Alan Wake

Frantic. That’s the first thing that comes to mind when you’re scrambling to aim your flashlight at a truck flying through the air at you. Then panic — as a shadowy group of growling, darkened figures lunge at you in the woods, equipped with axes. The only way to survive is to aim your pinpoint beam of flashlight fire at whatever’s attacking you, weakening them for the final blow from a gun — or whatever you may have on you.

That sweaty-palmed terror may not lie at the true heart of the finally revealed Alan Wake, but it sure as hell feels like it when you’re struggling to fire up a generator in the middle of a complete beatdown by forces that don’t always take human form. Animated objects — like a giant bulldozer, for instance — roar to life in the dark; menacing whispers bite at you through the trees; and giant flocks of shapeless birds swoop down to knock you from an already rickety tram high above a massive canyon. Welcome to Bright Falls, chump — hope you brought plenty of flashlight batteries.

While the white-knuckle sprints from light-source to light-source (Wake’s frightful creatures thrive in the dark but shrink from the light) drive the action in the game, your brain isn’t left to fend for itself. Finnish developer Remedy (Max Payne series) has crafted a lovely narrative tease that winds throughout the nightmare: As writer-blocked author Alan Wake, you’ve spent the past two years in an artless, airless attempt to pen your next great novel. Your wife tries to do you a solid by bringing you to the town of Bright Falls to get your writing groove back, but her best-laid plans go exactly how best-laid plans usually go — incredibly wrong. In fact, she’s gone missing. And now you’re left to chase after her fading trail, with only pages from one of your novels — that you don’t remember writing — to goad you on. Every page you come across, scattered in the environments around you, pre-empts events that are happening in real life, so best find the rest of those pages…and fast.

And this is how our time with Alan Wake begins — trapped in a log cabin with Alan’s skittish literary agent bitching about the fact that, well, you’re both trapped in a log cabin. Remedy’s self-labeled “psychological action thriller” may deliver plenty of thrills and chills, but it doesn’t miss an opportunity to dish out a little dark, goofy humor now and again. (The team proudly deems super-quirky TV series Twin Peaks one of Wake’s primary influences.)

Leaving your agent behind, you push out into the night to meet up with a local sheriff claiming to have “more pages” to the mysterious novel. Will they help you find your wife? That’s what you’re dodging through the pitch-black forest to find out.

You’re equipped with a pistol and a flashlight, and the mechanics are easy — keep your light beam pointed at anything that moves. Most non-human objects weaken and lose their menace if you hold the beam on them long enough. But those swarms of scary, axe-wielding meanies? You have to weaken them first with light, then blast them with your pistol…or with a flare gun. If you have flares, you can ward off nemeses simply by carrying one around for as long as possible. But if you’re lucky enough to have a flare gun, get ready for some serious fireworks. Shooting a flare into a crowd of evildoers can set off a multi-target free-for-all of instantaneous carnage. Awesome.

And after we’re chased by a giant bulldozer, then hop into an abandoned car (whose headlights let you plow through baddies) to find the final page at an isolated lighthouse, the giant beacon of light cutting through the surrounding shadows goes abruptly dark. Our short-but-breathtaking demo of Alan Wake is over; here come the bad men…

Cliffhangers be damned, we want more.