A Late Look: Alan Wake - Article
by Mark Nielsen , posted on 24 November 2025 / 1,713 Views
Alan Wake read the page describing how he read the page describing the strengths and weaknesses of a game called Alan Wake. ‘A Late Look’ was the title; the page described it as a series of articles where a certain talented writer took belated looks at video games from the past and assessed them in retrospect, with his sharpened intellect and acquired palate. What a tryhard, Alan thought.
Ahem… That was weird. But the game we’re covering this time is indeed Alan Wake from 2010 – the original version of Remedy Entertainment’s iconic semi-horror classic. Just in time for four weeks after Halloween (in my first draft it said one).
Strength: Unique Thematic Gameplay
Light vs dark. That’s what Alan Wake is all about, and the developers managed to incorporate it quite creatively in not just the story but also the gameplay. Instead of being a generic shooter, they threw in light as an element with which to fight enemies (in fact it's necessary to even make them vulnerable), first and foremost in the shape of your trusty flashlight - with mechanically fun but questionable inner workings. I’m not sure what type of flashlight can be overcharged (draining its battery in seconds), but it plays very well into the game, letting you either drain an enemy's darkness slowly or expend battery to take it down quickly. This was already a pretty clever mechanic, but they took the idea of putting light into your arsenal even further with tools like hand flares, a flare gun, and the absolutely enemy-destroying flash grenades. So even if the gameplay is at its core still similar, the way these small differences match and intermelt with a larger theme makes it stand out among other survival horror games.
Weakness: 4000 Enemies, 4 Enemy Types
Even though I praised the combat for its unique design, you need more than just a good system in place to make the combat fun in a game that has a lot of it: you also need well-designed enemies, or at the very least some variety in them, and that’s where Alan Wake falls a bit short. I could quite literally count the enemy types on one hand: Shadowy-Guy, Big Shadowy-Guy, Shadowy-Guy That Phaseshifts, and of course Levitating Barrel - and that still leaves me with a finger to spare! This wouldn’t have been a huge issue if Alan Wake had less combat and focused more on the story, but it reminds me a lot of the first Uncharted title in that regard: it’s filled to the brim with combat even though that’s actually its weakest element. It’s a little less pronounced here, and thanks to the pages there are tidbits of story even in the longer gameplay sections, but there’s still just a tad too much combat given how little depth there actually is to it.
Strength: Collectibles
Praising the collectibles in a (semi) horror game isn't something I expected to be doing, and yet here we are, because honestly they’re one of the most satisfying parts of Alan Wake's gameplay. Trying to scour each area for intriguing pages or the many, many coffee thermoses (Alan wondered if a caffeine overdose was the real cause of these hallucinations... Dr. Hartman had told him to switch to decaf) adds a lot to what would otherwise have been a very straight-forward 'walk forward and kill enemies' type of game. The only downside is that some pages are locked to the highest difficulty, which A) can’t be chosen for a first playthrough, and B) you're still taunted by them being shown as non-collected in the list of pages. Not a great combination. That small issue aside, Alan Wake does an excellent job of making exploration and trying to collect everything feel worthwhile.
Weakness: Attack of the Barrels
This is a bit of a continuation of the previous weakness, but that’s really because other than some slight pacing issues here and there, the enemies remain the one Achilles' heel of Alan Wake. We’ve already covered how few enemy types there are, but among those few is one that we in the writing business like to call 'a nuisance'. Having inanimate objects come to life and attack you is an interesting gimmick at first, but I believe it was a misstep for the game to turn it into a recurring and very frequently used enemy, because there’s even less to them than the other enemies. You can really only shine your light on them and attempt to dodge their uninterruptible attacks at regular intervals, which can be quite tough depending on the size of the object and the space you’re in, and there isn’t much fun in the hardest part of a game being crates and barrels that just want to give you a hug.
Strength: Pages and Pages of Writing
It would be a bad sign if the writing wasn’t one of the stronger elements of a game that’s literally about a writer, but luckily that isn’t the case in Alan Wake. In fact, it's a dual-layered strength, both in the writing of the story itself and through the pages of Alan’s writing that you find in the game. While it’s hard to go too much into detail without spoiling things, it would be no exaggeration to say it pushes the boundary for storytelling by putting a fictional story within a fictional story, and having you question whether Alan is even a reliable narrator or simply hallucinating. And then there’s the way the pages play into this by foreshadowing future events or giving you insight into elements of the story that Alan couldn’t possibly have known otherwise… except that he wrote it. And that’s without even mentioning how well the game manages to blend tones of humor, horror, and mystery – not quite as well as the Twin Peaks series that it clearly draws inspiration from, but still pretty damn well. It’s best to experience it firsthand and it's certainly one of the most unique stories in video gaming.
Conclusion
All in all, it’s not hard to see why Alan Wake has received a bit of a cult following (there’s that famous foreshadowing again). It’s a title that blends themes and gameplay, while pushing the limits of storytelling by putting stories within stories and letting you read those stories before you get to that part in… the story. It has flaws, to be sure - the gameplay side can’t quite keep up with the rest of its ambitions - but overall it’s a great game that stands out among its peers and is undeniably… one for the books.
Personal Verdict: 4 Blocked Writers out of 5
More Articles
Props for the Patrick Rothfuss inclusion in the rating. ;)
My fourth favorite game of all time. Back in 2012, I was about to give up at current gen games because almost all of them failed to make me impressed. Then, I tried Alan Wake, and it changed everything. I played it and thought: "Whoa, so games can evolve like that?"
I wish I could play Alan Wake II, but my PC isn't strong enough and I don't have a current gen system...
The game seems to be available for streaming on GeForce NOW. I think it might require you to buy it on Epic too, but I'm not sure, since I don't think I'm going to be trying GeForce NOW any time soon (if ever).
Usually in these sort of games the walking sections between each scene are quite dull, but the I always enjoyed the atmosphere in Alan Wake. The howling wind in the forest and the thick fog seemingly being a symptom of the darkness you were fighting always had me on edge.
I also remember bursting out laughing when Alan’s manager showed up for a fight with the Taken wearing Christmas lights as body armour.
My main gripe was with the FBI agent character as the game made it seem like he had it out for Alan due to a grudge against him, but it was never really clear why, unless he was just some hot-headed cop.
There are some hints in the game that question his credentials and it turns out SPOILERS that he was actually fired from the FBI. So yeah, it was definitely a personal grudge. He had some idea of Alan's connection to the supernatural though it's unclear exactly how.
This is definitely what I'd call a memorable game, even with all its flaws, and I don't call many games particularly memorable.
