Thanks to Wolfman for helping with edits.
I went through Remedy Entertainment’s beloved cult classic Alan Wake a few years ago and, unfortunately, didn’t enjoy it. A lovely atmosphere was betrayed by how the game largely devolved into a generic action hero story by the end. The gameplay mechanics also failed to evolve beyond a simple baseline: toughs show up, you shine your flashlight on them, and then gun ‘em down. Unfortunately, I felt similarly about its spiritual successor, Quantum Break; its humble mechanical ameliorations came at the cost of Wake’s more gripping, surreal aesthetic.
Alan Wake’s American Nightmare was released and is set two years after the first Alan Wake. Where the original blatantly draws from Stephen King, American Nightmare “is more Quentin Tarantino and From Dusk Till Dawn.”(Image: Remedy Entertainment)
A small, downloadable Alan Wake side story hit the Xbox 360’s digital marketplace between those games, however (it’s also available on Steam, GOG, and the Epic Games Store). Alan Wake’s American Nightmare has been on my to-do list since I beat Quantum Break. In the spirit of Halloween and the recent release of the long-awaited Alan Wake II, there’s no better time to finally tackle it.
Now, American Nightmare is an Alan Wake game, meaning it inherits its predecessor’s underwhelming combat. The Taken—aggressive, reanimated corpses that have been infused by and serve a dark intelligence—still swarm protagonist Alan Wake regularly, to the point of irritation. Unsurprisingly, brawls follow the same fundamentals: you’ll be jogging along, Taken appear (if you aren’t facing their direction, the camera briefly pans towards them), and you try to kill each other. Shining your flashlight on them or using flares drains their “darkness shield,” rendering them vulnerable to gunfire. However, there is mercifully more variety here courtesy of a handful of new freaks. They all bring something to the table: bugs lung at you, skinny Taken multiply at the cost of weakening themselves, some turn into birds to evade attacks, giants yield giant chainsaws. There’s a sense of escalation, too, as the more brutal Taken appear more frequently the farther you get.
The Taken briefly flash once they’ve become vulnerable. In the first game, you could also fight them with spotlights found in the environment, though that was a rare enough occurrence that its absence here isn’t felt much. (Image: Remedy Entertainment)
And Alan can keep pace with them because of a welcome buff to his arsenal. Previously, he only had a revolver, two types of shotguns, a hunting rifle, a flare gun (which is the best gun, as its blinding, makeshift bullets can kill Taken in one shot), and flashbang grenades. Most of those return and are complemented by a solid assortment of new weapons. Three of the stronger guns—the magnum, sawed-off shotgun, and combat shotgun—are locked in crates that require a certain number of manuscript pages, the game’s main collectible, to open. It’s a good incentive to find them, especially since the game’s map labels them with question mark icons; only a few require any real searching. Overall, American Nightmare still lacks anything genre-redefining, but its new grunts and gats give it a little more depth than its predecessor.
As for those manuscript pages, they’re from Return, a book Alan wrote. Like the first Alan Wake, manuscript pages foreshadow upcoming events or offer insight into its cast. Alan, the “champion of light,” developed the ability to alter reality after the last game. He’s using it to try to escape the gloomy purgatory of the Dark Place and stop his doppelgänger, Mr. Scratch, a sadist ready to kill Alan’s loved ones, ruin his reputation, and bring an even greater evil into the world. Notably, Mr. Scratch debuts near the end of the first Alan Wake, and Alan begins writing Return at the end of its downloadable chapters while trapped; American Nightmare revisits two of its unresolved threads.
American Nightmare itself is stuck in a weird purgatory: as a side story, it can’t advance Alan Wake‘s narrative in any major capacity but still must enrich it and be satisfying in its own right. Thankfully, it navigates these murky waters rather well. (Image: Remedy Entertainment)
The game is framed as an episode of Night Springs, a Twilight Zone pastiche we previously caught glimpses of in the first game that’s set in the titular Arizonian town. The show’s narrator even, well, narrates the whole game, infusing it with some personality. Important cutscenes, including the opening and ending, are also live-action affairs (Quantum Break attempted to elevate its narrative with a supplemental television show, which American Nightmare can be seen as a testbed for. Even Nightmare dropping its predecessor’s quiet daytime and violent, Taken-infested nighttime dichotomy bled into Break).
American Nightmare‘s framing is important: it muddles the “validity” of the game’s events. Heck, the ending—a movie where Alan reunites with and lovingly embraces his wife, Alice—wonders if it’s just a dream. To be clear, Alan triumphantly escaping the Dark Place would be a momentous accomplishment; it was never happening in a spin-off. American Nightmare‘s credits sequence even promises his journey through the night will continue. This isn’t and never was Alan Wake II, and Remedy always took care to say as such.
