Alan Wake

We’d been starting to wonder if Alan Wake had maybe overslept. The game’s always looked impressively cinematic throughout its long dev cycle, but we never got a great read on how exactly its story will unfold. In a recent demo where Wake slunk through a forest packed with gibbering horrors, we were floored by what we found out.

While the larger plot surrounding this sequence was purposefully kept vague, we know that Wake’s on the run from both the FBI and the local sheriff, and he’s hoping to meet up with his wife’s kidnapper. The woods he’s traversing are, of course, not friendly — the dark presence that’s taken over the town is killing everything it can. Trees lash madly back and forth, ravening flocks of birds take down helicopters, and shadows fling cars at the cops. (The visual parallels to Lost are both obvious and unnerving.) Wake doesn’t have a gun or even a flashlight, and for the first time in the game, he has to cling to the shadows.

“Here we totally turn the tables on Wake,” explains Matias Myllyrinne, managing director at Alan Wake developer Remedy. “So far, light’s been his ally, but now it’s his enemy. This really is the exception that makes the rule.” It also makes for a white-knuckle ride — do you drift deeper into shadows to avoid the police…and risk being consumed by the dark presence? Show yourself in the familiar safety of the light, and you’ll probably be shot or captured. It’s the kind of harrowing balancing act that creates a really memorable videogame level.

Fortunately, the game doesn’t keep you constantly at breaking point. “We do have daytime scenes where you meet the locals and learn their personalities and reasons for being there,” says Oskari Häkkinen, Remedy’s head of franchise development. (Of course, daylight isn’t always safe — after all, dark spots happen even during the day.) Don’t expect a standard RPG town sequence in these parts. “We don’t have dialogue trees and such,” continues Myllyrinne. “You’ll go over to a certain location and a natural dialogue will take place. They might ask you to do something, like turn on a jukebox. You walk over and put on their favorite song, and that’ll spark a reaction.”

So yes, maintaining that sweeping cinematic feel is still the focus of Alan Wake. “For us, a thriller is all about mood, atmosphere, suspense, and cliffhangers,” Myllyrinne concludes. “But above all, it’s a smart story with a reason for all the scares.” If the game pulls that off, we’ll even put the last season of Lost on pause to play it.