On Alan Wake - the bulleted version

I finished Alan Wake the same day I finished Portal 2. That was unfortunate for Alan Wake, but extremely good for helping me think through some aspects of the construction of narrative in linear games. Here are a handful of the issues around big narrative games that emerged in my playthrough of Alan Wake, and some spoiler averse thoughts on the game:

• Before starting Portal 2, I was of the opinion that Alan Wake was a pointer towards the true potential of big narrative games. I still believe that in some respects, but it is clearly not the only such game pointing in forward directions at this point.

• Alan Wake absolutely succeeds in capturing what it means to make a Stephen King novel as a video game. This is both good and bad for the game, as like King the storytelling is much stronger than the writing. For the record, I'm a huge Dark Tower fan.

• By exploiting a chapter structure and a well defined long arc, games like Alan Wake and Portal 2 leverage the way in which most players already engage with big narrative games over multiple sessions of play. Incidentally, this squares well with my own position on the way in which games are more like books than they are movies to begin with (it's pretty far down in the post).

• Coming back to the part about writing in Alan Wake and how it's like Stephen King . . . Like Emily Short, somewhere in the game I started wondering why I was still running around with a flashlight and a gun. The progression taken by Alan began to feel forced as I urged him across yet another dark field or path full of taken. By the end of the game, instead of feeling pleasantly scared as I had in the beginning, I was pretty much inured to what had become a meaningless barrage of zombies . . . err taken.

• In part, I believe this boiled down to bad level design at times. The chief example of this involves the ridiculous platforming you are supposed to do rather late in the game. The concept in the scene is sound from a narrative standpoint, but rather than being hard in a meaningful way for the player, it simply feels as though you're suddenly playing a really badly designed platformer.

• Just to be clear, I liked Alan Wake quite a lot. Ultimately I'm hoping that in their next game, Remedy will work out some of the ludonarrative issues that prevented this game from truly reaching it's potential as a psychological thriller.

• I have some specific notions about that, but they are harder to convey in a bulleted list. Some of them even extend beyond the psycho thriller genre.

• Also, some of the bigger ideas that are still simmering in my head about narrative will be better suited to a post focusing on Portal 2, and I can't really write that until listening to that Wolpaw interview.