It’s seems to be actively repulsive and hostile to people who loved it the first time around, but if you’re someone like me who actually likes crappy looking games, you may enjoy this Switch port. Now on Switch, it looks like a low budget game from 2010, unearthed for the first time 2022. When it was first released, Alan Wake looked like something from the future, like they had someone make a game from 2022 in 2010. The contrast between those roots in reality and the purely surreal, game world you’re trapped in it when you play makes both feel stronger by juxtaposition. The sound design and in-game TV show called Night Springs both also carried over perfectly from the 360 original, and both do so much to suddenly make the game’s world feel real. It’s extremely off-putting to see the game go from looking like a PS2 title to sounding like one of the greatest melancholy pop-songs of all time. The soundtrack is, in short, bananas featuring Roy Orbirson, Poe, and Nick Cave. There’re also a lot of little touches here that remind you that, in 2010, Alan Wake was actually a huge big budget game. It was a scary time for people like me who saw the move to make games more like films as a self-loathing near-suicidal downgrade.

Back in the 2010’s, games that tried hard to be movies won all the awards and made a bulk of the money.

That wasn’t true when Alan Wake was first released though. Games that try this hard to be like movies are now like the 3rd or 4th most dominant genre in the industry, way behind stuff like Minecraft, Genshin Impact, and even Mario Kart. Then, as if that weren’t enough to take you out of the game and make you think about a much better thing you could be watching than the game you are currently watching, the narrator then blurts out something like “this guy is like Jack Nicholson from The Shining!” This probably wasn’t supposed to be funny, but I still laughed out loud, and a big part of me hopes that was the intention. Spoilers: in the first couple of hours, the game features a cut scene that copies an iconic shot from Kubrick’s film adaptation of The Shining.

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