Alan Wake - X06 Impressions Preview

If ever there was a game that defined the word 'elusive', it would be Alan Wake, currently in production at Remedy "Max Payne" Studios. Unveiled at ATi's E3 2005 stand as a mysterious 'psychological action thriller', the Finnish studio has since kept the game very close to its chest, entering into a media blackout to focus on the game only to make a brief appearance as an Xbox 360/Vista exclusive at E3 earlier in the year.

That is, until X06...

Written by Remedy's Sam Lake, Alan Wake continues to promise a compulsive blend of Stephen King, David Lynch, and M. Night Shyalaman. Despite being set in a free roaming, open world of six square miles, Alan Wake is a heavily character-driven affair that focuses intensely on his story (with Wake's profession it would be somewhat ironic if the game wasn't).

Alan Wake is writer who, after meeting his fiancé, begins to have disturbing dreams that he draws upon to write a best-selling book. Soon after, his soon-to-be-wife, Alice, disappears leaving Wake suffering with chronic insomnia. In a move to resolve his issues, he visits a specialist sleep disorder clinic in the Pacific North-West. At the clinic, based in the fictional (though apparently geographically correct) town of Bright Falls, Alan finally manages to get some sleep - though when he wakes in the mornings he finds his notebook filled with strange writings in his own hand. Slowly, the real world of Bright Falls increasingly merges with the world of his writing, including the sinister shadowy monsters that cast themselves in human form...

The use of light and dark in the game is one of the few thing that the team at Remedy have been keen to push in the past, and it was capably demonstrated during the X06 demonstration. Beginning the demo with an opening cinematic sequence of Wake's writing and 'hand-drawn' images of Bright Falls, accompanied by a haunting string-based soundtrack, the gameworld opened with Alan Wake standing on top of a mountain range just outside Bright Falls. After demonstrating the astounding scenery that looks as though it's lept from vacation postcards of rural Washington State, Remedy's Creative Director, Petri Järvilehto, went on to show off the impressive range of weather effects and day/night cycle that will be used to generate the atmospheres of the game.

There's no doubt that Alan Wake will be a game that will ooze intensity and atmosphere, and this will be achieved in no small part by the extraordinary work that's been put into the weather, lighting, and shadowing. A stunning demonstration in the diversity of the weather, something that was also shown at the game's unveiling in 2005, was presented, from the tranquillity of daytime, through to heavy menacing clouds and storms, and the battering gale force winds that also rock the trees along the mountainside. Of course being a next-gen title, Alan Wake will also feature the likes of HDR technologies such as blooming, so there's plenty of technological grunt pushing the pseudo-realistic world created by the Fins. Topping off the weather came a demonstration of a mini tornado, which tore through a small settlement; sucking up and spewing out wooden palettes, trucks, cars, an electricity generator, and eventually the wooden buildings themselves...Although the truck dropping mere feet away from Wake was deftly scripted, the tornado and weather itself are entirely dynamic, based around the believable physics that literally drive the game and soak up one of the cores needed from what's going to be hefty spec requirements.

The actual demonstration of the gameplay (played on a multi-core PC with an Xbox 360 controller) saw the character of Alan Wake given the task of collecting keys to a cabin. Heading over to the town's car mechanic, (the first citizen of Bright Falls that has been seen since the game's announcement), Wake provides a voiceover account in the same vein as Remedy's previous 'hero'. Receiving the keys, he's suddenly unnerved by the mechanic's parting words, "It must be tough to know that your words won't change things." Eerie. Continuing his drive up to the cabin along the mountainside road, Wake mentioned how in his novel the main character (also a writer) had to get to a cabin, only to be stopped by a hitchhiker. No sooner had Wake completed his words, than a hitchhiker appeared by the side of the road...Things continue to get stranger however, when he tells the hitchhiker the similarities between the real world and his novel, and that in the book the hitchhiker dies. Suddenly the truck turns a corner only to see that another vehicle has crashed on the road with someone lying right in the middle of the tarmac. Stopping on the side of the embankment, Wake leaves his passenger to check the condition of the man in the road...only...he looks very much like Alan himself...and it's at that point that a truck ploughs right into Wake's vehicle, killing the hitchhiker, and waking Alan from his unconscious position in the middle of the road.

Finding himself armed with a pistol and a flashlight, coupled with information that the night is generally a dangerous time for Alan, we watched as the writer began to cross the decidedly rickety footbridge to the cabin. It was at this point that we finally got to see Wake's adversaries in the game, the shadow men. Turned vulnerable by light, the shadow men can then be gunned down with a few precise shots. Atmosphere remains a key aspect even in the game's combat, shrouding the game into darkness as the shadow men shattered the surrounding lights - undoubtedly batteries for the flashlight will be just as important as bullets in the gun.

The demo ended shortly after, with Wake reaching for the cabin door just as the camera makes a dash for the writer from the viewpoint of a second shadow man. Hopefully we won't have to wait another eighteen months for the next page in Wake's enticing adventure...