Using the D-pad lets you swap weapons. Holding down the left bumper lets you run for a spell, while pressing it as an enemy is about to strike makes Alan dodge. You have three bars of health, one slowly refills if you don’t take further damage, and healing Alan completely is done by walking under a heavy illumination source. (Image: Remedy Entertainment)
But there’s still some tension here regardless. Alan visits three places over the course of American Nightmare: a “road stop” complete with a motel, diner, and gas station; an observatory; and a drive-in movie theater and its neighboring power plant. They each house someone Alan must work with, although the mechanic and scientist of the former two initially mistake him for Mr. Scratch and, consequently, refuse to cooperate (the drive-in’s film director also mistakes him, but since he’s sort of brainwashed her she’s happy to see Alan). Once you’ve befriended them, you’ll wander around the compact maps on fetch quests. Your radar on the top-left corner of the screen always detonates where you need to go with a star icon, so finding your way is never a hassle.
American Nightmare is full of goodies. Ammo, which is split into “small gun” and “heavy gun” varieties, is strewn throughout each stage. Flares and flashbangs are, too. Ammo crates, a rarer find, refill your guns and batteries (your flashlight has a power meter that recharges automatically, but if it depletes completely, you need to swap batteries). Checkpoints are also doled out generously, so if you die, you never lose too much progress. Additionally, hidden radio shows give updates on how Alice and Barry, Alan’s best friend / manager, are handling themselves following his disappearance. Television sets depict Mr. Scratch, who gleefully shares his favorite ways to kill people and plans for when he “replaces” Alan. The writer’s bored idle animations while watching unintentionally deflates the tension, though.
Between the red lodging of Mr. Scratch’s hotel room and Dale Cooper’s own history with doppelgängers, the sadist invokes Twin Peaks, a known influence on Alan Wake. (Image: Remedy Entertainment)
Ultimately, Alan’s trip to the theater closes with Mr. Scratch whisking him back in time—yes, you’re going through these maps three times each, with Alan inching closer towards victory each cycle. That’s a major issue for some fans, and that’s fair: repeating each level thrice is underwhelming. This isn’t The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask or a Dead Rising, whose loops are mechanically essential to how they function. Still, Remedy does their best to freshen each level up by tweaking your objectives, having the other characters retain some memory of Alan (they’ll even fetch some of their junk), adding new collectibles, and at one point altering your starting position. But hey, forcing Alan to relive the same events endlessly is pretty cruel.
Night Spings helps alleviate the tedium through its strong aesthetics, thankfully. Forsaking the endless, drab forests and scenic towns of Alan Wake’s Bright Falls, American Nightmare features a more atypical desert backdrop, one whose cacti and canyons I dug, and the greater variety in buildings helps. Licensed music punctuates important moments of the game, like its forebear, and both it and the original tracks suit American Nightmare.
Presumably, American Nightmare’s cyclical setup is at least partially a consequence of it being a small downloadable title. Other games in this position pad themselves out by reusing content, too. (Image: Remedy Entertainment)
Alan Wake, at its core, is a third-person shooter, a fact American Nightmare embraces through a new “Arcade Mode” (a score attack mode is an admittedly strange inclusion for a horror title, though games of the time commonly featured such things). Unsurprisingly, it shares the campaign’s mechanics, but is more challenging and ranks your performance with three, two, one, or zero stars. Online leaderboards also keep track of your high scores, adding more replay value. Getting enough stars unlocks new maps, of which there are five normal ones and their five tougher “nightmare” counterparts. Getting a good score—and, therefore, three stars—depends on you earning a good chain multiplier, which increases as you hurt Taken and dodge attacks without suffering damage. Surprisingly, each map, while small, is a unique location, not something repurposed from the campaign. Like American Nightmare as a whole, “Arcade Mode” isn’t just some throwaway thing.
I’m not exactly sure what I expected out of Alan Wake’s American Nightmare when I first booted it up, but what I found was a fairly pleasant surprise: out of Remedy’s three collaborations with Microsoft, this is the most interesting one. Its combat still isn’t engaging, but it is a step in the right direction, and hey, if any of these games could support a strange, arcade-y bonus mode, this one’s it.
Like the first Alan Wake, American Nightmare has harder difficulty modes available. The story lasts two hours, which is fine—if you aren’t going to evolve your gameplay mechanics, try to make the game short but sweet. (Image: Remedy Entertainment)
American Nightmare also rises above the heavy limitations, both narrative and technical, placed on it. Yes, Alan’s still trapped in the Dark Place, and Control, which is set afterwards, implies Mr. Scratch survived and has been harassing Alice. But American Nightmare lets us spend time with a wiser, more heroic version of Alan, and him fending off his double here is a victory. Honestly, I still wouldn’t call myself an Alan Wake fan yet, and I should stress that I wouldn’t say American Nightmare is good. But I left it eager to boot up Control and its downloadable Alan Wake-centric AWE campaign. That, too, is a victory.
It’s also pleasing that Barry’s physical cameos open and close American Nightmare. That gives the game’s events solidity: American Nightmare happened and “matters,” even if Alan then spent over a decade stuck in limbo. (Image: Remedy Entertainment)
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