RIP James McCaffrey, the voice of Max Payne

News has sadly broken that actor James McCaffrey has passed away at the age of 65, following a battle with cancer.

Born in Albany, New York, McCaffrey began acting on-screen in the late 1980s and by the mid-1990s had started being cast in leading roles. He starred in TV shows including New York Undercover, Viper, Swift Justice and As the World Turns.

In 2001 he was cast as the voice of video game character Max Payne, in the video game of the same name from Remedy Entertainment. Payne was the narrator as well as the star, and had more dialogue than everyone else in the game put together. McCaffrey's world-weary delivery, influenced by every hard-bitten detective noir story ever written, was pitch-perfect and won him an immediate legion of fans.

McCaffrey returned to the role for Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne (2003) and Max Payne 3 (2013), and also had a cameo in the disappointing Max Payne movie (2008).

James McCaffrey (left) with Sam Lake (lead writer at Remedy and the face of Max Payne in the original game) and Matthew Porretta (the voice of Alan Wake) in November 2022.

McCaffrey later starred in Rescue Me as Jimmy Keefe and became a perennial guest star on American television and a reliable supporting player in films.

Remedy Entertainment continued their association with McCaffrey by casting him as Alex Casey, a fictional detective clearly based on Payne (whom they couldn't use for copyright reasons) in Alan Wake (2010). He returned to Remedy to play Zachariah Trench in Control (2019). He returned as two distinct versions of Casey in Alan Wake II just this year, winning acclaim for his performance. It was assumed he would resume the world of Max Payne in Max Payne Remake, an upcoming remake of the first two games from Remedy.

McCaffrey's gravelly vocal performances across two franchises will go down as some of the all-time great video game performances, and he will be missed.

Alan Wake II

2023, Bright Falls, Washington State. A spate of unexplained murders bring FBI agents Saga Anderson and Alex Casey to the remote, sleepy town. They find a town still uneasy over the memories of thirteen years before, when there was another spate of murders and the disappearance and presumed death of infamous author Alan Wake. Anderson and Casey's investigations confirm that the supernatural forces that Wake had to deal with have indeed returned, possibly thanks to a mysterious cult. Meanwhile, Wake himself remains trapped in the Dark Place, a dimension beyond our own, where he strives to find a way back to reality.

Alan Wake, originally released in 2010 and remastered in 2021, was an interesting but flawed game. It had a great story, characters and premise, but struggled to find the gameplay thread in its morass of noir and horror influences. The game degenerated into being a repetitive action-shooter, Wake throwing flashbang grenades and fending off enemies with shotguns and handguns. This wasn't awful, but it was something of a tonal mismatch. Alan Wake also ended on a cliffhanger (and, after two more DLCs, another cliffhanger) which people have been left pondering ever since.

Thanks to the surprise success of their 2019 supernatural action game, Control, Remedy have had the resources to finally deliver a sequel to Alan Wake. Even more remarkable is how they've accomplished this: a game with AAA production values delivered on a modest budget (reportedly only $50 million) in just three years. Much more remarkable than that is how incredibly good the game is. I'm not sure I've seen such a gulf in quality between one game in a series and its direct sequel, even given such a large gap in release dates.

Alan Wake II, on the surface, resembles its forebear. You're still trudging through the forests of the Pacific North-West, defending yourself with various guns and a flashlight. You're still fighting off "Taken," effectively zombies, dead humans motivated by the evil Dark Presence. You're still mixing combat, puzzle-solving and narrative beats. Your adventure is still being narrated over-earnestly by Alan Wake himself. But the sequel simply nails every single one of these facets far better than its forebear.

The first big change is the addition of a new viewpoint character, Saga Anderson. Saga stands in for new players, who've perhaps heard of Alan Wake but haven't played it ahead of this sequel. Saga's story takes her to the town of Bright Falls and the nearby Cauldron Lake, both key locations from the original game, as well as further afield to new areas, such as the town of Watery and a nearby amusement park (Coffee World!) and lighthouse. Saga's story is anchored in the "real world" and it's interesting to see her gradually bump into characters and locations that tie in with Wake's story from the original game. Saga has two major assets: her friend and FBI partner Alex Casey, who shares the same name as Wake's signature detective hero; and her "Mind Place," a mental technique which allows her to analyse clues and keep abreast of the game's sprawling narrative. At almost any point in the game, Saga can slip into her Mind Place and digest her latest discoveries.

