IF I SHOULD DIE BEFORE I WAKE
At the bottom of the lake, your wife Alice awaits — trapped, frightened, and alone. Something dark drew her there, and it is your mission, as celebrated horror author Alan Wake, to set her free. You came to the wooded little town of Bright Falls seeking rest and inspiration. The plan was simple: escape the city, rent a secluded cabin by the scenic Cauldron Lake, and cure Alan’s writer’s block. Instead, the entire place appears haunted by a malevolent force that brings his fiction to life.
Something drags Alice beneath the surface, and you dive in after her. Then everything goes black. When you awaken, you’re trapped inside the wreckage of a crashed car on the outskirts of town. A full week of your life has vanished from memory. Armed with little more than a flashlight and a handgun, you begin searching Bright Falls and its surroundings. By seeking help from its eccentric residents, you try to uncover what really happened — and to write your story straight before it’s too late.
Structured like a television series and split into six episodes, the game sends you chasing lead after lead, spiraling deeper into a mystery you may not survive. Every tree trunk, bush, and boulder along the forest paths could conceal an enemy, waiting to strike. On paper, this sounds tense and frightening. In practice, appearances are deceiving.
Alan is no action hero — he’s a writer. His lack of athleticism defines the combat. He suffers from what Swedes affectionately call “ping-pong lungs,” meaning he can’t sprint more than a few seconds before wheezing to a halt. This limitation creates genuine tension during encounters. You must remove the darkness shielding your enemies, dodge their attacks, and dispatch them quickly before you’re overwhelmed.
In other words, Alan is an author forced to play the action role, gun and flashlight in hand. I liked this setup at first. Unfortunately, the game insists on being a borderline action title, showering you with ammunition to the point where it rarely qualifies as survival horror. Aside from a few extremely simple puzzles and brief story segments at the start of each episode, there’s little variation.
Neither Alan nor the controls are suited for such sustained combat, and because it dominates the experience, the gameplay becomes monotonous. You shine your light until the darkness peels away, then shoot. Repeat. Alan’s limited toolkit results in the same handful of encounters, barely evolving over the course of the game.
You can only survive two or three hits before dying, unless you retreat and allow the auto-heal to kick in. Dodging is your primary defense, and if you’re feeling bold, you can sprint toward the nearest pool of light where enemies can’t follow. That’s essentially it. Tougher enemies exist, but they merely justify using shotguns or rifles. You can also find upgraded flashlights with stronger beams or longer-lasting batteries, and rare weapons like flare guns and flashbangs can clear crowds instantly.
What consistently bothered me was how Alan controls in relation to the camera. The flashlight beam — your de facto crosshair — doesn’t quite align with the center of the screen. Movement often feels like a drunken stagger. I aim the light where I intend to run, only to collide with a tree, fence, or boulder sitting just beyond the beam’s edge.
Still, gameplay be damned — I’m here for the story. Alan Wake draws heavily from Stephen King and Twin Peaks, blending them into a strange horror sitcom of lumberyards, diners, gas stations, and cheap motels connected by long, winding forest roads. Much of the game has you running through pitch-black woods at night, desperately trying to reach some distant, illuminated structure on a mountainside.
As the mystery unfolds, it becomes clear that Alan wrote a story during his missing week — a story meant to fix something. I love how pages from this manuscript are scattered throughout the world, serving as foreshadowing and exposition. They often describe events before they occur, subtly raising tension as new enemies and boss creatures are teased ahead of time.
I also appreciate the ambition to mix horror, comedy, and drama — something Twin Peaks mastered. The problem is that Alan Wake isn’t especially scary, despite horror being its primary emotional driver. The tone is simply too eccentric and goofy to sustain genuine fear.
Remedy often tries to cram conflicting emotions into the same scene — enemies cracking sitcom-style one-liners while attempting to cleave your skull with an axe. Twin Peaks, by contrast, kept its emotional registers separate. Horror scenes were pure horror; dramatic moments focused entirely on character turmoil. When Alan Wake tries to be funny and frightening simultaneously, the emotions cancel each other out, leaving your amygdala thoroughly confused.
That said, the story is clever, mysterious, and consistently engaging. By the end, I even found it a little touching. Light and darkness are literal forces in this universe, but the story surrounding them operates on multiple levels. What is real? What is imagined? What did Alan write — and why?
It feels as though Alan uses storytelling itself — its comedy and horror alike — as a defense mechanism, shielding himself from the truth behind something terrible he may have done. Not every plot thread is neatly resolved, but ambiguity feels intentional here.
Normally, that would invite a replay. Unfortunately, that’s unlikely. The gameplay simply isn’t strong enough to carry me through another trek along endless forest paths, nervously fondling my WASD keys while twitching the mouse back and forth. And besides, as the Stephen King quote at the beginning of the game (roughly) puts it: explanations are for losers.
I’ll give Alan Wake an average score and move on — eventually — to Alan Wake II, which has just been released.
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