Alan Wake – Killed By 40-Year-Old licenses

   Alan Wake is a 2010 horror game developed by Remedy Entertainment and published by Microsoft. It was published for both Xbox 360 and PC, the latter of which should guarantee that it remain always possible to purchase but at the current time but it is now impossible to purchase except through piracy or used copies.

   The reason for this is simple licensing. In 2017, the licensing required for their in-game music ran out and, finding it impossible to patch the music out, the game was discontinued on all platforms. After discounting the game to 10 cents with all DLC included, the game was removed from online stores forever. For now, physical copies are quite cheap, but the number of actual copies can only go down and as such the price can only go up.

   This is all a shame, because it is a damn good game. Inspired by horror works like Twin Peaks and the writing of Stephen King, Alan Wake has a creepy and unreal feeling that really leaned into the corny, with monsters yelling at you about writing deadlines and advice on where to find the best hot dogs. The unreality of the situation is helped along by the stilted, nasaly voice acting and absolutely horrifying rubbery facial animations. I can’t say for certain if this is just the game showing its age but I get the sense these animations were bad even for 2010’s standards, but all this just adds to the unreal factor of this half-remembered Stephen King riff. The lighting and sound design lends to an uneasy experience even when there’s no danger in sight.

The story is told in several “episodes” that genuinely feel like episodes of a TV show, each one bordered by a musical intermission (part of the reason for the game’s removal). The story has enough twists and turns to keep you playing and while it certainly doesn’t live up to Twin Peaks (what could?), it definitely feels like a successor to abandoned horror franchises like Silent Hill, which hasn’t had an installment this creepy and engaging in years.

Between missions where you fight off hordes of townspeople possessed by a strange poltergeist-ish ghost, you explore the town of Bright Falls, where the title character has come with his wife on a work-mandated vacation as he struggles with a crippling writer’s block. Bright Falls is about what you’d expect from an interpretation of a small Midwestern town by game developers who only know them from horror stories. Still, there’s a cute charm to the quirky characters of the town, like a diner owner who happens to be a crazed fan of the main character’s books, or two aging senile punks who keep leaving their care to cause trouble (a fun experience with these two- the first example of the copyrighted songs that forced this game out of stores is a song they direct you to play on a jukebox. Somehow Microsoft, a billion dollar company, couldn’t get long term usage rights to Coconut by Harry Nilsson).

The gameplay is sticky and hard to control and the majority of deaths you suffer will come from you struggling to get a handle on what you’re doing- and that’s part of the charm. Every enemy encounter feels like a struggle, as you try to aim your flashlight in order to render your enemies vulnerable, every camera movement making the screen incomprehensibly blurry. The minigames you play between encounters have… Less right to be frustrating. It really pulls you out of the experience when you need to start a generator by timing button presses like this has suddenly become a rhythm game. At no point did these minigames really provide any fun or add to the experience in any way, but thankfully they don’t make up a large chunk of the game.

Despite these stumbling points, Alan Wake is a solid game that doesn’t really get made by big budget studios anymore- one where the horror comes from atmosphere rather than aggressive amounts of gore.