The camera angle and Alan's terrified gob are an exact mirror of the scene in the film, but rather than let the moment sit cleverly in silence, giving the player room to perhaps ponder the game's own relationship between fiction and reality, Alan's motormouth narration just can't help itself. Much like Control's Hiss enemies, The Taken in Alan Wake are murky, ethereal beings that evaporate in a puff of smoke once defeated.Įarly on in Alan Wake, for example, there's a moment where a possessed madman hurls an axe through a wooden door just like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Instead of letting its melting pot of horror tropes and inspirations breathe and simmer beneath the surface, Alan Wake repeatedly whacks you over the head with them, almost like it's scared you won't get the reference unless it explicitly spells it out for you. The game's script and heavy use of voiceover narration to help feed its central idea of one of Wake's books come to life are full knuckle-biting clangers that really make you feel every one of those eleven years since its original release on the Xbox 360. That being said, as much as I enjoyed revisiting this handsome remaster of Alan Wake, the intervening decade has done little for its overall subtlety. I have much fonder memories of Alan Wake, and yes, while the coffee flasks still serve no purpose other than being a glinting, shiny collectible to seek out in the all-consuming darkness, I view them more as little tiny nods to its Twin Peaksian setting than anything else. Or perhaps the question should be, is it really worth going back to Alan Wake at all, in the cold light of 2021? Back in the day, our Alec (RPS in peace) was less than impressed with its third person shooting and torch-based combat, and found its string of collectible coffee flasks just another incoherent distraction in its overwritten and mildly nonsensical plot. Indeed, when there's still a perfectly good version of Alan Wake sitting right there on Steam for less than half the cost of this new remaster, you're probably better off playing the original than stumping up the cash for this latest nip and polygon tuck.Īlan Wake Remastered - Announce Trailer Watch on YouTube

Alan Wake Remastered, however, marks the first time it's ever come to PlayStation (it having been an Xbox console exclusive all these years), and its spruced up character models, higher frame rates and 4K texture packs feel very much intended to get PS4 and PS5 players up to speed on this old-but-new figure in Jesse's life than us on PC. While the original Alan Wake had a brief, year-long holiday from Steam in 2017 due to the expiration of its music licences, PC folks have been able to play Remedy's cult classic shooter more or less uninterrupted since its release in 2012. In hindsight, it seems obvious that these two worlds would eventually collide in Remedy's newly established Wake-iverse - such is their shared love of shadowy, flying objects - but back in the dark days of 2010, little did we know that Remedy's tortured horror writer would be making such a big comeback eleven years later. Long before Jesse Faden and the denizens of Control were losing their minds over sentient fridges and rubber ducks, Alan Wake was doing unholy battle with possessed logging tractors and combine harvesters. In light of Alan Wake's new relevance in Remedy's Connected Universe, it's well worth making the trip back to Bright Falls for this classic third-person horror shooter, but the remaster has little to tempt PC players over the original Steam release.

Alan wake remastered ps5 review