Started this as a early Halloween game and for the Control connection. Haven't decided to play more like game trying to find every collectible or more like I was Alan Wake. The game is guiding you one way but that other path probably has a old thermos to collect. Can the wife wait until I get coffee? What if someone peed in this thermos? The wife is probably dead. I know how these games work. I played all those games where the wife that you have been talking to or looking for has been dead all along. Why is the husband never the dead one? Man if it turns out Alan is really dead and trapped in hell or something I will give the creators a cookie for being different. Only a small cookie though since the game could have been Alice Wake. Ladies right books when they aren't writing slash fiction of Sam and Dean. THOSE GUYS ARE BROTHERS STOP IT, JUST STOP IT.
Anyway only about a hour into the game. Just pointing flashlights at stuff and going bang bang. On the way to a gas station for help.
You know there was a interesting bit to the story near the beginning. The game let it be known to the player that we were sent to the wrong cabin by some spooky lady. Alan and his wife think they were sent to the correct cabin. Kind of makes me think the player is Alan's subconscious.
Walking through the forest I see swirling smoke and say "What the hell is that". A second later Alan Wake says "What the hell is that". I thought it was funny.
Interesting game so far. Enemy design and combat aren't very good but I'm still early in the game. I have only seen shadow people. Point light at them and shoot rinse and repeat. The story is more interesting. A building get pushed over while I'm in it. The guy hounding me is disturbing even if he is boring in design.
Not liking the limited run time and heavy breathing.
Point light at them and shoot rinse and repeat.
That's basically the whole game, yeah. I completed it, but it got pretty old for me by the end.
I really liked Alan Wake, now I want to play it again.
Now that Alan Wake 2 is out, I've started playing Alan Wake 1 Remastered. On Easy mode, not because I'm worried about its difficulty, but because I just want to blaze through it as fast as possible to get on to AW2.
Now that Alan Wake 2 is out, I've started playing Alan Wake 1 Remastered. On Easy mode, not because I'm worried about its difficulty, but because I just want to blaze through it as fast as possible to get on to AW2.
My recollection is that (like every Remedy game I've played) it starts out manageable but gets really hard as you approach the end, then downright brutal in the postgame DLC. Even on Easy, I think you'll hit a challenge in the back half.
I'd humbly suggest you consider starting on Normal to make yourself "git gud," then drop it to Easy in the latter part when you start dying repeatedly. I might be projecting, but that was the best experience for me.
...and done with Alan Wake 1 Remastered, including the two DLC episodes. Fun game. The use of typed words in the last episode and through the DLC was brilliant. I thought for sure that
Tom Zane was going to be revealed as the actual real-world author, and Alan Wake would be Tom's fictional character, but Tom denied that pretty clearly in DLC2. Oh well.
On to AW2!
Alan Wake has been sitting in my PS Plus pile forever. I made one attempt to play it, but only made it past the prologue/tutorial. However, my decision to snag Alan Wake 2 at roughly half price on Amazon has forced me to return to it.
I've just finished Chapter 3 and I'm a little bemused and disappointed. This is a very, very one note game. As a player, it's mechanically very simple: walk/run, point torch, shoot. I don't even have a melee attack, so if I run out of ammo I'm basically dead. And from the developer's perspective, it's also mechanically very simple: funnel the player through very long, linear levels towards a place, through groups of enemies at the player from time-to-time, trigger cut-scene at the objective.
I know there are six chapters in total, so I'm halfway through, but is this really it? It feels incredibly basic. For a game so full of combat, the combat mechanics are quite poorly developed.
It also feels a touch cheap. The game takes my weapons away at the start of every chapter. And the only way the game seems to escalate combat is to through more enemies at me with each encounter. (The ghostly bulldozer boss - midway(!!) through Chapter 3 - has been the low point for me so far.) I find it particularly annoying to have them spawn to side and - I feel - ever so slightly behind my character, from the shadows.
I get that this is meant to look and feel to help the game feel like a waking nightmare, but it's also the kind of game design that's an actual nightmare for the player. My enemies are forever getting free hits in, because I cannot see them when they spawn.
I wondered whether I was being too hard on a game from 2010, but there were some really interesting and complex action games in that year: Red Dead Redemption, Bayonetta, Heavy Rain, Nier, Vanquish... This one is neither.
Yeah, I never clicked with Alan Wake for all the reasons you list. Boring gameplay and the tone/writing never worked for me. I know people love it but I just could never see why.
Yeah it depends if the story works on you. I played and enjoyed the original a lot but I don't think I'll ever want to replay of because of the gameplay.
Oddly enough I've replayed American nightmare spin off twice. It has a fun story and much faster and interesting combat.
Alan Wake 2 improved the combat and added other types of gameplay. Which adds some nice variety.
And man was 2010 a packed year. Although I might be the only person to not like nier.
Nier was always a cult classic, plenty of people bounced off it.
I'll also admit that, rather than adoring Control, I hate-finished it by the end. At the time it came out, it had awful difficulty spikes, poorly placed checkpoints, and realllllly long load times. The story and lore were neat, and I enjoyed the writing in the various notes and logs you find. But by the time I made it to the Ashtray Maze, which everyone raved about, I was just ready for it to be over because the whole thing felt like a chore. I know they patched it a lot after it came out, so maybe it'd work for me better now. But at the time it confirmed for me that modern Remedy games just don't seem to be for me. I probably won't ever try Alan Wake 2. And that's okay! Not every game has to be for everyone.