The second big change is in structure. Alan Wake was a very linear game where Wake travelled from the start of one level to the next, occasionally facing larger arena areas which were more open (usually for combat or even a boss fight). Famously, the game was developed as an open-world title but that was changed late in the day to improve pacing. The sequel isn't a full open-world game but instead is more similar to a Metroidvania, being divided into several areas, with each being explorable at will but having various areas sealed off by environmental elements or by literal gates. As the game progresses you gain access to tools to allow you to access these areas later on.

There's also a change here in terms of collectibles. Alan Wake had thermoses lying around which you could collect and then do absolutely nothing with. Alan Wake II has three types of collectible: lunchboxes tying in with Wake's books; mysterious nursery rhymes attached to puzzles; and sealed containers belonging to the mysterious Cult of the Tree. These collectibles are each attached to their own storyline chain and unlock additional weapons, abilities and equipment for Saga. They are not essential, but they make her journey easier, and fill in additional backstory and worldbuilding details. Tracking down these things also allows you to explore more of each map, sometimes finding other equipment caches along the way.

Another big change is combat. It's now been under-emphasised compared to the first game. Combat is somewhat rarer, more lethal and more of a resource-managing challenge, more in line with the recent Resident Evil remakes. This is better than the original Alan Wake, where Wake was only somewhat less of a competent death-dealing gunsmith than Max Payne, with much more tension. Unfortunately, this makes the decision to base one key setpiece moment near the game's conclusion around waves of combat fairly inexplicable, resulting in the game's steepest difficulty spike.

All of this applies to Saga. It's not a major spoiler to say at a key moment in the game, we rejoin Alan in the Dark Place and have to help him try to escape. The Dark Place in this game resembles a twisted, shadowy version of New York City, complete with subways, theatres, a creepy hotel and Alan's apartment. Traversing the Dark Place is more complex than the real world. Alan doesn't have Saga's Mind Place, but he does have his Writer's Room. At any point Alan can switch to this room and use it to analyse the plot, like Saga, but unlike her he can also change the plot. In a mechanic that recalls the superb Dishonored 2 mission "A Crack in the Slab," Alan can flash back to earlier points in the story and thus in time, when an area may look completely different. Alan can take advantage of this to get past sealed-off areas or discover fresh clues about what's going on and how he can escape.

You can soon choose to switch between the two characters at will, choosing whether to mainline all of Saga's story first and then all of Alan's, or maybe alternate at the end of every chapter. Despite being trapped in different universes, Alan and Saga develop a link that allows them to work together to help defeat the Dark Presence. This works all rather splendidly. Alan and Saga's stories have different feels and tones, so the ability to switch between them whenever Alan's over-earnest monologues or Saga's family concerns get a bit too much is appreciated.

Alan Wake II is also surprisingly funny. The first game had some laughs, but the sequel takes things up a notch with comedic zero-budget adverts from a pair of Finnish brothers and, as is now well-known, a full-blown musical number that makes up an entire chapter of the game. Quite a few characters are also now pretty over the whole "shocked by supernatural stuff" thing and whose only reaction to some fresh eruption of inexplicable weirdness is a world-weary sigh. This is especially noticeable when characters from the Federal Bureau of Control show up and are utterly unphased by the Dark Presence doing its thing; they've seen this stuff before in Control.

Ah yes, the Remedy Connected Universe. As is well-know now, Alan Wake and its sequel both take place in the same universe as Control, which the game is quite upfront about (you'll meet an FBC agent probably around an hour into the game, maybe less). Some Control characters show up, and Saga gets to read a bunch of reports from the FBC on the Cauldron Lake phenomenon. Alan Wake II could have maybe been a bit more low-key on this, as a few times I felt almost penalised for not having finished Control (I started it when it came out, but got sidetracked by other games), but it's not too bad. More amusing are the very deep cuts to Remedy's other games, Quantum Break and the first two Max Payne titles; Remedy doesn't own those IPs any more, so they have to rename characters (Martin Hatch becomes Warlin Door; Max Payne becomes the fictional Alex Casey) but the general ideas come across well. Players less well-versed in Remedy lore might miss out on the meaning of some Easter Eggs, but the game mostly tells you what you need to know within the game itself.

