Wesley Fenlon | Not with a bang but a whimper.

Alan Wake has clearly been a troubled project. Remedy Entertainment last released a game in 2003 with the crime drama The Fall of Max Payne. Six years is a long, long time between projects, and Alan Wake has been on the horizon of upcoming Xbox 360 games for half that time. Sadly, those three years have come and gone with fewer and fewer public appearances from the mysterious game; every E3 has brought with it another Microsoft press conference making no mention of Wake. But now, at long last, the game has resurfaced with a (hopefully final) release window of next spring, and Wake still looks to offer something original despite how long it’s been since the project’s inception.

This year’s gameplay demonstration gave me hope for a genuinely unique take on the survival horror genre. Remedy are doing their best to blur the line between thriller novels and the scary sector of video games: Wake stars a writer whose tales of the macabre come to life, and it seems to feature a chapter-esque episodic structure. It may essentially work out to be little more than a traditional mission system, but the twist is interesting nonetheless.

Read the rest of this entry on GameSpite »