Alan Wake

Author Alan Wake runs around in the woods waving a flashlight and shooting people. His manuscript is coming to life! There’s a mean old lady in a veil who kidnapped his wife and put her at the bottom of a lake. For a guy huffing and puffing around a forest all day and night, he sure does like to keep his tweed jacket on. And he’s wearing long pants.

I bet by the time his adventure in Bright Falls is over that jacket will smell pretty bad. Writers aren’t the most athletic people and he drinks all the time, too. And now he’s sprinting around park trails, climbing on old wooden buildings fighting monsters. He needs to turn those writer pants into cutoffs and tie the jacket around his waist, emasculated-husband-at-a-craft-fair style. Or just throw that shit on the ground, you can get a new jacket. You’re a celebrity, Alan Wake- the world of jackets is wide open to you.

Alan Wake narrates the hell out of all this crazy stuff happening to him. I didn’t know about this, I wasn’t sure about that, but I knew this had to be that and those, etc. etc. Narrating your own life is pretty cool. Just ask Harrison Ford’s character Decker in the “Narrator Cut” of Blade Runner. He was a fake human robot looking for other fake human robots and he narrated all the time. I guess someone must have installed a Narrate Protocol in his chips. Unless you are one of those crazy people who believe Decker wasn’t a replicant. Then you need to ask yourself, “Am I a replicant?”

Alan’s agent Barry wears an even heavier red puffy jacket to fight shadow monsters. Did Burlington Coat Factory sponsor this game? There were a lot of Verizon ads, that’s for sure. Kind of took me out of the game when I was driving a truck on a gravel road mowing down civilians possessed by an ancient evil and a bright ass Verizon billboard popped up. I don’t think minions of darkness need phones.

Also, why were only men overtaken by the magic shadows? The “dark presence” itself was female in form, but all of the enemies you fought in the game were male farmers and cops and loggers. Guess it wouldn’t do to have Alan Wake pumping shotgun rounds into the ladies. Unless you mean something else by “shotgun rounds”.

Spoiler Alert

So Alan Wake jams a light switch in an evil old woman’s heart hole and pulls the trigger. Sound almost romantic doesn’t it? Then the game wraps up with Alan Wake sitting in front of a typewriter in the “dream space of ideas” under the lake after freeing his wife. I’m all for a cliffhanger, but if I had paid sixty dollars for this instead of renting it I’d feel like this game did something to my heart hole, too. I loved this game, but you can’t just leave your hero hanging out in limbo writer head space world and roll to credits. I need closure, Alan Wake!

Tagged Alan Wake, video game, Xbox360