Alan Wake Remastered Review

Alan Wake Remastered Review

A classic perfected!

Author Mahmoud Reza Javidi

Arranged by Ali Reza Kianifard

Thanks to Remedy entertainment and Epic games for providing the Alan Wake Remastered game review code to the Gamerima team for review before release.

At the end of this article there is a gameplay of Alan Wake remastered from Gamerima and review video of Alan Wake remastered from Gamerima.

If you were a gamer in the 7th console generation, chances are you had heard the name Alan Wake at least a couple of times, this Psychological Thriller from critical darling game development studio, Remedy Entertainment, originally came out exclusively for Xbox 360 in May 2010 with a pc port hitting shelves in April 2012, While not receiving much commercial love when it came out, Alan Wake has become somewhat of a cult classic over the years and with rumors of a sequel floating around, the Remaster aims to bring the classic into the public eye once more by giving the visuals a nice new coat of paint.

A new dev commentary from game writer and Remedy Entertainment Creative Director Sam Lake; And bringing the game to the Playstation platforms for the first time. In this review we are going to take a look at the core game and story, as well as reviewing the changes this Remaster brings to the table (spoiler alert, they are awesome, and not all of them are visual). Stay with Gamerima so we may find the light!

THAT PINPRICK OF LIGHT

            “Beyond the shadow you settle for, there is a miracle, Illuminated” -Tom Zane

this is very much at the heart of Remedy’s storytelling and it’s never more prevalent than in Alan Wake.

 The game opens with Alan saying “In a horror story, the victim keeps asking “Why?” But there can be no explanation, and there shouldn’t be one.

 The unanswered mystery is what stays with us the longest, and it’s what we’ll remember in the end” Alan Wake is an 11-year-old game but it’s fascinating how many fans are still thrilled by its unanswered mysteries;

 when bringing the game up with someone who has played it, the first thing they say will probably something like “It’s not a lake, it’s an ocean” or that they are still waiting for a sequel.

 The narrative team at Remedy, and especially Writer and Creative Director, Sam Lake, should take pride in that, something they made has kept the audience thinking for over a decade.

the human brain wants to understand what it can’t.

It wants answers where questions are asked, and when denied immediate answers, it starts filling in the gaps and believing in those personal answers, that’s why we make theories and even fight over them when someone challenges our way of understanding the mystery.

We don’t want to settle in the shadow, we want to run wild, look for that pinprick of light, that miracle, Illuminated.

It’s incredible how Alan Wake plays with the concept of not giving you the answers, but leaving you alone with the questions and enough ingredients for you to come up with your own answers, and they can’t be right or wrong, because there is no such thing when it comes to the human imagination.

“MY NAME IS ALAN WAKE, I’M A WRITER”

            In this game, you play as Alan Wake, a crime fiction and horror writer who has been suffering from writer’s block for two years and decides to take a vacation with his wife, Alice, to the town of Bright Falls. Though this is an action game, Wake is not a typical action hero, or at least doesn’t start out as one, he is not comfortable with shooting a gun and, as you’d expect from a writer with so many clothing layers on, not that particularly good at sprinting either.

In fact, Alan’s lackluster cardio has been a long-running joke between the Alan Wake fandom ever since the original came out and his inability to run more than a few feet is untouched and still hilarious and just a bit annoying in Alan Wake Remastered.

Alan Wake’s character model may well be the most noticeable change in this remaster, our protagonist’s model has been redone from the ground up, with much higher fidelity texture and clothes, as well as a complete face change to bring his visual closer to the appearance of his real-life actor, Ilkka Villi.

This new model looks great for most of the playthrough but admittedly its animations can look wonky at times especially when it comes to the movement of Alan’s eyes. Nevertheless, it’s an undeniable improvement over the original which has not aged very gracefully in the 11 years since the game’s launch!

“ALAN, WAKE UP!”

            As we mentioned, Alan, along with his wife, Alice, are taking a vacation in the small town of Bright Falls, though, this vacation does not go as they planned, the couple stays in a cabin on a little island in Cauldron Lake named “Diver’s Isle”. It was during the first night that Alice seemingly falls into the lake, and Alan jumps after her trying to save her from any harm.

Only he saves no one, after what felt like a dream, Alan wakes up behind the wheel of his crashed car, missing a week and finding pages of a manuscript he wrote and the events inside these pages seem to come true. “The book I couldn’t remember was either a terrible and true prophesy, or an act of creation that had rewritten the world”.

Alan is also haunted by shadowy figures, townspeople taken by some sort of darkness, not human, not anymore. They take any chance they get to attack Wake and stop him from getting closer to Alice, and they can only be hurt in the light. So yes, light is your best friend and you should hold that flashlight as close and tight as you can.

Alan Wake Remastered’s story, like the original, is told in an episodic format, the six main episodes and two DLC episodes (Which are included at no additional cost in this remaster) are extremely well-paced and all end on some sort of cliffhanger that just keeps you wanting more.

There are very few games that try this episodic format and succeed in delivering a truly unique experience but Alan Wake perfectly captures the feeling of binging a tv show and gives it a video game twist.

This Remaster leaves the original narrative and story untouched, and that’s not a bad thing at all. Alan Wake has always been praised for its story so there really would be no point in making substantial changes to this part of the game.

WELCOME TO BRIGHT FALLS, AGAIN OR FOR THE FIRST TIME

            Bright Falls is a small Idyllic town in Washington famous for its lovely locals, vast forests, big Caldera lake named “Cauldron Lake” and annual Deerfest! This town is where you’ll be spending most of your time in Alan Wake Remastered, during the day you are usually asking around and getting to know the many locals who make up the cast of lovely and memorable side characters of Alan Wake who are either friendly, too friendly, or a mix of creepy and weird.