Alan Wake II also looks utterly stupendous, easily the best-looking video game in the world right now. Character animations are impressive (though some characters - like Casey - seem a lot stiffer than others), but it's the lighting effects and environmental graphics in the forests or on the not-New York subway which are completely mindblowing. This does come at the cost of hefty systems requirements on PC, with even my new 4090 graphics card occasionally chugging unless DLSS was switched on. Consoles are broadly fine, but it's going to be a good few years before most PC players will be able to experience this game at maximum settings.

Alan Wake II (****½) comes very close to being an outright masterpiece. It is very well-paced, it has a ton of content - Wake and Saga's stories are each individually as long as Alan Wake in its entirety, meaning this game is twice the size and length of its forebear - the horror elements are far more effective, the atmosphere is superb and the writing is easily Remedy's best to date. There are very nice links to all of Remedy's previous games (bar possibly Death Rally), but playing those titles is not strictly necessary to enjoy this game (the Control references do push the limit on that, though), and for a horror game, it has a brilliant sense of humour. It has some fantastic gameplay mechanics and several setpiece events which are clear challengers for the best gaming moments of the year (especially the horrific murder investigation in the hotel, the ludicrous rock opera and a 15-minute Finnish arthouse film completely contained within the game). It is a fantastic-looking game, and the soundtrack is outrageously good. It has earned its Game of the Year nominations, being a worth competitor to the likes of Baldur's Gate III and Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty.

Complaints are few. The game is let down a little by its combat, especially the decision to base an entire key moment around an absolute ton of combat despite it not being the game's forte. The story and lore is pretty dense at times, requiring you to pay close attention or miss out on key plot points. The game's ending is great, with some excellent twists, but also somewhat ambiguous, left afloat for the two forthcoming DLC episodes which will continue the storyline. The game's steep system requirements and Epic-exclusive status (to be fair, Epic also paid for the game's development and are its publishers, so the game wouldn't even exist without them) will also put off many PC gamers.

Overall these complaints are slight. Alan Wake II is Remedy's best game to date, a rich horror narrative with compelling gameplay which improves over its predecessor on every single front.

Alan Wake II is available now on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

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Alan Wake Remastered

Alan Wake is a successful novelist suffering from writer's block. He and his wife, Alice, take a holiday to Bright Falls, Washington, and rent a cabin on an island in the middle of a volcanic lake. When Alice surprises Alan with a typewriter, hoping he'll feel inspired to start writing again, Alan becomes angry and storms out. He hears his wife screaming, only to find the cabin and the island have disappeared. Apparently the island was destroyed in a volcanic eruption in 1970. Wake discovers he has somehow lost a week, and keeps finding pages from a new novel he's been writing called Departure in which he himself is the protagonist. As shadowy creatures attack him and TV shows seem to reflect his state of mind, Wake must discover whether he has gone insane and attempt to track down his missing wife.

Alan Wake was originally released in 2010 by Finnish developers Remedy. At the time they were best-known for their Max Payne series of shooters with interesting time-slowing capabilities. Since Alan Wake's release they have worked on Quantum Break and Control, and more recently Alan Wake II. Alan Wake Remastered was released in 2021 as a way of improving the original game and also releasing it on PlayStation consoles (the original was only available on Xbox 360 and, after a significant delay, PC), and getting people into the story ahead of the release of the sequel.

Alan Wake Remastered is a surprisingly restrained revision of the original game. The main focus is on the graphics, with revised and updated textures, a new and more impressive lighting system and it now being possible to boost the resolution up to 4K. This is all splendid and results in very impressive visuals, although unfortunately the process has not been optimised well; the game occasionally chugged even with an nVidia 4090 under the hood. More annoying were visual glitches and problems, which could be briefly fixed with a reload but soon returned. Oddly, these problems are mostly focused in the fourth and fifth episodes of the game and were not present before or after. However, the problem is widespread (going by the game's forums and subreddit) and has not been fixed after two years, which is disconcerting.

