen more weirdness, even if it had to be at the expense of not actually explaining everything really well. This is something Silent Hill has always been perhaps unintentionally great at: leaving things open to speculation and interpretation, where Alan Wake is a bit too tidy.
Some reviewers were bothered by the coffee thermoses. I wasn’t really. It’s just another collectible thing. They’re a little weird, but you can safely ignore them if you don’t care about achievements, and at least they aren’t interrupting the flow of the game by insulting you in a Scottish accent.
I was a little bothered by when I picked one up and got an achievement called “Damn Good Cup of Coffee.” Look, I know Twin Peaks, and you, sir, are no Twin Peaks. All the superficial comparisons are there: there’s a missing woman, a small town, an investigation, but, the weirdness level is not nearly high enough. Wandering about the town making sure all the light bulbs work just makes good sense, considering, and ties in the logic of the game much more directly than backwards-talking or ranting about owls.
Not to mention, there already was a “Twin Peaks” game this year, and it was called Deadly Premonition.
So maybe, at the end of the day, the reason Alan Wake left me cold is it wasn’t Deadly Premonition. I had a not-exactly-PC metaphor about dropping babies to use in comparing the two games to my husband, so I’ll take a slightly kinder track in my writing. Alan Wake is like a show dog. It’s well-groomed, well-trained, and does its business in the proper place. Deadly Premonition is the Hyperbole and a Half Dog. It’s sort of dumb and goofy and gets more wrong than it does right but it’s so charming and quirky and unique and trying so hard it’s kind of impossible not to love it more.
Survival Horror isn’t dead. It just did the same odd thing that adventure games did in the 90s, where it was really weird and inaccessible and couldn’t be mainstream, and now it’s circling around back and reaching out hands to people who missed it the first time. I’m grateful that games like Alan Wake are out there to ease people in to the genre who may not have even noticed it before, since it controls well and is slick and polished. For someone who has played a lot of survival horror, and watched and read horror, I’m just not sure I’m the audience.
(Screenshots via GamesRadar; I just feel like long articles need broken up.)
Leave a Reply