Alan Wake

It's not often we see actual deep and well constructed horror stories. Alan Wake might not be the greatest gameplay of all time, but for those who love a good Stephen King story or old shows like Twilight Zone and X-Files it is impossible not to love.

Thoroughly played through Control and figured it was finally time to play this after watching my brother for a bit back on the 360. Growing up in the PNW and currently living near a region that looks similar to the game's setting I really enjoyed the locations and atmosphere. The writing and world building was great and about what I expected, although having great bits of story being locked behind collectibles is a shame instead of incorporating everything into the unmissable main story. The character movement is often janky and the combat is extremely repetitive and largely unenjoyable with the flashlight mechanic getting old after an hour. Absolutely worth experiencing but I probably won't replay it like I do for almost all my game purchases.

I played the sequel first and came here for the story. The story is just as great. The sequel wasn't enough of a spoiler to ruin it. The graphics aged well except for the cutscenes, which are pre-rendered and look worse than in-game graphics on modern hardware. Bugs: the game doesn't even launch when there's a non-ASCII characters in the user name. A workaround is to copy the nonexistent path from the error message and create it.

Its new and old at the same time. Looks like a classic horror film and slightly dated tech but the story and gameplay are great. this is one of my favorites and its totally unique. best movie ever...

Wow, this game really surpised me. The mood, the dialgoues, the episodic nature with episode recaps, the gunplay was all great. I got this elsehwere at a great price, but it is worth $14.99, in my book. I just started Episode #4 and it has a draw that keeps me coming back. I checked my PS5, and saw that I already had it. Oddly enough, on the same difficulty level, it is a much easier game on th PS5. I love it!