Otherwise the game runs exactly the same as it did back in 2010, complete with somewhat clunky movement and occasionally iffy dodging mechanics. This is an action thriller where you control the titular Alan Wake, a novelist suffering from writers' block after killing off his most iconic character. He takes a holiday with his wife, but gets angry when he realises that she has tricked him into a retreat to focus on his writing, with a hospital nearby specialising in the mental health problems of artists. When Alan storms out, his wife abruptly vanishes. Alan loses a week of his life, waking up to experience strange visions. However, when he receives at telephone call from a man claiming to have his wife hostage, it appears that the situation is understandable, if frightening. But Alan then encounters the "Taken," possessed individuals clad in shadows who seem to be obsessed with destroying him, and it becomes clear something much more supernatural is at work.

The game is divided into daytime sequences where Alan wanders around and interacts with characters, maybe solves the odd puzzle, and uncovers more about the story, and night sequences where Alan has to achieve some objective whilst fighting off the Taken. The Taken have to be illuminated with a flashlight and, once their "darkness" has been burned off, can be dispatched with conventional weapons. As the game unfolds across its relatively well-paced 12-13 hours or so, both the types and tactics of Taken evolve, as does Alan's arsenal and his skills for dealing with them in combat.

The sheer volume of combat remains quite surprising: those who've heard that Alan Wake is the closest thing to Twin Peaks in videogame form may be taken aback by the amount of time Wake spends blowing people away with shotguns.  The game also feels like it sometimes doesn't like doing this (combat within a section of the game can get quite repetitive), but has to fall back on shooting things as the default game style rather than run the risk of the dialogue and cutscenes putting off too many people. The game does have missed opportunities though: as is well-known, the game was originally an open world game, which can still be discerned in some areas (areas from one mission are clearly visible bordering another later on, with some artificial barrier preventing you from free-travelling over there) but was taken out due to pacing issues. The game allows you to drive vehicles in some limited sequences, and there's some interesting puzzles to solve, which could have been expanded on to make for more interesting and varied gameplay outside of combat. It's notable that the two bonus DLC episodes (included here, weirdly, as optional extras buried in the level select screen, but definitely don't miss them) have better pacing, puzzle-solving, traversal mechanics and combat than the main game itself, suggesting that Remedy only figured out how to get the best out of the game quite late in the day.

The story is interesting and well-thought out, with writer Sam Lake's trademark humour, enjoyably overwrought (and sometimes deliberately purple) prose and an internal logic that hangs together even as things get quite surreal and out there. Dividing the game into six TV-like episodes (complete with a recap and their own credit sequence and theme song), each about an hour and a half to two hours long, is also a masterstroke of pacing, ensuring the game's combat and story beats don't get too repetitive and it never feels like you're too far from a natural break point in the flow of events. The game also does do a good job of changing things up whenever it feels like you're maybe spending a bit too much time in the woods aiming flashlights at trees, with some mid and late-game setpieces being genuinely impressive. Again, some of the best stuff is actually in the two DLC episodes.

In the thirteen years since release, gaming has moved on a fair bit and Alan Wake can't help but feel clunky, with sometimes-sluggish controls and occasionally iffy animations, with an overreliance on combat. This remaster also feels like it may not be entirely necessary, given that the gameplay has not been overhauled to the same standards as the graphics. But there's a very solid story at work here, the mixture of CG and live-action cut scenes is a nice foreshadowing of Remedy's subsequent work, and the game is well-paced and doesn't outstay its welcome. The game's biggest weakness it is technical issues which make the middle third or so of the game a bit of a game of Russian Roulette as you wait for it to work out if it's going to crash or not. This should really have been fixed years ago. Also, and a fairly big annoyance on PC, is that it's only available on the Epic Game Store. As the PC version is actually published by Epic, there's little likelihood of it appearing on Steam in the future.

Another minor complaint: the stand-alone expansion Alan Wake's American Nightmare is not included in this package. American Nightmare is a bit of a weird game (being almost entirely combat-focused) and tonally didn't entirely gel with the original game, so I can understand why Remedy decided to ignore it this time around, but completionists may feel short-changed at its absence.

