Two things stick out after playing Alan Wake again for the first time in 11 years: Farmville is better than I recall, and Alan Wake is more of the dick than I recall.
Back this year, I was also a writer. Technically, I still am an author, however i was obsessive about being a serious writer. I had been even going to school for it. I had been getting a Master's so I could call myself a Master writer.
Alan Wake is likewise a serious writer. He's dark. He's brooding. He's also a best-seller. He lives in a large New York City apartment together with his beautiful, doting wife, Alice. As he goes on a magazine tour to advertise another best-selling novel in his Alex Casey mystery series, he's so miserable that he drinks himself into a stupor to numb the pain. As he faces paralyzing writer's block, he whisks Alice off to a cabin in Bright Falls in the center of nowhere, and takes his frustrations on everyone around him.
Alan Wake is really a serious writer, and that we are all aware that serious writers can never be happy.
The first time I played Alan Wake, in 2010, I sympathized with the titular hero. I laughed when he slagged from the kindly old radio host who desired to interview him. I rolled my eyes together with him when he met Rose, a waitress at the local diner who was his number 1 fan. I cheered as he punched Dr. Emil Hartman in the face for suggesting that he needs help. I even thought, as far as gaming characters go, his outfit was cool.
Let me reiterate that: I thought Alan Wake's outfit was cool.
I've many userful stuff here in the last 11 years, namely that if you're struggling with your creative output to the stage it's impacting the rest of your life, then you should either visit therapy or just put whatever you're working on away for some time. But I've also found that the myth from the “serious writer” and what behavior as a “serious writer” is suitable is just that: a myth. Playing Alan Wake Remastered, when Special Agent Nightingale mockingly calls Wake “Raymond Chandler” or “Ernest Hemingway” or “Stephen King,” I completely sympathize. To most people, those don't seem like insults. But to those who have ever handled someone struggling with Serious Writer Complex, Nightingale's obvious disdain for writers makes sense.
Part of the joy of playing Alan Wake Remastered is getting to experience the game again with an older, marginally wiser mindset. For what it's worth, I don't think creative director Sam Lake and the rest of the team at Remedy Entertainment that originally created Alan Wake are complete fans of the guy. (I can't be 100 % certain relating to this, however i even suspect that Lake uses Wake like a kind of apology letter to anyone he's been a dick to on his road to creating their own art.) They take every opportunity they can to exhibit Wake being a complete jerk, and the Dark Presence that is the game's main antagonist is a succinct metaphor for the darkness that Wake brings into his own life. The only method to rid the world of one Dark Presence is to rid it of some other. Wake up, Alan Wake. Greet your life.
Of course, you will find complications to this reading. Remedy getting back the rights to Alan Wake from Microsoft means that the Finnish studio are now able to return to the world in any manner it wants to, and it's done so twice so far-most recently in Alan Wake Remastered, and previously in the “AWE” expansion to Control. It's the latter output that throws a stick in the spokes of the reading of Alan Wake, that the character is flawed, unhealthy, toxic. The smoothness of Dr. Hartman always represented a sort of tyrannical, untrustworthy view of mental healthcare, because he attempted to use his creative patients to evoke the Dark Presence residing in Cauldron Lake. “AWE” takes mtss is a step further, completely strips Hartman of his humanity, and turns him into a disfigured monster, possessed by the Dark Presence and Hiss, hellbent on destruction. In addition, it's the ever-dutiful Alice that wanted to bring Alan to Hartman to begin with.
Part of what is interesting about revisiting the smoothness of Alan Wake in Alan Wake Remastered is to trace the trajectory of Remedy's protagonists. Max Payne is definitely an obvious homage towards the hard-boiled detective, but he's also more self-aware than Wake, more honest in the purpose of blood-soaked revenge. (Rockstar needed to go and undo all of that in the ill-advised Max Payne 3, but that's for an additional time.) Quantum Break's storytelling approach resulted in players got to experience the story from both Jack and Paul's perspectives-the latter representing megalomaniacal quest for technological revolution, the previous representing the stifling force of conservatism. Control's Jesse Faden is a culmination famous Remedy's efforts: She's an outsider each and every to be hateful and skeptical, but instead decides to make use of her abilities to assist her adopted family of the Bureau whilst not completely adhering to its traditions.
