In 2010, an Xbox Exclusive title named Alan Wake was released and quickly became a genre darling of the horror scene. For my part, I would say I definitely enjoyed it, and I would recommend it to someone who hadn’t played it but I wasn’t itching to go back and revisit it. As time passed, much like the Dark Presence that casts its shadow over the town of Bright Falls, my interest sunk to the depths, lying dormant and waiting, and 2021’s release of Alan Wake Remaster, did nothing to relight that desire. With 2023’s release of Alan Wake 2 gaining incredible acclaim from critics though, my interest in the series was reignited, and I decided it was worth playing the Remaster again to refresh myself on the story before jumping into the sequel and pick up a new Platinum trophy on the way. So how was my return to Bright Falls? Was the darkness that plagues the sleepy town driven away with the light of a Platinum? Let’s find out!
If you don’t know, Alan Wake is a survival horror game, where you play as the titular character, a best-selling writer, who is suffering from a prolonged stint of writer’s block. Alan and his wife Alice travel to the sleepy American town of Bright Falls, planning to take a small vacation there, unbeknownst to Alan to help him with his writing. Shortly after arriving, however, his wife goes missing and Alan finds himself hounded by people who have been taken over by a shadowy force, a being Alan calls The Dark Presence.
The story of Alan Wake is brilliant, aping both popular horror novels, particularly Stephe King’s, as well as well as TV shows like Twin Peaks and X-Files. Its characters and setting are great and if you are a fan of the media that has inspired the game, then you will love the narrative with all its twists and weaves. It is difficult to talk about exactly why it’s so good without spoilers, but if you love pulpy horror then you will enjoy this.
Each chapter of the game is structured like a TV Episode, starting with a “Previously on…Alan Wake” refresher, and ending with its own end credits sequence, that has some incredible licenced music playing with it including Space Oddity by David Bowie, which is one of my favourite songs of all time. The whole thing plays into the vibe of a TV show, and it’s incredibly charming for leaning into that.
But the story and the way it is presented was never something that needed remastering or changing at all, it is as captivating and thrilling as it was in 2010, so let’s talk about the things that did change.
Graphically I didn’t find the Remaster to be that impressive. I have gone back and looked at the graphics of the original, and they hold up surprisingly well. Character models are improved generally speaking, but the faces often look stiff and don’t emote that well in cutscenes, which can pull you out of the moment sometimes. The background scenery fares better, with the areas being much more detailed and clearer, but again isn’t a huge jump from the original despite the gap of 2 console generations. This isn’t to take away from how good the game’s areas and scenery look though. The game looks great, the environments you move through maintain the incredible atmosphere and spooky ambience that the original had 13 years ago.
The key theme of the story of Alan Wake is Darkness and Light, and the game does a really good job of utilising this in all of its key areas. Narratively the game is about fighting the darkness, and graphically the way the game contrasts it use of light and dark to create atmosphere and tension while maintaining the pacing is a delight. During the daytime, the areas Alan travels through look welcoming and peaceful, a perfect vacation spot for a struggling artist trying to uncover the truth.
When Night falls over the town though, the game uses shadow and darkness to great effect. The way that enemies appear from behind the trees, or out of the shadows behind rocks, never fails to be alarming, especially when accompanied by the panic-inducing sting of the music. When you are running through dense woods, trying not to get lost between the trees, or you are dashing through an abandoned mine, the darkness always feels oppressive and encroaches upon you in a way that keeps you on edge. The sight of a checkpoint in the distance, represented by the white light of a streetlamp, is always welcome, banishing the sense of dread the same way the safe haven banishes the darkness around you.
This interplay between Light and Dark is a core gameplay element too. To defeat the enemies Alan Wake faces, he must strip the darkness from them, and you do this by shining a torch on them, aggressively. Doing this for long enough will strip The Taken of their shields and allow you to hurt them with your guns. It is still an interesting mechanic, a unique point to help Alan Wake stand out against other survival horror giants and serves to further integrate gameplay and narrative for the player.
