Alan Wake

Preview from Luke - Friday, 30 April 2010 @ 8:32am

Nearly 10 years ago Remedy Entertainment released Max Payne upon the world. 2 years later they followed it up with a highly successful sequel. The rights to Max Payne were then handed off with Rockstar Games taking responsibility for the third entry into the series. Since then we haven't had anything come out of Remedy, until now... In 2 weeks we will finally get to experience what they have been working on for the past 7 years.

Alan Wake is a psychological action thriller which takes a lot of inspiration from the work of Steven King, and TV shows such as Twin Peaks – I also got a LOST vibe from the game. Alan is a best selling writer who hasn't been able to come up with anything for a few years. He takes a trip with his wife to a small town called Bright Falls, hoping that some new scenery will clear his current case of writers block. Things start to get weird when his wife mysteriously disappears and pages from Alan's latest piece of work start to show up. With each page the events written start to come true, only thing is that he doesn't remember writing them...

The game is structured like a TV show, each episode begins with a recap of what has previously happened in the story. It's a way to put more attention on the story and supporting characters - to keep things fresh in the players mind.

Light plays a key role in this game, with your main weapon of choice being a flashlight. Light is used to remove the “darkness” from the enemies known as the taken. They are a dark presence that has swept over the town - inhabiting objects and people. Once the darkness has been burned away, enemies will be prone to attack from regular weaponry. You'll need to strategically work with different sources of light when progressing through the game - flares, environmental lighting, and a vast array of flashlights will be just some of the ways that this is incorporated.

I honestly tried to think of a bad thing that I could say about what I experienced with this game, but I couldn't come up with one. The controls in Alan Wake are absolutely perfect, there was no learning curve at all for me. I picked up the game and jumped straight in without any hassles, it all just felt so right.

The combination of the environment and sound is stunning, there were moments where I completely stopped in my footsteps to abruptly spin around to see what was lurking behind me. I could have sworn on multiple occasions that something was right there, just watching. The quality of the sound raises that suspense level so high, it also doesn't help when you are given a page that tells you danger is looming. You know that it's coming but you still slowly walk around that corner, just waiting for that critical moment where you get the pants scared off you.

I'm so excited to get my hands on the full game, I think what we have here is one of the contenders for Game of the Year. Alan Wake is due out on the 20th May for the Xbox360, keep an eye out at Australian Gamer for the full review.