DINER HARD

Rewriting the rules of horror in ALAN WAKE

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Is it possible to forget you've written an entire book? The premise of Alan Wake, on the surface, seems absurd. But I've started re-re-reviewing games for this column that I'd literally covered only months before, so perhaps it's feasible. Maybe I've already re-reviewed Alan Wake and this is actually a clever metacommentary (I have, but it was years ago, so it's fine).

That’s the level of cleverness that Alan Wake aspires to: the sort of cozy, self-referential attention to detail that makes you feel valued because you know the source material. It’s refreshing that the game makes zero effort to obscure its influences. The actual first words in the game are ‘Stephen King’. And episodes of Night Springs, a fictional anthology that’s a naked celebration of The Twilight Zone, play on TVs throughout the world. Alan Wake wants you to know that it loves the things you love.