DLC #202 - Alan Wake : Remastered - The Writer

"It was a moment of clarity", says Alan Wake right at the beginning of this final episode.

The game's sudden decision to finally just start delivering some straight-talking, no-nonsense snippets of information to you about what's actually been going on around here this whole time seems like an odd tact for a game that has shrouded itself in utter mystery for an entire main game and DLC pack prior.

If the intention was to keep things ambiguous and purely down to the players interpretation, then it seems like a strange switch up to suddenly start spilling the secrets so abruptly. Even after all this, the episode still concludes Alan Wake on a cliff-hanger.

Anyway, we did ultimately come into the final piece of DLC for Alan Wake looking for definitive answers, and we do get them - sort of - but only by virtue of the game's strange u-turn to drop the mysterious persona it's been playing on for the last 7 episodes and just begin delivering answers. You are trapped within your own mind. You're struggling to free yourself after making the sacrifice to save your wife. Everything you're facing around you has been conjured up by your own mind through Alan's creative writing which has gotten out of control. 

I know I'm on the cusp of breaching my own rules of generally trying to be spoiler free, but that's the first time I've been able to comment on the plot with any sort of reasonable conviction. In the 8th episode of the game. Even then, the game still doesn't even reach a true conclusion, and it's no surprise at all the game has a sequel.

There are 9 additional trophies added for the episode, and the approach is exactly the same as it was for the Signal DLC. There's no pressure to beat the episode on any specific difficulty level, so an initial run through on normal difficulty in an attempt to unlock the "No Punctuation" trophy, awarded for Making it through The Writer in one dazzling dash. As before, this just translates to beating the episode without dying or restarting from a checkpoint.

Compared to the Signal, there is a much lower emphasis on combat in the Writer, and instead, is substituted by periods where the mysterious voices in your head are confirming plot details back to you as you move through empty space. The game suddenly takes an interest in platforming segments too, and Alan Wake is most certainly not built for platforming. If you thought it was clunky before, wait until you try and navigate moving platforms/objects whilst timing jumps. It's definitely easier to make it through this episode without dying than it was previously, and that is due to the more limited combat, but it's a shame because one of the strongest suits of the game has suddenly taken a back seat.

With that being said, I didn't succeed on my initial run, and abandoned it in favour of the "Go Gentle In That Good Light" trophy, awarded for Making it through the approach to the lighthouse without firing a weapon. The few hectic battles you'll encounter are made much easier by environmental help. You can use your torch to burn words and manifest explosions to eliminate enemies, or summon the support of the booming lighthouse beams to protect you. The sense of jeopardy that the game is capable of delivering in combat scenarios is well removed in this episode, and once I knew what to expect, I beat it without dying incredibly quickly.

There are also 10 Night Springs video games to collect. I missed a couple of them on my initial run and made sure I grabbed these afterwards in subsequent play throughs, and this also gave me a good opportunity to grab the remaining miscellaneous trophies to finish off the list at the same time - None of which are any trouble.

The episode is only around an hour in length, and I didn't need to play it for any more than a total of 3 times in full to grab all 9 trophies on offer. 

Alan Wake is a solid game. It's made me curious enough to want to explore the sequel, but the plot is like a complicated relationship. It's full of second guessing and confusion, and it's always been a personal gripe of mine when games just refuse to give you any sort of clarity, especially when additional content should set the expectation of delivering conclusions, not cliff-hangers.

DLC #201 - Alan Wake : Remastered - The Signal

I will always be of the opinion that, if you insist on leaving games ambiguously open with the view of bringing out post-game DLC, then you have an obligation to give the end user clarity.

I've determined by this point that Alan Wake is very good at explaining alot of things without actually revealing any answers.

The opening to The Signal sets up the premise that Alan is stuck in his own mind after sacrificing himself to save his drowning partner, and the next step is to now work out how he frees himself from his own nightmare. 

Not only do you start in front of the Bright Falls Diner, but you start by re-enacting the exact same opening scene to the main game - Sticking on the jukebox at the request of the Anderson brothers and being lured into the back toilet by a mysterious force leading you astray.

This time, the mysterious force introduces itself as Thomas Zane with the promise of helping Alan free himself if he does as he says and follows the signal via the GPS on a mobile phone. That's about as clear as anything gets as you spend roughly the next hour trawling through rehashed environments and battling through the same enemies you've just spent 8-10 hours fighting off.

