Alan wake me up inside.

There is a pigeon singing gutturally outside my window, the loud fucker isn’t getting their bread handout for a week, to the squirrels go my toasty crusts.

Horror, it takes many forms, like when you misjudged the gaseous quality a fart, forget someone's name or come face to face the entities whose existence renders your own meaningless and more fragile that the flame of a candle as the last droplets of wax flow away. I myself am trapped in the horror of my own fickle memories, i could have sworn i’ve done a review of Alan wake before but apparently not, it could have just been that i intently focused on doing so, maybe one afternoon during a thought shower, i’m not adopting modern terminology there, quite literally showers are great places to mull things over because nowhere else i am free to cup my lathered scrotum in peace, it’s a kind of freedom that promotes free thinking.

The Game: could you make a game out of a stephen king book? Is the premise of this game, not the narrative premise but the actual intent. For those struggling with the difference, the narrative premise would be me going to the shower to think, while the intent would be to cup my lathered scrotum in peace: a sentence one ought never have to read twice.

Set in a sleepy new england town with a terrible monster living in the lake, a writer; with writer's block and presumably a twitter account that see’s the lion share of their typing efforts, goes to get their mojo back, by living in a cabin on the lake side; so they can get over their twitter addiction and actually write something... but WHOOPS, he accidentally writes the creature in the lake into existence and the pages of his new book starts playing out around him. Can he spoiler himself by finding the pages in order to stop what is going down… Maybe.

In terms of metafiction mindfuck the game is fun enough to float through the narrative beats of a pulp novel, which is aware that it’s a pulp novel, also a game; and takes some measure of glee in being a touch on the cheesy side while retaining that capacity to drive genuine fear into the player. Like when someone knocks on the door of the bathroom to ask about your thought shower when really…

The monster is your evil shadow eldritch kind of thingey and so you can only kill an enemy after shining a torch at then, naturally the game plays up the contrast between light and dark more heavily than a silhouette portrait. Upon rereading this i realise silhouette portraits are really out of favour in a world when you can snap chat your lathered scrotum to just about anyone, using a glass of wine and flew clicks. Fortunately i don’t phone.

On top of that the enemies are just townsfolk that have been possessed by the shadow which makes you real monster? Both ammo and batteries are sparse, the classic trick to making everything all the tenser and on top of that the safe points, under street lamps, occasionally cut out just to stop you recovering too much from the intensity of the shadow shit show floating around you.

If memory serves there are some pretty good bits of storytelling going on here and the action is never truly overwhelming if not a touch repetitive, if anything one gets a bit worn out from being so tense all the time.

I didn’t finish the game, not because it was bad or anything just didn’t manage to find the time when i played it a few year ago, which is maybe why i held of on a review for so long but if they’re truly aping stephen king, in the true and time honoured fashion, then the ending wouldn’t have been that good anyway. It would just sort of peter out, tired, kind of predictable. Limping on to a, belated, slow… finish.