But is here, where narrative theming and combat mechanics join together, that my memory of this game, and reality clashed. Alan Wake felt janky to play to me. I don’t remember the original feeling that way, but it has been a long time since 2010. I had forgotten how clunky and slow Alan moves when trying to run from enemies, I had forgotten that he can only sprint for what feels like mere seconds before he starts to wheeze and slow down. I had forgotten how rough the dodge mechanic feels when you are being flanked by enemies, and harried by thrown axes from the dark.
In my initial playthrough of the game, I played on Normal Difficulty, as you need to finish the game once to unlock the hardest difficulty, and throughout this run I dreaded combat. The enemies felt too strong, and Alan too weak. It took too long to burn through their defences and kill them, all the while I was getting smacked in the back by enemies that had spawned behind me without warning. Around halfway through Chapter 4, I wondered if I was struggling this much, would I even be able to make it through Nightmare difficulty without tearing my hair out? I was so disappointed playing through Alan Wake on normal that I was genuinely surprised my memories of the game were so positive.
However, when I started again on Nightmare difficulty, and I was faced with the prospect of enemies taking more than twice as long to make vulnerable, and taking twice as many shots to put down, I changed tactics. I treated every fight as something to be run from. I learned to use the torch sparingly and in short bursts to stun enemies that got too close, before slowly jogging away again. I only killed enemies when I had to, when there was no other way to progress.
And god damn did the game become so much more enjoyable that way. It felt like the intended way to play the game had revealed itself to me, emphasising the importance of survival and resourcefulness over direct conflict. Alan can’t run for very long, so you can’t just sprint through each area. You have to make short dashes, then turn, stun your enemies and jog away while you get your stamina back. Flares became integral and dropping them in choke points or at the bottom of ladders to help you escape felt like I was outsmarting the game. It’s strange to say this, but I found the game easier on Nightmare Difficulty, I’m sure part of that is due to remembering which way I had to go, and where enemies came from after playing through it once for sure, but more than that it felt like I had learned to stop fighting with the game, and play it the way it wanted to be played.
This had a knock-on effect of being really well geared for the moments you have to fight, a drawn-out fight with wave upon wave of enemies, felt challenging but manageable when I had a stash of flare guns and flashbangs to use. There are trophies for doing certain sections of the game within a certain time, or without firing a single gunshot, or not reaching the low health threshold and I got most of these, on the hardest difficulty, without even really trying, That is just how much of a difference this change made for me.
This isn’t to say that gameplay is perfect though, even though I enjoyed it more. The controls can still be janky as I said, and the camera can be a problem. More than once the camera would zoom out to show me some spawning enemies, and there would be so many spawning, that the camera would spin dizzyingly around Alan, disorienting me and causing me to get hit. Sometimes the camera would randomly just judder forward and then back, even if I was just moving normally with no enemies around. The game does have an annoying habit of surprise-spawning enemies behind you, which is more frustrating than fear-inducing. There are also moments where you need to climb something or jump from platform to platform, especially in the DLC, and this felt cumbersome and unresponsive most of the time. Overall it just feels and plays like a game that came out 13 years ago, and as much as I would have liked the controls to be improved with the Remaster, I can only hope the sequel is much improved.
Alan Wake Remastered comes prepackaged with the 2 bonus episode DLCs that were released for the original game. The Signal and The Writer. These are pretty short experiences, less than an hour each, but they take some of the mechanics added at the end of the base game and run with them. The DLC did feel like they were a bit more combat-focused, but the game also gives you some extra tools to deal with the enemies, so it didn’t feel as frustrating to deal with for me. Throughout the areas, you will find words floating in the air, and if you shine your torch on them long enough the words will turn into useful things. Shine your torch on the word “Recharge” and get some batteries, it is a nice way of explaining the presence of ammunition and batteries while inside the Dark Place and another moment where the game weaves the narrative into its mechanics. Where the DLC uses these words most effectively though, is the other more specific effects.
In the first DLC, there is a room full of furnaces that have the word Blast in front of them. If you activate these words, the furnace explodes in a plume of fire and light before going out. There is a trophy for activating all of these furnaces, but more importantly, if you wait for an enemy to step in front of the furnace before you activate it. Boom! The enemy gets toasted, saving you ammo and time. The DLC is full of areas with this kind of effects and they are really fun to abuse to get through areas quickly and safely.