But as soon as the sun goes down you face an entirely different atmosphere, the welcoming tall pine trees and nature trails of Bright Falls turn into towering beasts blocking even the moonlight from guiding you, and paths perfect for those taken by the Dark Presence to ambush you

the calming quiet of the small town is now a deafening reminder of the fact that you are alone, only interrupted by the footsteps of the Taken haunting you from the shadows and waiting for an opportunity to put an end to your story.

Alan Wake’s atmosphere is at the very heart of the experience, you will spend most of your time walking in the woods and waiting for Taken to fight you, and it really helps that those walks are extremely enjoyable in their own nerve-racking and sometimes claustrophobic way.

The game’s incredible atmosphere is only elevated by its masterfully crafted and beautiful music score by Remedy Games award-winning composer, Petri Alanko. Each environment is scored with unique music and major story points are accompanied by special musical pieces that stay with you long after you’re done with your visit to Bright Falls.

The atmosphere and world of Alan Wake is another part where the Remaster improves from the original, the amount of vegetation is greatly increased and the terrain quality is pushed up to 11 with new ground textures, normal maps, and much higher quality big and small rocks population the scene more than ever.

Alan Wake’s environment was a big strength when the game originally came out and it remains a huge part of the experience with Alan Wake Remastered

FIGHT WITH LIGHT

As the official Alan Wake Remastered FAQ states, Remedy and d3t “have not touched the gameplay” the gameplay is the exact same as the original, whether you liked that or not is up to whether you enjoyed the original, as I said before, the main attraction of the gameplay for me has always been the atmosphere and its mysteries.

And when the Taken finally catch up with you and start attacking, that’s when you should rely on light the most. The combat of Alan Wake remaster, like the original, is crisp, heavy, and calculated.

Enemies mostly have close-range melee attacks and sometimes throw a couple of axes as well, by initiating a sprint you can dock under these attacks which is accompanied by a little slow-motion effect.

Now it’s time for you to attack them, and that’s where Alan Wake differs from most action games, you can’t just shoot at your enemies, because the darkness they are engulfed in protects them from any immediate damage, you first have to destroy their shield of darkness, and that’s done with your trusty flashlight

 you can point your flashlight at your enemies and burn the darkness away from them, you can also squeeze your light close and have a more focused light on them, which also eats up your precious limited batteries, so use this power-up sparingly, or alternatively use the other light arsenal you have, like flares or flashbangs!

MORE THAN JUST A REMASTER

As we mentioned at the beginning of this review, while most of the changes in Alan Wake Remastered are visual, there are other changes and additions as well, firstly it’s the audio commentary by Remedy’s creative director Sam Lake, which actually turned out to be more than I thought, in both the quantity (51 audio clips in total) and the content, in these commentaries Mr.Lake talks about his creative process and where so many of the story themes we see in Alan Wake come from and how that relates to the later entries in the Remedy Connected Universe games.

These commentaries are chock-full of spoilers and are really only recommended for those who have already experienced Alan Wake’s story. And it provides real value for those players coming back.

This commentary was the only non-visual difference officially announced. But there is actually one more thing, something that dropped my jaw as soon as I found it out. Let’s start with some history first, when the pc version of Alan Wake was released back in 2012, it contained some distinct QR codes around the game that linked to the Alan Wake Facebook page and some quirky little messages from the developers.

These QR codes are in the same place in Alan Wake Remastered, but what they link to are very different and *very* important to the Alan Wake story and what we should expect from a possible sequel. 

I am going to go a little in-depth and link to the first QR code now but beware that these contain EXTREME SPOILERS for Alan Wake and Control, and we recommend you find them for yourself, so if you haven’t yet, purchase Alan Wake remastered and find these codes for yourselves, You Have Been Warned!

Still here? Okay then, here we go, these QR codes (the first one is in the picture above, you can scan it for yourself) link to unlisted Youtube videos uploaded to the Remedy Entertainment channel, these videos simply are messages from Alan in the Dark Place.

More manuscript pages in the hotline call form we got in Control’s AWE DLC, pages from Alan Wake’s The Return. In these pages Alan talks about the challenges of being trapped in the endless ocean of darkness, with the Dark Presence bringing his every worst thought to reality and making him lose his memory, he talks about Alex Casey (the character in Alan’s famous detective novels).

Alan says how he needs a hero and Casey is the perfect fit for such a role. Looks like Casey really is being made real, helped by Alan to find himself, as Alan himself said once, “Every story finds its writer” and this time it seems to be more literal than ever. These are fascinating additions to Alan Wake remastered and surely are signs of what to come with the possible Alan Wake 2 in the near future.

VERDICT

            Alan Wake Remastered takes the flawed masterpiece that was the original game and improves as much of it while leaving the core game untouched, the redone facial animations and cutscenes help you immerse yourself more easily into the world and the masterfully crafted story.

While the added content like the Sam Lake commentary and the visions make playing Alan Wake Remastered a fresh experience even for those who played through the original.

I can say without exaggeration that Alan Wake Remastered is the definitive way to experience the story with both DLCs included.

Alan Wake Remastered will release on Oct 5th on Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S , PS4, PS5, and on pc on the Epic Games Store, and at 30$ for the whole package, it’s well worth it.

Remedy have taken their classic masterpiece and turned it into a timeless masterpiece.

Final score and Strenghts and Flaws from Gamerima for Alan Wake remastered:

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Video of Alan Wake Remastered Review:

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that was our Alan Wake Remastered Review thanks again to Remedy entertainment and Epic games for providing the Alan Wake Remastered game review code to the Gamerima team for review before release. please leave your comments down below for us and for more reviews check out review part of gamerima web site.