A few games mark a generation and, in the days of Xbox 360, Alan Wake was among them. 11 years later, the adventure of the haunted writer is back with enhanced 4K graphics, and its two included narrative expansions. But, more than a decade has passed. What does this Alan Wake Remastered tell us? Let's dive deeper into this Alan Wake Remastered review.
Alan Wake Remastered Review
The story centers on Alan, a famous mystery novel writer who travels on vacation to the remote town of Bright Falls to try to bring his lost creativity back together with his wife. Once there, his wife mysteriously disappears and everything seems to be surrounded by a darkness that possesses the inhabitants.
As Alan escapes from the possessed, those mysterious attackers, he must unravel three mysteries: what happened to his wife, whom he remembers in strange flashes? What is this darkness that turns everyone into murderers and seems to possess even the objects on the stage?
As in any good Remedy game (creators of Control or Max Payne, among other games of a similar cut to the one at hand), the story and the narrative play a crucial role in the development.
Many will define Alan Wake Remastered as a horror game (in fact, Remedy herself does it), but more than fear, this experience offers us irresistible suspense, which encourages us to play more and more to understand what is happening.
Gameplay Features
The gameplay is more typical of an action adventure. We handle Alan Wake in the third person and we have to find weapons with which to defend ourselves from the possessed while avoiding his attacks. These possessed are beings of darkness so that before shooting them, we have to weaken them with the light of our flashlight.
Therefore, with the only help of a simple "radar", the game constantly urges us to look for the light, because if we place ourselves under a lamppost or turn on a spotlight in front of them, the enemies will disappear and we will recover health. The light from these streetlights is thick as if it wraps us up to protect ourselves.
Thus, a shotgun can be forceful, but a lighting grenade is even more so, which can take out several enemies at once. In addition, the light from our flashlight can illuminate clues on the walls that lead us to extra ammunition.
This constant need to watch the light, either with the batteries that we put in the flashlight to recharge it or the places that show us the way forward, make us live many tense moments and feel almost naked when we run in a completely dark forest, With the trees and the wind roaring around us.
Credit: Remedy Entertainment
In addition to facing the enemies, we have some moments of space puzzle, with platforms or machinery that must be placed in the right place to advance. In any case, those challenges are fairly straightforward, and the real challenge is usually in the fighting.
Dedicating ourselves to just those main tasks is entertaining enough, but Alan Wake Remastered constantly stings our collector streak. On the one hand, we can search the stage for the pages of our manuscript.
If we read them, they tell us events that we have just experienced or others that will happen in the future, but narrated cryptically, as in a Stephen King novel, so that we do not fully understand what awaits us. In a way, they are reminiscent of those omens that we find in Supermassive Games games.
We can also collect 100 thermoses of coffee, which add nothing to the game, except give us achievements or trophies, in a reminder of that boom for the achievement points we had at the zenith of Xbox 360.
There are other extras that we discover in the game, such as televisions in which we can see entire chapters of a series invented for the game, The Night Rises, which is a great parody of classics like The Twilight Zone. We can also find radios in which the inhabitants of Bright Falls comment on what is happening.
A Decent Remaster?
And what about the remaster itself? Does the guy hold up to a game from two generations ago by today's standards? The truth is that yes ... And surprisingly well. It is true that the animations and expressions are quite bare and robotic for what we are used to now, but everything else manages to catch up.
On the one hand, Alan's models and the secondary characters have gained detail during the cut scenes (although sometimes they "squint" a bit) and, above all, it is noticeable that the textures of the HD sets help to immerse us in the environment. Resolution up to 1440p upscaled to 4K and 60fps on the PS5 and Xbox Series X versions.
The base versions of PS4 and Xbox One run at 30 FPS, with 1080p and 900p of the resolution, respectively. For their part, PS4 Pro and Xbox One X can play with the performance mode or the resolution mode to go further, while the most recent consoles do not give a reason, because it is not necessary: it already looks luxurious.
The best are the atmospheric effects, with the shadows moving at full speed through the trees, as the stage collapses around us and the mist lurks in the distance.
Logically, the graphical experience is not as powerful as that of more recently created games, but the necessary changes have been added so that we "believe" that we are there, immersed in this mystery.
The narrative, with Alan's monologues and conversations with the characters, do the rest to build an experience that is an explicit tribute to the works of Stephen King, Twin Peaks, or the pulp novels of the 20th century.
Alan Wake Remastered is also a testimony of that time when action adventures took a step forward in the narrative (do you remember games like The Darkness, Spec Ops: The Line, or the Bioshock themselves?), Which served to create exciting stories like this one.
How Long to Beat Alan Wake Remastered?
Overcoming the adventure will take you between 10 and 15 hours, as you entertain yourself with collecting objects and stories, but do not be in a hurry to advance, beyond fleeing the darkness. In Bright Falls you will feel as strangely comforted as when savoring a freshly brewed coffee. Hopefully, you now can judge for yourself after this Alan Wake Remastered review if the game is worth picking up.
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