Alan Wake Remastered (***½) is an enjoyably solid game, especially at the very reasonable price it can be had for these days. It hasn't aged entirely well and some might be surprised at its overreliance on combat, which is a little at odds with its supernatural mystery genre. It's also very much The Hobbit to Alan Wake II's considerably bigger, more ambitious Lord of the Rings, and like that isn't strictly necessary to understand the sequel, but it certainly helps. The game is available now on PC (via the Epic Game Store), Xbox and PlayStation.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

AMC picks up the rights for ALAN WAKE TV series

American cable network AMC have picked up the TV rights to the cult video game Alan Wake, created by Finnish developers Remedy Entertainment.

Originally released in 2010, Alan Wake told the story of the titular protagonist, a novelist who travels to Bright Falls, Washington for a break to try to break his writer's block. However, his wife goes missing, apparently kidnapped by a supernatural force, and Alan discovers a strange dimension known as "the Dark Place" impinging on the real world. Aided by various allies, Alan tries to defeat this force and locate his missing wife. The story continued in a standalone expansion, Alan Wake's American Nightmare (2012).

In 2019 Remedy released Control, a new game about a team investigating "Altered World Events" from their headquarters in New York City. The game and its expansions eventually confirm that they take place in the same universe as Alan Wake, and events from the game play a major role in Control's second expansion, AWE. Last year, Remedy released a remastered version of Alan Wake and formally announced that Alan Wake 2 was in development, hopefully for release in 2023.

Work on an Alan Wake TV show began in 2018, with Legion's Peter Calloway set to serve as showrunner and Remedy's Sam Lake (the writer of Alan Wake) serving as producer and consultant.

AMC's previous shows include The Walking Dead, Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad, Mad Men and Preacher.

ALAN WAKE TV show in development

Contradiction Films has teamed up with Remedy Entertainment to make a TV drama series based on the latter's 2010 video game Alan Wake.

The story is set in the town of Bright Falls, Washington, and sees horror novelist Alan Wake trying to track down his missing wife. As the story unfolds, he gets involved in increasingly weird events. Strongly influenced by The X-Files, Twin Peaks and Stephen King novels, Alan Wake was a commercial and critical success for Remedy, selling over 4.5 million copies.

Peter Calloway (Cloak & Dagger, Legion) has written a pilot script for the show which is being shopped around various studios by Contradiction. The TV show will partially adapt the game's storyline, but will have the freedom to move beyond the constraints of the game (which remains focused on Alan at all times). In particular, the TV series will explore some of the secondary characters in the world.

Remedy Entertainment have long harboured plans to make Alan Wake 2, but despite the first game's success they have been unable to do so: their then-publishing partners Microsoft instead convinced them to work on an original game for the X-Box One's launch, the splendid (but under-performing) Quantum Break, and have not had an interest in publishing a sequel to the older game.

Remedy's next game, Control, will be released in 2019.

Alan Wake's American Nightmare

Two years after the nightmarish events at Bright Falls and Cauldron Lake, Alan Wake finds himself in Night Springs, a town from a fictional television show he once worked on. Wake is still trapped in the Dark Place, an otherworld where the fabric of reality is malleable and can be changed by acts of creation. Wake is on the trail of his evil doppelganger, Mr. Scratch, who was created by the forces at Cauldron Lake and now means to destroy Alan's life in the real world. Wake must end Scratch's plans and find a way to escape the Dark Place.

Alan Wake was Remedy Entertainment's highly ambitious, mostly-successful follow-up their iconic Max Payne action games. A mixture of thriller and action elements, combined with a light frosting of horror, it was high on atmosphere and story but the actual gameplay elements were stretched by a limited number of options. American Nightmare is a stand-alone follow-up, not a true sequel (Alan Wake 2 will likely follow in a few years), but also rather larger than the normal type of DLC expansion.

