Originally posted on Wordpress on 3 May 2023
- Purchased Through: Epic Games Store
- Hours Played: 3.75 (first two chapters completed)
I never played the original version of this game. It came out in 2010 as an Xbox exclusive, and I didn't get into gaming seriously until 2018. It took playing Control - which takes place in the same universe and has quite a few references to Alan Wake - for me to become interested in playing the game.
The first day I played, I thought the game was oddly janky, especially in comparison to Control - which I felt ran smoothly. I didn't run into any glitches, bugs, or crashes, but the game felt a little clunky in general. None of it interfered with me playing the game, but it seemed like things weren't running quite the way they should.
As it turns out, this really was just a feeling I had. Alan Wake runs at a pretty consistent 58-60 FPS (and 200 FPS in cutscenes) with a render latency around 30 ms, while Control ran at around 40 FPS with a render latency of 110ms. So Control was running worse on my PC than Alan Wake does, but I was able to ignore it entirely when I was playing Control because I was having way too much fun.
Or...maybe the clunky controls were a deliberate choice. The protagonist is a writer, and writers aren't exactly known for being good at things that aren't sitting at desks and writing.
I do wish the game had a dedicated photo mode. Having to take screenshots by hitting the screenshot button and then pasting the images into Microsoft paint is fairly awkward.
Also, there's a Leeroy Jenkins reference right in the opening:
