Alan Wake
Remastered edition, via Ps+ July 2023
Plays: 2, plus random portions of multiple chapters for trophies, about 30 hours
This is survival horror with a strong emphasis on narrative. You play as Alan Wake, an author, encountering some very strange things and trying to find your wife, who you are separated from very early. Armed with a flashlight ("attacking the darkness" is not really a meme in this game), and sometimes a revolver, shotgun, or even a flare gun, can you recover the missing pages of your manuscript which are actually describing the story as it unfolds, and solve the mystery of what is going on?
The story is well done, and the gameplay is good, but not great. First, as promised, I am removing a star for allowing inverted camera, but then resetting that when you get in a vehicle, which is quite disorienting. Speaking of that, when you start reversing in a car, the camera immediately does a 180 degree spin, instead of just keeping the same frame of reference, which I assume they were trying to be helpful, but which actually just makes it horrible.
Second, while I appreciate that thematically you are just an author and can't really take that many hits, if you're going to allow my health to recharge slowly, and I am not in combat or any danger, please just refill it nearly instantly, I didn't enjoy standing around for an extra 2 minutes to regain all my health.
Third, the game has only a single save and exclusively uses auto save. That may have been fine in 2013 for the original version, but this remaster was 2021 and yes, it's just a remaster, but that's no excuse for no quality of life improvements. It's fine to have limited save points, but let me return to one I've passed and save again if I need to. It's a very minor nuisance, but save points often have ammo nearby, so you'd trigger the auto save and then get the ammo, and if you died (and you will, a lot) you have to pick it up again.
All that said, I enjoyed my 2+ plays. I don't recommend nightmare mode to any but the biggest fans of survival horror or the die hard completionists, though, because it's a lot of just repeating the same checkpoint until you figure out the exact ways you can stretch your limited resources to get through to the next checkpoint.