Yeah their games tend to get by on style and theme not gameplay. I barely beat control. Had to skip all the side content of I was going to quit. Combat was just so frustrating at points.
Alan Wake is one of my favorite games and Control is definitely up there, but the gameplay is the least important aspect for me. If they had somehow replaced it with just Pong but kept everything else the same my opinion would likely be unchanged.
It’s maybe a little embarrassing but the tone and atmosphere with which they present the Pacific Northwest is one of the things that made me fall in love with this region and want to move here.
It’s maybe a little embarrassing but the tone and atmosphere with which they present the Pacific Northwest is one of the things that made me fall in love with this region and want to move here.
Hell yeah!
My general thoughts about ALL the Remedy games I've played (Alan Wake, Max Payne 3, Quantum Break, Control) is that they look beautiful and have intriguing stories and the gameplay is frustratingly difficult for me. I kind of wish they made walking sims.
My general thoughts about ALL the Remedy games I've played (Alan Wake, Max Payne 3, Quantum Break, Control) is that they look beautiful and have intriguing stories and the gameplay is frustratingly difficult for me. I kind of wish they made walking sims.
The combat sliders in Control can basically turn it into a walking sim. I think those may have been added to the game later so if you played at launch they may not have been there. I made heavy use of them after the being super annoyed by the mailroom boss.
I completed Alan Wake this weekend. The final two chapters took it from being 'Not A Good Game' to being 'A Bad Game'. Other than looking very pretty on PS5 (so it must have looked sumptuous back in 2010), I struggle to identify anything it did well. Perhaps the atmosphere/ambiance? The combat was - at best - functional, but did not develop as the game progressed. The platforming was rare and perfunctory. The puzzling - such as it was - was the same. And given this lack of engaging interactivity, the game was far too long.
The thought I kept coming back to was that the gameplay was little more than a game level (from a bigger, better game) stretched into being a game in itself. You could almost hear Microsoft insisting to Remedy that it needed to be at least 10 hours long to justify the retail price. Certainly, in the last few chapters there were narrative twists whose sole function seemed to be to add another 30 minutes of game-time here and there. For example, I go to meet a kidnapper at the abandoned coal mine... but he turns out not to be there, so I need to hike back through the woods to another location.
What I find truly baffling are some of the reviews from the game's release. It was greeted with almost universal praise from critics, with an average score of 83 on Metacritic, and a couple of outlets (The Escapist, Joystiq) awarding it 100 marks! Even reviewers who noted its "repetitive action and uninspired levels" gave it an 80. I can only put this down to 2010 being a very, very different time for reviews.
In theory, Control is next for me, but I'll probably step away from Remedy games for a month or two.
Sounds like their variety of weird just isn't for you? (full disclosure - really enjoyed Alan Wake, Alan Wake American Nightmare, Control, and eventually Alan Wake 2). I loved that AW wasn't particularly complicated or stuffed with mechanics and systems, and was mainly just a 'roam through this weird Pacific NW area, and try to decide if this is reality or not' aesthetic they overlaid (this changes a bit for AW2).
I own the remaster but haven't played it. I probably should, now that gaming has 'moved on', so to speak. I might not find as much joy in it as a I once did. I'm not big on nostalgia, so this might not be my best course of action. 
No, the 'weirdness' didn't grab me, though I didn't mind it. It just didn't find it as compelling and as unsettling as something like Silent Hill 2... which established itself as my benchmark for atmosphere in these types of games.
I find it interesting that you use the word 'roam' in your post. One thing that I never felt was that I was 'roaming' anywhere. I always felt that I was on a narrow prescribed path, with no real opportunities to explore and discover. The game was always very clear, and very strict, about my movement options. Some alternative routes and some genuine places & things to find would have gone a long way to lifting the game for me.
Thinking more about games released in 2010, I suppose the game I'd compare and contrast it with is the Undead Nightmare DLC for Red Dead Redemption.
Anyway, I will get round to Control and then AW2 at some point...
I replayed Alan Wake a few years ago, prior to the release of the remaster - I loved it when it was new and I still love it, warts and all. One risk you run with Remedy games is that, while they give you some freedom to approach scenarios in different ways, with different tools, there generally seems to be a way to play their games that is (mostly) enjoyable, and a way to play that feels like a punishing slog.
For instance, Alan Wake presents itself like survival horror, but if you play it that way, being cautious with ammunition and resources, it's a bit of a grind. If you search around for all the little off-the-beaten path supply caches and play it more like an action game, charging in and blasting away, it's easier and substantially more enjoyable. The boss fights are not great no matter how you slice 'em, but I found myself enjoying my replay for different reasons than my original playthrough, because the game rewards playing more aggressively.
It's maybe also worth noting that Alan Wake was originally an open world survival game, and was stripped back to its current "action/thriller" form over a grueling 7-year development cycle. There's real tension between the presentation and implied genre of the game, and the way it actually plays.
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