I'm very much pro story-driven DLC, but it HAS to add something to the story, and I really don't feel the Signal does that. Even the gameplay doesn't really bring anything new to the table. No new enemies, weapons, equipment or gameplay. I've said before that more of the same is absolutely fine sometimes, but both the lack of progression to the story and gameplay features combined left this a bit flat for me - Not to mention you can comfortably beat the episode within the hour, so it is an incredibly short offering.

In terms of trophies, there are 8 added here, and it's perhaps most important to state that you don't need to beat the Signal on Nightmare difficulty, like you had to in the main game.

With that noted, an initial playthrough on normal difficulty with the intention of grabbing as many trophies as possible, paying specific attention to the "Run-On Sentence" trophy, awarded for making it through The Signal in one glorious go. This just translates to beating the episode without dying or restarting from a checkpoint.

This isn't too difficult, very much helped by the fact that you can play through the episode on whichever difficulty setting you wish. However, after a cheap death where I just got crushed underneath a possessed object that pinned me to the floor, I had to abandon this trophy on my first run, but still came out the other side having collected 5 of the 8 trophies on offer. These are mostly progression-based and the game is still incredibly linear to the point where you can easily pick up many of these trophies as you go along.

Ironically enough, despite claiming a lack of challenge, I would go on to fail a no-death run a further 2 times, but not by being overwhelmed by enemies. Just for silly things that were completely avoidable. There was a necessity to grab 16 collectibles for 2 separate trophies - 10 alarm clocks and 6 cardboard cut-outs - and I needed the extra run to go back through and scoop up a few of these I had missed.

Everything unlocked within 3-4 hours, and the only reason it was even as long as that was because of a couple of cheap deaths setting me back the additional time. If you're slightly more competent than me, this could be done within a sub-2 hour timescale.

Platinum #141 - Alan Wake : Remastered

Platinum Difficulty Rating - 4/10

"Psychological Action Thriller" is what Alan Wake bills itself as. I didn't have any other clues at to what this may entail before I began the game, but I'm glad my curiosity got the better of me. It didn't exactly blow me away, but it's an honest, solid game.

Admittedly, the story is hard to understand, but it doesn't outstay it's welcome and with a couple of episodic pieces of DLC waiting in the wings, there's always the faint hope things become a bit clearer.

Alan Wake himself is an apparently famous crime fiction author, and when his wife mysteriously disappears during a cabin getaway in the small town of Bright Falls, his sole motivation is to understand how she went missing and find her.

The clues to her whereabouts are contained within the manuscripts of a book littered across the ground throughout the game that Alan has apparently been working on, and the theory is that the developing situation around his wife is being manifested from his own creative writing. Without giving too much away (not that I can be confident in saying that), this theory is directly hypothesised by Alan Wake himself during the game, though posed more as a question, as if he himself is ambiguous about what's actually going on. So who knows.

The game draws on heavy influences from horror writer Stephen King, and it makes no efforts to disguise these. In fact, they're really blatant at times. The man himself is name-dropped on numerous occasions, and there are plenty of references to his novels baked into the gameplay features, including inanimate objects being possessed by mysterious forces and shadowy figures out to kill you.

I'm not overly keen on the cast of characters. Alan Wake himself is a fairly dull and bland main character, which is ironic given the fact he's a creative writer by trade. The cast around him isn't much better though, and I thought the lack of memorable characters was a big downside to the game. It's a nice touch that the narration of the story comes from the main character himself, and the running commentary does a nice job of providing an authentic feel to the script, even if it is prone to sounding a bit too cheesy at times.

Despite this being a Remastered version of the game, the graphics are a bit hit and miss. I felt like the character models still looked dated, and the voice acting/lip syncing during cutscenes is poor. This is a Remaster of a game that was originally released in 2010, so maybe I should be a bit more forgiving, but I've definitely played sharper remasters recently in the graphical department and Alan Wake doesn't feel up to par in comparison.

The environments are captured well though, and do a good job at providing the tension of a psychological horror. Dense fog, unnerving darkness and an eerie chorus of music every time enemies are nearby. All contribute to nailing the atmosphere. I wish there was a bit more variety though. You seem to spend 80% of the game trekking through a forest and the enemy variation is very limited.

In terms of trophies, this is a standard sized list with 51 trophies available, including the Platinum trophy, spread across an entirely Single Player driven experience.

