Literary journey through waking nightmare

After five years in the making Remedey Entertainment's "Alan Wake" finally graces its presence on the Xbox 360. Does the development time show in the final product? It does, but not in a way that makes this game an instant buy at full price.

The plot of "Alan Wake" revolves around the title character, a famous author who seems to be hitting a slump in his writing career. To help cure his slump, his wife Alice takes him to Bright Falls for some needed Rest & Relaxation and to get him to start writing again; the latter doesn't sit well with Alan when he finds out later. After meeting an old lady that could be described as creepy, Alan and Alice drive toward their cabin in the middle of Cauldron Lake. As it turns out, there's a dormant darkness in the town that's been awakened by Alan Wake's presence known as the Dark Presence.

Things change for the worse when this darkness takes Alice.

After that, Alan Wake finds himself in a car crash the next moment after diving after Alice in the lake. As it turns out, a whole week has passed since he arrived at Bright Falls.

For the rest of the game's plot Alan Wake tries to find Alice while trying to piece together what had happened during the missing week.

However, Alan Wake had actually written a book whose events are being played out. This is both a decently clever plot device and an annoying gameplay mechanic. Over the course of the game you can collect pages of the manuscript of the book that Alan Wake wrote called "Departure."

Sometimes the manuscript pages spoil something that's going to happen later in the plot, while others provide more information about the game's secondary characters. So after collecting certain manuscript pages one could guess where the plot was going or know events before they happen.

It should be noted that gathering the manuscript pages isn't required, even though they're an important plot element.

Aside from page gathering the rest of the game plays much like an action game. There are enemies trying to kill you. You shoot them. They're dead and you're not.

However, there is a twist: the enemies in this game are people taken over by darkness, and are thus called the Taken. This darkness makes them invulnerable to your attacks. In order to be able to kill your enemies you have to use a flashlight to destroy the darkness that is protecting them, allowing you to shoot them. Later on in the game you fight possessed objects including farming and construction equipment.
The reason that that darkness is doing this, at least initially, is to recapture Alan Wake. As it turns out the Dark Presence had Alan Wake write a novel that would gradually make it more powerful and eventually free it from Caldron Lake. It seems that lake itself has the mystical power of bringing works of art to life. It should also be noted that something similar to the events of the plot has happened once before, but the writer involved wrote himself and everything he wrote out of existence.

While Alan Wake isn't carrying a thousand bullets on him at one time very rarely are you without a usable weapon. There are times where the game forces you to go through the dark without any equipment, but you'll eventually run into a flashlight.

Speaking of equipment, for some odd reason Alan Wake seems to lose all of his equipment as he progresses through the game. Sometimes there's a valid reason for losing his equipment such as being involved in a crash (and he's in a lot of those).

Other times, Alan Wake is perfectly fine, yet all he has is a basic flashlight and a pistol. While this could help prevent the difficulty curve from leaning towards the easy side, such artificial prevention is a little annoying.

The visuals of Alan Wake are amazing, except for the character animations. When the characters move, you can tell that they were generated by a computer—especially their mouths. And that's a shame because the game's voice acting is awesome and believable. I especially like the effect on The Taken: they speak like they're still human but at times sounds like a monster.

"Alan Wake" is worth purchasing, although it would be wise to wait for a price decrease before buying.

"Alan Wake" was released for the Xbox 360 on May 18. The game retails for $59.99 and has the Teen ESRB rating.