Alan Wake Remastered

First off, do not play the remaster if you have an AMD card. The graphical glitches in the game on PC are unbearable, with textures randomly stretching across the screen, random bright lights flashing and TVs not even playing properly. There is little chance of Remedy fixing these issues so you're better off just playing the original because it ruins the tone of the game.

Alan Wake has a good story and atmosphere but it's really held back by its gameplay. I'm a big fan of Control and defended a lot of the gameplay in that game, but now I totally understand the issues people had because it's so much worse in Alan Wake. The gameplay loop is really tiring, especially when you're fighting inanimate objects or birds and the extent of gameplay is hold right mouse and point at the enemy, occasionally press Q to insert a battery. When you fight inanimate objects it feels more like you're fighting the physics engine than anything else. Objects move erratically and dodging them is even more awkward than trying to dodge the human enemies.

The game also makes fights even more difficult when it goes into "cinematic" mode and rips the camera away from Alan Wake and instead starts circling around you when you use a flare, or following the shot of a flare gun. It's seemingly random when it decides to do this but it's never at a good time. The game also punishes you for trying to find hidden collectibles due to exhausting your run in a few seconds. One manuscript page I found was at the top of a mountain, requiring minutes of just running up an empty trail, picking up a single page, and then running all the way back down. By the last episode I was really just trying to push through as fast as possible to the end.

Playing this I can really see where Remedy polished their style and improved things while making Control. I still love their use of live action segments and hidden messages. I'm hoping Alan Wake 2 continues to improve the gameplay to better support the story they're trying to tell.

I planned my next review to be one for Alan Wake, played on the Remastered PC port, but instead I have to warn y'all for now that, while not unplayable, it currently has some massive immersion breaking bugs at least on latest AMD hardware, such as:

- TVs not playing properly
- Stuttering on higher settings and when the "direct aiming mode" is turned on
- Occasional brief vertex explosions
- Screen randomly turning black for no apparent reason (temporarily fixed by pausing and unpausing the game)

There don't seem to be any issues on console versions of the game (at least DigitalFoundry didn't look at any besides the occasional FPS drops that should be bearable still), but I'd advise you to stay away from the PC remaster for the time being and get the original version on Steam (or Epic, depending on where your wallet stands or whether you already got the game for free or not). I'll personally tackling this game once the bugs on the remastered version are fixed, as I do enjoy its graphical improvements that don't feel out of place at all.