In many ways, Alan Wake represents a turning point for Remedy. While Max Payne was an authentic character, Alan Wake far less reliant on tropes. He's psychologically richer than his predecessor, and also the story is a lot more willing to take risks. But it's also in the gameplay that Alan Wake turned out to be a turning point, showing that Remedy didn't need to rely on high-flying, bullet-time antics to create its action tense and satisfying.
The two-step procedure for taking down enemies in Alan Wake is, I think, underappreciated. Having to “break” an opponent with light before you kill them means that you constantly need to juggle between your flashlight as well as your gun. On top of that, the way that enemies are continually charging in your direction with hatchets and sledgehammers and chainsaws while screaming to you in garbled, glitchy voices makes the action feel horrific. These bankruptcies are not mobsters or armored goons shooting at you from a distance; they are shadowy woodsmen emerging in the dark, between your trees, to slaughter you in cold blood. For all its obvious references towards the original run of Twin Peaks, Remedy seemingly predicted the development of the disturbing woodsmen from The Return, which would emerge seven years after Alan Wake.
In all of the ways in which it must, the Remastered version of Alan Wake-handled having a great reverence and respect because of its source material by d3t Ltd.-enhances the original. Considering the engineers at d3t not just had to translate the game across two console generations, they also needed to take it to some brand-new architecture in the form of PlayStation consoles. This, alone, isn't any small feat, but considering I played it with an Xbox Series X, I can't talk to how good the game translated to PlayStation 5.
What I'm able to say is that d3t preserved the most important aspect of Alan Wake, and that's its atmosphere. Bright Falls' dense and twisting forests are as imposing as ever, along with a big part of that's how d3t introduced volumetric lighting to every square inch of the game, not only to the streetlight checkpoints. How a moonlight hits the fog and Alan's flashlight bounces off the environment highlights and improves the original's artistic direction without attempting to wrongfully “improve” upon it the way that other remasters can.
The characters, too, are merely more “enhanced” versions of the previous selves. Somewhat, this really works-the stitching in Alan's tweed jacket is particularly impressive. In other cases, however, d3t's slavish devotion to Remedy's original vision can mean you have characters that appear stiff and unreal, most noticeably in Alice. The overall effect is one thing that's stuck halfway between your past and the present; fans who know the definition of “remaster” will not be bothered, but new players with increased contemporary expectations might find the slightly weird faces and 2010 animations somewhat distracting. Still, the consistent 60 fps during gameplay that I experienced on the Series X more than make up for that.
Really, the only thing that's disappointing about Alan Wake Remastered is it doesn't include Alan Wake's American Nightmare, the game's more arcade-y semi-sequel. Sure, two DLC chapters in “The Signal” and “The Writer” are included, but the package feels incomplete, both being an historical artifact and as a product, without American Nightmare. I don't know what sort of technical issues that would have represented for d3t, however i would find it hard to think that American Nightmare's architecture was so far off from the original's that it proved impossible to do. No matter the reason, its exclusion feels a little cheap.
Even without American Nightmare, Alan Wake Remastered represents a creative and commercial victory lap for Remedy. If this first launched, it performed poorly commercially while gathering a popularity and showing that Remedy was more than just the Max Payne studio. Now, Remedy is a studio that's truly hitting its stride, with increased pots around the burner than in the past and a commercially successful Control to boot. If Alan Wake was the bridge between Max Payne and the more narratively rich games that would come after, Alan Wake Remastered seems like a bridge between Remedy's roots and it is future.
