2.5/5 ★ – Lammy's review of Alan Wake Remastered.

Alan Wake Remastered post-abandonment review - So, yeah, this game isn't for me. Alan Wake Remastered is a 2021 remastering of a 2010 game by Remedy. You play as Alan Wake (surprise!) a famous writer afflicted with writers' block. He's led to a small town called Bright Falls to relax and solve his writing issues, but ends up caught up in a supernatural mystery involving dark forces housed within the town. The story is neat! It's very Steven King inspired, and it wears this proudly, even quoting the famous author in the very first line of the game. The visuals are also quite good for an up-rezzed 2010 piece, even if they don't hold up to 2021 standards, and the soundtrack is killer. Why then, does this say "post abandonment review"? Simple - the gameplay is ROUGH. The main conceit of the game is enemies are possessed by a spirit of darkness, and you need to shine a light on them to break their dark shields before you can damage them with firearms. The problems with this are twofold: 1) the gameplay loop is a tedious cycle of 'shine light, break shield, shoot a few times, reload' and 2) the game throws literally infinite enemies at you, forcing you to divide the shieldbreaking between upwards of 6 enemies at a time with shields that sometimes heal if you aren't actively doing damage to them. Non-combat sections of the game mostly revolve around going between streetlamps or other light source "safe havens" waiting to engage in more terrible combat. The loop got old in the tutorial, and by the end of chapter 2 it was downright unbearable. I found myself dreading actually playing this, and like, I play video games to have fun, man. When I realized I REALLY wasn't, I closed the game, took the disk out of the console, put it in its case and added it to my trade in pile. Alan Wake may be one of the most critically praised games of the 2010s, but that doesn't change the fact that I didn't like playing it. I'll give it a 5/10 for story so far and watch a YT playthrough.