Systems: May 14, 2010, & February 16, 2012
Release Date: Xbox 360, Windows
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios & Remedy Entertainment
This is going to be a somewhat brief article, likely not a normal Game EXP article for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, I honestly cannot mentally distinguish between the two DLC Specials and when specific plot points happened. And there is really no way of talking about either of these two DLC episodes without getting into any kind of spoilers from the main game, so if you have not played Alan Wake or either of the DLCs and are planning on it, you might just want to skip this article. Each DLC, referred to as "Specials" because the game is presented as if it were in a TV episodic format, is fairly compact and can be completed in 1-2 hours, depending on how many of the in-game collectibles you search for
**SPOILERS AHEAD**
Because it is revealed that Alan Wake is still in the cabin on the lake, that he is essentially battling against his own brain, and that everything happening to him "is" in his own mind, Remedy Entertainment could do a lot more strange things in terms of gameplay and mechanics that they could not do when the player thought that they were still playing as Alan Wake in the real world. So having sections of buckwild platforming on floating rocks and empty shipping containers above pits leading down to the void is now plausible. There were also a couple of areas that took this messing-with-reality to fascinating places and allowed the devs to mess with the environment which could not have been done with the story they were telling in the first game. These moments did feel a lot more video-gamey as if Remedy was just trying to make a cool-looking and fun-to-play stage outside of reality, but by this point in Alan's story, he was more trying to survive and less believing what was happening to him was supposed to be real.
The other major new mechanic was the floating words that could only be activated by Alan's flashlight, often requiring the same amount of bulb power and time commitment as it would reveal/weaken The Taken. When illuminated, these words like AMMO, TOOL, and BRIDGE can offer consumables to help Alan against The Taken or help him literally progress through levels. I really liked this mechanic because it meant that you had to decide when fighting against The Taken whether you wanted to light them up to weaken them, or to use your battery power on one of the words that could either give you assistance in killing them or potentially get you out of the area to avoid them.
The other change from the main game to the Specials was that there was a much greater focus on combat. In the main game, there might have been a combat encounter with a swarm of Taken or a boss that I had to replay 2-3 times to figure out how to best survive. In the Specials, it was less about stealth or avoiding combat and more about seeing how well you could survive against a horde of Taken in different settings. One area might have you use a truck/jeep in a set area while others just throw enemy after enemy at you in a semi-open train car-filled area. There were several encounters that took upwards of five attempts to survive and the final battle in Special Feature Two took maybe around 10 attempts and got to be pretty frustrating. In these situations, I always think about the interview
Dead Space director Glen Schofield gave to Ars Technica where he said that encounters and difficult areas shouldn't take more than three attempts for the player because after that the game becomes no longer fun. I like that philosophy because while I do not believe that I should be able to blaze through a game without any restarts/respawns and I do appreciate a challenge, I do not want to die over and over and over and over and over again in the exact same area just because a game wants to be hard for the sake of being hard.
After all of that, did I enjoy the Specials for
Alan Wake? I think I enjoyed the story that was told, that Alan is still on the island, writing against himself and his own anxieties about being an author and a good person to Alice and his friends and that he is stuck in his own mind. I did not like the focus on action-heavy areas since I tend to like my survival horror less action-oriented; although I guess Remedy has said that they consider
Alan Wake to be an action-adventure game. But then again, in the "boss" stage of
Special Feature One: The Signal, I did like how the fight itself felt story-based, even if it did take several attempts to recognize all of the stage elements that were designed for the player to take advantage of. I am also still not a fan of all of the in-stage collectibles but at least there were not any that were locked behind a difficulty/skill wall this time. It was some time close to the end of the first Special that I decided I was not going to actively look for the alarm clocks/standees/video games/ etc because I knew that I was missing them and I did not have the desire to attempt anything near a completionist run. I did like the focus on implementing abstract-level designs that were not possible in the main game that was trying to convince the player that what they were experiencing was happening in the real world while still dropping hints that Alan had been, and is still in his own mind.
But at least it appears that he might be winning that fight.
So:
Story: Yes.
Gameplay: Yes.
Level design: Yes.
Emphasis on Combat: No.
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