Firstly, a casual playthrough of the game's story for two primary reasons. As always, to enjoy the story at a leisurely pace, but also conscious to the fact that we'd need to unlock Nightmare difficulty, which is achieved through beating the game just once on either Easy or Normal difficulty first.

The game is broken down into 6 Episodes, and contains 16 trophies related to either natural story progression or beating the game on a specific difficulty level, which is roughly a third of the entire list. Apart from this being about a mysterious missing persons case, I found the story difficult to understand. Maybe it's purposely convoluted. There are constant interactions with Doctor Emil Hartman, who believes Alan is potentially psychologically unstable, and the random Manuscript pages lying around at times seem to foretell the future. A completely different angle to the one presented above which theorises that Alan is responsible for manifesting the dark energy through his own writing. Either way, if there is a story to grasp, I didn't really grasp it.

The gameplay itself is very simplistic. It's quickly determined that the biggest weakness to the darkness is light. You get access to a torch in order to shine beams of light directly at an enemy and weaken them. Once they're vulnerable enough, you'll have the choice from around 5/6 weapons to finish them off. There is a clear running theme of combatting the darkness through the salvation of light, and the variance on this theme is strong. You can use different sources of light against enemies. Headlight beams on vehicles, spotlights and there are even multiple variations of the handheld torch you carry around with you. It's a new concept to me and I liked the depth it adds to the gameplay.

Outside of the direct combat, you can only perform 3 other actions. Dodge, Jump and Run - and don't underestimate any of these, especially when it comes to your Nightmare playthrough. The latter in particular will prove to come in very useful.

Alan Wake doesn't have an expansive skill tree, there isn't a levelling system and you can't upgrade any weapons or equipment. It's about as minimalist of a combat experience money can buy. Is the game worse off for it? Not really. I think the game does a good job of balancing the atmospheric pacing. There are some hairy moments and combat-centric set pieces, but they're few and far between as the game has you trawling through eerie environments and the balls to the wall action moments mostly remains on the shelf. The depth of the combat is ultimately proportionate to what the game throws at you, so you never feel like you're held back by the lack of character development options.

The challenge on Normal difficulty really isn't that great and there are alot of miscellaneous and chapter-specific trophies to collect as you go through the game too. Aside the odd bit of side-tracking, Alan Wake is also a very linear game with clearly defined paths from point A to B. You're even led by distanced light and encouraged by the game to follow the light source if you ever feel like you're lost or not moving in the right direction.

After a casual playthrough of the game, I'd unlocked 37 trophies from the list, and this was without any real specific focus on anything other than just beating the game. This would unlock Nightmare difficulty, where the challenge of the list would peak.

The "Alan, Wake Up" trophy, awarded for Completing the game on Nightmare difficulty, comes with it's challenges, and these are notable in comparison to lower difficulty levels of the game.

The most notable difference is the fact that you die much easier. Most enemies only need to hit you a couple of times to kill you, and I actually found that the best strategy for tackling Nightmare difficulty in most instances was to run away. This is what I meant by earlier when I referenced the importance of not underestimating your options outside of combat. This isn't completely fool proof though and there are 2 small nuances to be aware of when choosing this strategy.

Firstly, there's this mechanic in place which only allows Alan Wake to run for a limited amount of time before running out of breath and slowing down, so it can be difficult to get away sometimes. I'm not necessarily against this feature, but enemies don't seem to suffer from the same sort of fatigue, so they can catch and kill you way too easily at times and it feels like a cheap handicap that purely exists to force you into combat. It should be considered a viable strategy to look to escape in games like Alan Wake that bill themselves as psychological thrillers. Secondly, you can sometimes be hit with projectile weapons whilst attempting to escape from a fight. Enemies have annoyingly pinpoint accuracy, and there are plenty of times you'll be felled whilst fleeing courtesy of a flying knife to the back from 50 yards away.

However, the overly generous checkpoint system will come to your rescue, and whilst you may end up accumulating your fair share of deaths throughout a Nightmare playthrough, you'll never have to make up too much lost ground. Checkpoints are thrown at you with a level of frequency that makes you feel like the game feels sorry for you. It's hard to be angry at the cheap tactics the game deploys to earn a death out of you when the most it'll ever seem to set you back is 30 seconds. It's a big redeeming feature.

