1.5/5 ★ – notyourbro's review of Alan Wake Remastered.

i'm really not sure why so many people call this a masterpiece. first and most understandably, alan wake - even remastered - is a slog to play. i get this. it's old, and loads of games don't age well in the gameplay department. but what's egregious is how little it evolves over time. what you do at the beginning is basically what you do at the end, and it's a shallow system to begin with. the experience is repetitive as a result, worsened by the fact that the gameplay escalates solely by throwing bigger groups of enemies at you. so by the time you're well and truly fed up with light, shoot, repeat, you're being asked to do it for even longer stretches. this isn't a controversial point. i gather that most of alan wake's fans will point to the story as its primary appeal, but i found this surprisingly weak too. it plays with fascinating ideas but doesn't explore them with a great deal of depth, and it's stretched so thin across the gameplay. the average episode sends alan trekking toward some goal, only to move the goalpost farther away every time you think you've gotten there. it's so defeating, and whatever nuggets of info the brief end-of-episode cutscenes gave me never felt narratively earned nor worth my time. i was also surprised by how poor the dialogue was. alan's monologue (and the manuscript pages) can be schlocky, because alan's a pulpy thriller writer. makes sense. but ALL of the dialogue feels stilted and unrealistic, and not in a we're-poking-fun-at-this way. the best bits of writing and voice acting are in the radios, imo. overall, this was a big swing and an equally big miss. alan wake has cool ideas and tons of ambition, but it fumbles the execution at every turn, working neither as a gameplay nor a narrative experience. i suspect a game with such a distinct personality felt novel at its original release, but a decade and many bold, creative games later, it just doesn't hold up.