The short stories of the two DLCs make for an interesting exploration of Alan’s character and setting up the sequel that came 13 years later, and if you enjoyed the base game story I would highly recommend doing the DLC, and getting all of the trophies in the DLC are not particularly difficult if you are careful.
The trophies of Alan Wake are quite straightforward for the most part for both the main game and the DLC and earning the surprisingly unimaginatively named “Platinum Trophy” trophy is not too difficult. The main game requires two playthroughs, one to unlock nightmare mode and get the bulk of the collectables and then the nightmare mode playthrough which some additional exclusive collectables.
I hope you like collecting things because Alan Wake has so many things to pick up and put in his tweed jacket. You have Supply Chests to loot, Coffee Thermos to pick up, Signs to read, Can Pyramids to shoot, Radio Shows to listen to, TV Shows to watch and Manuscripts to read. The DLC adds cardboard cutouts, Video games and alarm clocks to this list. In total, there are 324 things to find. It’s a lot of stuff.
It helps though that some of these are worth finding. Manuscript pages are parts of the book that Alan has written, and some of these tell you things that will happen later in the game, or fill in blanks about things that Alan was not present for. I loved finding these because they were fun to read and were nice foreshadowing for later events. The Radio Shows are small segments of a show hosted by one of the characters Alan meets, and they are an interesting way of filling out information about the town of Bright Falls and the people in it. My favourite collectable though was the TV shows. Some of the TV shows are recordings of Alan locked in a room with a typewriter, thinking out loud ad trying to come to terms with his predicament, and these are ok. The best ones though, are small episodes of a show called Night Springs. This show is a short version of the Twilight Zone, with each episode being about a strange event that happens in the town of Night Springs. They are quirky and weird and honestly, every TV I found in the game, I was hoping for another episode.
Although the other collectables are just things to pick up, the fact that the manuscripts make up the bulk of the collectables and having them be something so interesting and that I wanted to find, made the hunt for them so much more enjoyable than if they had all been just things to find for the sake of finding them.
The majority of the other trophies are simple things, getting 50 kills with different weapons, and using things like flare guns and flash bangs to get multi-kills. If you are following a collectable guide, and mixing up your weapon usage you should be fine. There are a few miscellaneous trophies to keep an eye out for. Almost every chapter has a missable sub-objective that requires some work.
In Episode 3, you need to get from the Mine to Cauldron Lake in 30 minutes, this is easier to get on your second run as you won’t need to get the collectables. In Episode 4 you will need to defeat the taken that attack while you are on stage without dropping to low HP, you’ll know this has happened if the screen goes grey.
In Episode 5, you need to get to the helicopter without dying or restating a checkpoint which isn’t as bad as it sounds, you just need to take things slow. Episode 6 you must go from the Dam to the Lake without firing a single bullet. As I mentioned earlier, I managed to get all of these on Nightmare difficulty without much trouble, but being aware of them means fewer Episode Replays.
Both DLCs have an annoying trophy for finishing them in one go with no deaths or restarting from checkpoints. Luckily these are short, and I did each one in around 30 minutes rushing through ignoring all the collectables, but some of the platforming sections can be finicky and I died multiple times trying to get one of the collectables in The Writer Episode.
After I finished with Alan Wake Remastered, I came away feeling pleased that I had gone back to it, but honestly feeling like the Remaster was a little lacking. It could have made the character models better or improved the controls somewhat. There have been better remasters, and this one felt disappointing as a whole. Despite this though, the game is still great, the story is still amazing and despite the rocky start I had with it, I did have fun on my second run of the game. I really appreciate the way that the game does such an excellent job of tying all of its parts into one cohesive theme, where everything from gameplay to graphics, serves its narrative.
It is good that this once Xbox exclusive is now on Playstation, so more people can experience it, and now I’m more than ready to jump into Alan Wake 2, which I’ll be reviewing next time.
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