Enemies do also take a few more bullets to go down on Nightmare difficulty too, but another thing the game is also overly generous with is supplying you with ammunition to offset this. I never once really found myself in a perilous position at any point in the game, especially when it comes to the segments where you're forced to fight larger groups of enemies because your path to progression is blocked until you clear out what's in front of you. There are 30 hidden chests that you'll need to collect as part of the collectibles element of this list, but these contain generous stashes of ammo that I would absolutely recommend going out of your way to find and open. Once you get hold of flares and flashbangs, the game may aswell roll out a red carpet straight to the end. They're incredibly powerful and can take out groups of enemies in one go if you ever feel overwhelmed or close to death.

You'll still die a reasonable amount. The game loves a cheap death, and some of the tougher fight segments where you need to rely on some really wonky AI to help you deal with crowds of enemies are frustrating. It's worth at least an extra point on the difficulty scale as a whole experience, but to say there are tougher offerings out there would be an understatement.

The other distraction of Nightmare mode was gathering the array of collectibles on offer, and does Alan Wake love a collectible. There are a whopping 298 collectibles in total, including 100 Coffee thermos flasks, 106 Manuscript pages, 11 Radio shows to listen to, 14 TV shows to watch, 30 Hidden chests, 12 Pyramid cans to shoot and 25 Signs to read. Each of these comes with it's own trophy once they've all been collected too.

For a game the length of Alan Wake, it is completely overloaded with collectibles, and you feel like you need to stop to turn your attention to something every 5 steps. It's intrusive to the flow of gameplay and breaks up the immersion way too much. It's almost as if they had so many ideas, they felt the best way to approach it was to just cram them all in and hope nobody really noticed. I did decide to collect everything I could as soon as I saw it on my Normal difficulty playthrough of the game, and actually managed to find the majority of the collectibles without really looking too hard, which is also a good testament to the linear nature of the game. You may have to go off the beaten path sometimes, but most of it is literally looking back at you.

There is an exception to be aware of for the Manuscript pages. Some of these are only collectible on Nightmare difficulty, but these are clearly marked out on the segment within the pause menu that lists all the manuscripts and those you may be missing. All of the other collectibles can be gathered up on any difficulty you wish, but given the fact you'll need to beat the game on Nightmare difficulty anyway, it's a wise tactic to sweep through whatever you see on your initial run, and use a guide to mop up the remainder on a second run.

Outside of this, there are a small bunch of chapter-specific trophies, which can easily be obtained through the chapter select option on the main menu, should you miss them through any of your playthroughs. The chapters are even further divided into sub-sections, so you don't even need to replay entire episodes of the game to get to the specific part you need to get to in order to unlock any of these trophies. The game is very user-friendly and gives the player loads of leeway into the accessibility of trophies. Even collectibles can be scooped up via the chapter select feature for any strays you may have missed. Some games still require you to collect everything in a single playthrough and will punish you for anything you miss by making you play the entire game again. Big thumbs up for the sort of flexibility on display here, and this level of accessibility is a big influencer on the overall difficulty rating.

Ultimately, Alan Wake is an easy game to pinpoint on the difficulty scale. There's no doubt you'll die often on Nightmare difficulty, but the checkpoint system is so generous, death feels almost inconsequential, and you rarely have to re-tread old ground. It almost negates the sense of challenge entirely because you never have to worry about scrambling around for survival to prevent an imminent loss of progress. Die, reload and get straight back into the fight you just lost. The story is also a modest length, at roughly 10-12 hours, and doesn't insist on being prolonged or stretched out. It sometimes feels like there's pressure for Single Player games, that don't offer any additional games modes, to max out their story offerings to extend beyond 20 hours in order to achieve public satisfaction, but Alan Wake doesn't choose to be a victim of this and that's refreshing.

The game is far too collectible heavy though. There just isn't a necessity for any game to contain as many as almost 300 collectibles and attach individual trophies to all of them. They're not my favourite kind of trophy as it is, and they seem to be as common as they ever have. Despite my disdain for them, there's ways to do them right and the sheer volume of unnecessary collectibles is a thumbs down. The Manuscripts might provide some added value to the lore of the game, but the rest of it just feels like clutter with little added value. They're easily worth an additional point on their own merits.

A short-ish story, necessity for just 2 playthroughs and an accommodating chapter select feature. Nightmare difficulty feels like it deploys some cheap tactics sometimes and the collectibles feel like a chore, but Alan Wake is a great example of less is more, and that includes the requirements of the Platinum trophy.

Notable Trophies -

Alan, Wake Up - You completed the game on Nightmare difficulty.

Hardest Trophy -

Alan, Wake Up

You completed the game on Nightmare difficulty