The game takes place in three locations: a diner and garage on the outskirts of Night Springs, a nearby observatory and a drive-in movie theatre. Unlike the strict linearity of Alan Wake itself, these three areas are fairly large and open. Alan can explore each area at leisure, searching for weapons and collectible manuscript pages (which also flesh out the world and storyline) whilst fending off random encounters with the Taken. American Nightmare expands both Alan's arsenal (adding automatic weapons to his standard pistol/shotgun combo) and also the range of his enemies. The Taken now include 'splitters', single enemies who split into two enemies when hit with the flashlight beam, and guys who can transform into flocks of birds before reforming to attack. Also, scary killer spiders have also been added to the mix, but given they die the second you shine a light on them they are completely pointless.

American Nightmare is heavily combat-focused. Taken attack in larger numbers and with more variety to their attacks than in the original game. However, this greater threat is negated by Alan's access to combat rifles and machine pistols, which can scythe through Taken ranks rapidly and with ease. Despite the more dangerous enemies, combat is much easier than in the original game (I didn't come close to letting a Taken touch me in the whole game). Unfortunately, the combat focus is necessary because of the lack of other elements. There are only three major characters for Wake to interact with, each of them a fairly typical spin on the 'damsel in distress' motif, and the puzzle elements are fairly basic. Alan has to find a few pieces of equipment in each area and combine them to defeat Scratch.

A potentially interesting spin is introduced when Scratch is able to defeat Alan's plan and put him in a time loop, restarting the whole game. Characters retain their memories from the prior cycle, so, amusingly, are able to negate some of the more time-consuming tasks from before and carry out tasks in a more efficient manner. Whilst it's amusingly lampshaded, this repetition (the cycle goes round three times in total before the game ends) shows that Remedy are painfully trying to eke out as much length as possible from a very small number of assets. This is furthered by TV sets which Alan can switch on to receive threatening messages from Scratch, which go on for way too long in an attempt to push the gameplay time up to something respectable. Remedy have a good stab at making maximum use of limited resources, but by the end of American Nightmare's five-hour playing time the game feels exhausted.

On the plus side, the writing is okay (though not as strong as in the main game itself), there's some knowing humour and some genuinely hilarious moments of bizarreness (playing a Kasabian track in a CD player causes a satellite to fall out of the sky and collide with an oil derrick...somehow). Combat may be easy, but it's also satisfying. Graphically the game remains impressive and it's good to see the engine handling the transition to an Arizona, desert-like location well. Those invested in the story and world will also find plenty of clues and easter eggs as to what direction the full sequel might take.

Ultimately, Alan Wake's American Nightmare (***) is a stopgap until the full sequel appears. It's short, easy and repetitive, lacking the atmosphere and more varied cast of characters of the first game, but whiles away a few hours entertainingly enough. It is available now on Steam and GoG (for PC) and on X-Box Marketplace (for X-Box 360).

Alan Wake

Alan Wake is a successful novelist suffering from writer's block. He and his wife, Alice, take a holiday to Bright Falls, Washington, and rent a cabin on an island in the middle of a volcanic lake. When Alice 'surprises' Alan with a typewriter, hoping he'll feel inspired to start writing again, Alan becomes angry and storms out. He hears his wife screaming, only to find the cabin and the island have disappeared. Apparently the island was destroyed in a volcanic eruption in 1970. Wake discovers he has somehow lost a week, and keeps finding pages from a new novel he's been writing called Departure in which he himself is the protagonist. As shadowy creatures attack him and TV shows seem to reflect his state of mind, Wake must discover whether he has gone insane and attempt to track down his missing wife.

 
Alan Wake is the creation of Finnish developers Remedy, best-known for their superlative work on the first two Max Payne games. Like the Max Payne games, Alan Wake is strongly based around a central protagonist and emphasises his character development throughout the game, giving the player more of a connection to their character and his fate. Unlike Max Payne, Alan Wake is not purely an action game. It also employs elements of survival-horror, adventure games and exploration to create something that is hard to classify. This gives the game a unique mood and feel to it, but also makes it hard to market and resulted in initially disappointing sales (although, thanks to the highly successful PC version, the game has now sold more than 2 million copies and a sequel is likely).

The game is divided into six distinct episodes (with two more included with the PC version and available to optionally download for the X-Box 360) and structured like a TV mini-series. Each episode opens with Alan recapping the story so far and ends with a different song, usually on a cliffhanger. Each episode is usually divided into two sections, a daytime one where Alan investigates what's going on by talking to people and exploring the backstory, and a night section when Alan has to achieve some goal whilst under attack by the 'dark presence', a shadowy force which can animate objects and possess people using clouds of darkness.

