Ambitious storytelling makes Alan Wake one mystery game worth playing.
Alan Wake's main draw is the storyline. Every step of the way will keep you guessing whether or not this is actually reality or if he is just making it up in his head. Several scenes in the game and how many NPC's act towards Alan will make you doubt his sanity. But the storyline comes together, quite well actually, and the manuscripts and Alan's internal monologue will beautifully foreshadow, somewhat obviously at times, upcoming events. The game is supposed to be book like and it blends together a novel like storyline with a enjoyable battle system. Surprisingly, the game uses very little characters to accomplish this; It's mostly Alan and his battle with the darkness that advances the storyline and, while it does get lonely, it's nice to see the story focus on one character. But various other characters have been added to the game and they are just as fun and mysterious as the main character himself.
The game is primarily set during the night, a perfect opportunity for the 'darkness' to not pull out any stops in scaring the player. And it mainly accomplishes this; it's set in the dark, it sends out many shadowy surprises and it has a spooky atmosphere. But the game feels the need to constantly remind you, the player, that there are monsters around, as it often zooms in on incoming enemies. While this is fine for 'boss fights', it does this a lot with normal enemies as well, effectively lowering the amount of surprise that will come from the sneaky denizens of the dark. The manuscript pages, future events that Alan had written himself, also hinder the amount of surprise that the player will get from the game. I remember many times where a page would talk about a boss that would shortly pop up and, lo and behold, I run into it a few minutes later. While the manuscript pages were a really neat idea, it also took out many of the surprises that would make a thriller a thriller. I was not often surprised because of them.
The battle system is pretty simplistic. To hurt the creatures of the darkness, Alan has to shine his flashlight, or other light based items, on them so that their shield or darkness will be dissolved. Then they can be killed using one of the guns Alan has picked up on his journey. This system is really fun and can be pretty thrilling when in tight situations. When confronted with many Taken, you'll have to prioritize and take them down or take your chances, and try to run to the nearest light source, the latter being more difficult depending on how many are on your tail. The combat in this game is fun, but gets old pretty quickly because of the lack of variety. You have your basic Taken: large ones that are hard to take down, the drones that come in packs and are moderately easy to take down, fast ones that are difficult to target but are easy to take down and large, possessed objects. I was disappointed in how few Taken there actually were in the game, but it does a good job at throwing tight situations at you.
Exploration is key if you want to collect the various collectibles that's spread across the game. I liked how many items they dropped all over the place that could be collected by going off of the beaten path. It encourages exploration of the entire level and it's entertaining to find a collectible that you had been missing beforehand. The TV and radio shows were also pretty neat to and they add a good amount of foreshadowing and tidbits of information about events in the game. They're spread across the entire game so you will have to be diligent if you want to collect them all
Overall, Alan Wake is a very entertaining game with a fantastic story that's filled with more questions than there are answers. Alan Wake is a game of many mysteries so finding out the latest mystery will be as satisfying to the player as it is to Alan himself. The game has a few problems, such as unneeded foreshadowing, but the goods definitely outweigh the bad. The combat system along with the various quirky characters make Alan Wake a thrilling mystery that's hard to put down.