In Alan Wake, the darkness itself is your enemy. Not in that, child-afraid-to-sleep-without-a-night-light sort of way, either. It’s more of that, malevolent-beings-cloaked-in-shadow-advancing-on-you-with-pointy-objects sort of way.  Alan Wake is an interesting game to say the least. The titular character is a writer, overburdened by his success, he and his wife seek asylum from their stress in a quiet mountain town, presumably in Maine from how southward things quickly turn. Yes, it’s not long at all before the inevitable shambling mollusk from beyond the reaches of space and time rears its ugly head, snatching away the protagonist’s wife and hurling him into a peril-laden adventure to fetch her back.

Ninety-nine percent of the game can be described thusly: “You trudge through the dark woods with a gun and a flashlight, darkness swirls like mist about you, you are likely to be eaten by a grue attacked by 3-8 knife-wielding assholes. “ This is fairly scary the first few times that it happens, but a hardened horror game veteran can quickly succumb to the tedium that familiarity brings, especially once one progresses far enough into the game to be able to predict the incoming jump-scare or wave of enemies.

Vanquishing the enemies is a bit more complicated than simply popping a few rounds into them however. Every enemy in the game is literally cloaked in darkness, shielding it from your attacks until you’ve focused your flashlight on them long enough to reveal them. While an interesting idea in concept, and not much of an issue against a single opponent, it becomes an entirely different situation when up against any number of enemies greater than two since nearly every enemy in the game has some sort of ranged attack, and the game has a delightful habit of spawning enemies BEHIND the player in areas they’ve already cleared. It quickly becomes a rather infuriating game of keep-away. You can of course try to evade enemies and their attacks, but seeing as how Alan apparently has the stamina reserves of the fat kid in gym class and the all enemies are olympic track stars, running will nearly always result in a dogpile of crotch-stabbing. Not to mention that the game’s evade button only seems to want to work when it has the time. It’s not here to help you avoid damage, god damnit, it’s got a lot of things to do today and helping you just happens to be the chore it’ll get around to once the rest are finished. Combat in Alan Wake is like trying to hose the feces off of a group of angry knife-wielding baboons before finally saying, “fuck it” and shooting the flea-ridden bastards.

Even if the game occasionally falls flat on the ‘fear’ part of being a horror game, it can at least get the ‘tension’ part correct now and again and does manage to be legitimately unnerving from time to time. The first time a tornado of pure darkness drops a goddamn train car five feet in front of your face will certainly wake you up in the morning. It also features a number of really nice atmospheric things that help make the setting a little creepier or a little more real in turn. You’ll find TVs and radios scattered around as you make your way through the twilit countryside, each of these producing either a clip from the local radio-host calmly reassuring the increasingly terrified locals as they call in reporting strange sightings and noises in the night, or featuring delightful live-action mini-episodes of a show reminiscent of “The Twilight Zone” or “Outer Limits.” These are a really nice touch and I would frequently go out of my way while playing the game just to find them.

The game also features collectibles for some unknowable reason and while I feel absolutely no attachment to the hundred-odd random coffee thermoses scattered throughout the game, the pieces of Alan’s manuscript; the grim tale slowly coming to life around him; are actually really fucking cool. They often describe events that take place much further in the game, but in such a way as to not spoil any surprises when they come, giving them an excellent method of foreshadowing later segments of the game. On a similar line of thinking in regards to foreshadowing and calling back previous segments, the game is also separated into six “episodes.” Each of these, after the first, start and end with a cutscene not unlike those seen on serial dramas in the 80’s and 90’s. You know the kind, “Previously on such-and-such, our hero is in over his head…” cue cuts to scenes from the previous episode, snippets of dialogue.  It was certainly kind of bizarre, especially when attempting to play the entire game in one sitting, but it is charming and unique, so it gets points for that.

It’s a hard game to judge, it is literally a game about a writer, writing about another writer who has written about himself and that other writer. And also there’s a monster. It’s hard to tell if the game is taking itself seriously or not at times. The combat is solid if a bit frustrating, but that’s sort of par for the course in most horror games. The characters are notable if a bit stereotypical, and oftentimes the dialogue feels forced. I like any game with a bend towards Lovecraftian horror, but I feel like Alan Wake is just sort of skirting the line between average and pretty good. For a game with a lot of very neat ideas, and a setting that I can absolutely get behind, it’s a shame that the game itself isn’t a bit more enjoyable.