The daytime sections are, disappointingly, free of choice. You can't choose Alan's dialogue and are on rails for most of these sections as people talk to you and explain what's going on (or not, in most cases). You can move around and sometimes find bonus items for use later, but there's a limit to your freedom in these sections. For those who become hooked by the game's intriguing, Twin Peaks-lite storyline, this will be fine. For those itching to get to the actual gameplay sections, these parts of the game may feel tedious (although they're usually pretty short, and we get to the action relatively quickly).

The bulk of each episode is the section set at night, during which time Alan has to fight off enemies. He can use a torch to burn away the dark presence from opponents and then destroy them with conventional firearms (oddly, the idea of finding some way of freeing people from the presence rather than killing them outright is never discussed, even when major characters are possessed). His torch can also be used to destroy possessed flocks of bird and animated everyday objects outright. Oddly, the torches in Bright Falls all have an 'intense light' mode that burns out the batteries, but will recharge if left alone (and the standard light setting doesn't use batteries at all, in contravention of the laws of physics). These mechanics result in a lot of scenes where Alan is running through the wood at night alone and having to intelligently combine his resources (lights, weapons, special weapons like flare guns which can take out entire groups of enemies) to fight off opponents. This could risk becoming repetitive, but new weapons, enemies and ideas are introduced steadily to vary things up so it never becomes boring. For example, Alan is joined by allies late in the game who fight alongside him and can provide light and weapons support from a search-and-rescue helicopter.

The game is reasonably well-written (a few clunking lines aside) and has some knowing nods at the genre, with Wake starting off by warning us that good stories don't always have fully comprehensible endings. This seems to be Remedy covering their backsides in advance, but in fact the storyline and ideas behind what's going on seem pretty straightforward. Their impact in the world is often weird, sure, but it all hangs together quite well. The characters are well-realised, ranging from Alan's agent and primary ally Barry (who is occasionally annoying, but also has some amusing ideas) to the ageing ex-rock stars whose farmhouse, studio and pyrotechnic equipment can be combined into one of the game's most impressive set pieces. Alan himself can be a bit whiny at times, but given what a bad couple of weeks he's having, this is understandable. More amusing is that Alan (and his more OTT fans) has an opinion of his popular crime fiction (that it's Serious Literature) which seems to be somewhat at odds with what we see of it (which is Average Cheese). The voice acting is overall very decent as well, with Alan's internal monologuing (which occasionally threatens to go all Max Payne on us, but just about holds off) summing up what's going on quite well.

The game is overall engrossing and enjoyable, with a good pace to events. It also has a great amount of content. After Max Payne 2's borderline-embarrassing 5 hour length, Alan Wake by itself clocks in at around 12 hours with another 3 hours on top for the optional extra episodes. It missteps a few times, however. Alan has a number of character animations which cannot be skipped, sometimes leading to unnecessary deaths where you're hammering the controls to fight off a horde of the possessed (or 'Taken' in the game's parlance) and all Alan is doing is ducking his head and waving his arms uselessly. The concluding section of the main game (Episode 6) and the second of the 'special' episodes also go on for way too long, with combat sequence after combat sequence that ultimately becomes tedious. The fact that the ending is sequel-baiting is to be expected (what isn't, these days?), but there is also a lack of closure to several other character arcs outside of Alan's experiences, which is disappointing. In addition, the optional episodes taking place entirely within the 'dark place', meaning that the laws of reality can be dropped altogether, may results in some excellent and inventive set pieces but this also results in the situation where you may find yourself not caring too much, if none of it is 'real' on the game's own terms.

Still, Alan Wake (****) is overall a very strong title. It's richly atmospheric, with excellent graphics and music. The story is interesting and, for a computer game, rather different and original. The combat is satisfying, if occasionally frustrating, and despite the weird and offbeat storyline most things are explained and make sense. The PC version features vastly superior graphics and control options and, as it also includes the two extra episodes for free, gets an extra half-star from me. The game is available now via Steam and in the UK (PC and X-Box 360) and USA (PC and X-Box 360).