After writing a series of best-selling thrillers and becoming a household name, novelist Alan Wake is suddenly struck with writer's block. Needing a break, he travels to the sleepy town of Bright Falls, Washington with his wife Alice—a vacation that soon turns into a nightmare. Alice goes missing; shadowy axe-wielding phantoms stalk him relentlessly; and the plot of a new horror novel he has no memory of writing comes terrifyingly to life. Alan Wake first launched on Xbox 360 back in 2010, but now you can experience it in Alan Wake Remastered, a new version created by original developer Remedy with upgraded visuals, improved cutscenes, and a new commentary track from writer/director Sam Lake. It's also the first time the game has appeared on Sony consoles, having previously been an Xbox/PC exclusive. But how does it hold up over a decade later?
The majority of Alan Wake takes place in the mountains and forests surrounding Bright Falls. Early in development it was an open world game, before the scope was changed and it became linear. But you can still feel some of that open world scale in the setting, with its sprawling woods and sweeping mountain ranges. As Wake searches for Alice, he battles those shadow creatures with light, burning away the dark presence that's possessing them with a flashlight, then finishing them off with a few shots from a revolver. It's an entertaining mix of very Remedy action, complete with lots of gratuitous slow motion, and atmospheric horror. The handful of enemy types makes the combat feel repetitive, especially towards the end when the game starts throwing more and more of them at you. But it makes up for its shortcomings as an action game with pure vibe.
Bright Falls is one of the all-time great video game settings, and Wake's journey through its fog-shrouded forests and mountain trails is incredibly evocative. It looked great back in 2010, but Alan Wake Remastered gives it a new lease of life with notably improved textures, an increased draw distance, and a lot more fidelity thanks to the jump to 4K. It's not a radical remaster, with Remedy choosing to maintain the art direction of the original rather than slathering every frame in fancy modern visual effects. I'm glad, because despite looking better overall, it's still the Alan Wake I know and love. It's in cutscenes where the biggest changes are felt, with new character models and facial animations making the cinematics appear less stiff. Just don't go in expecting a full-on Demon's Souls-style remake; this is very much a refined version of the original game.
Also, as someone who has become invested in the ongoing Remedy Connected Universe, returning to Bright Falls after playing Control—specifically the AWE expansion—is extra exciting. The events of Alan Wake are examined, and expanded upon, in Control. We learn more about what happened to the town and Alan's fate after the final chapter, and it seems the Federal Bureau of Control had a presence in the town while all this was going down. The story is really the thing that keeps me coming back to Alan Wake, and the reason to play it today. It's a perfectly enjoyable action game, but it's the world, characters, and ambience that will really stick in your mind—and the visual upgrade in Alan Wake Remastered, while not as immediately dramatic as you might expect, makes exploring those creepy Pacific Northwestern woods, and hanging out with Bright Falls' quirky residents, even more of a strange delight.
Sam Lake's love for Twin Peaks has been apparent since the Address Unknown theme park in Max Payne 2. But Wake is a much more obvious homage to Mark Frost and David Lynch's surreal supernatural soap opera. Like the show, the game's horror is amplified by taking place in an idyllic, seemingly perfect all-American setting—and it’s this contrast that makes Bright Falls such a compelling place. Remedy does weird better than pretty much every developer making big, expensive video games, and Alan Wake is delightfully strange. The developer's idiosyncratic personality is felt in every scene, which despite being an homage to a hundred different horror stories, gives it its own distinctive identity. Remedy games always feel like Remedy games, which is one of the studio's greatest strengths—and Alan Wake Remastered is a nice chance to revisit its past glories.