Alan Wake's American Nightmare

Remedy Entertainment’s 2012 follow up to Alan Wake, American Nightmare, is an incredibly mixed bag of a video game. Remedy is excellent at creating atmosphere, storytelling, balancing the bizarre with hard boiled characters, along with creating innovative gameplay mechanics. Alan Wake was a game that to me worked best when focused on the story and atmosphere of the fun little Stephen King/Twin Peaks inspired world it spun while the gameplay at times felt limited albeit creative and at times frustrating. American Nightmare all but roots out the story in service of a revolving door of gameplay that while it feels more fluid and responsive starts to feel tedious due to repeated levels. The best part of the game in my mind was the third act, or last time loop, wherein repeated sections were truncated and waves of enemies were increased such that it started to feel climatic, exciting, and fun to play. As your familiarity with the world builds you can move faster, and I did enjoy the sense of progression toward the end, but the second loop was very frustrating and felt entirely inconsequential. I love the idea of this game taking place within a Night Springs episode, I also really appreciated the mixing of live action footage with gameplay, however, the lack of many cutscenes and in game storytelling, while seamless, lacked punch and felt unpolished. This is essentially Undead Nightmare but in Alan Wake given that it is a limited expansion of the base game that throws some new quirks at you but lacks much of an overarching structure, much innovation, or really much reason to play. While Undead Nightmare had the allure of zombies there is not much to American Nightmare. Overall, the rewarding feeling I got from the last bit of the game, and the generally improve gameplay did make it feel worthwhile especially after purchasing it at such a low cost on a deep discount, though it is not a game I give a strong recommendation to.