Alan Wake is, to get this out of the way and to be clear, absolutely amazing. It combines the "Survival Action" genre pioneered by Resident Evil 4 with a psychological story straight out of Stephen King. It is structured as a TV series with 6 'episodes' on the game disc, and two DLC episodes are available (one of which was included in the retail game as a code) and they are about 90 minutes in length.
I got it for £8.99 from Amazon with free delivery. So, by my rough calculations, that works out at about a pound for each hour of gameplay. This does not include the DLC mission provided as a code in the box, or the other DLC pack which is download only. This game has no multiplayer aspect, but it does have several layers of replayability. There are a lot collectibles and hidden treasures which the obsessives out there will enjoy collecting. To fully complete the game you need to collect all manuscripts on Nightmare mode which something of a challenge.
Alan Wake is concerned with fiction, narrative and reality. Wake is a successful writer and a minor celebrity holidaying in the American pacific north west with his with Alice. The area is full of deep coniferous forests and wilderness in contrasts to the urban life Wake leads. He becomes involved in a dark and twisted nightmare filled with possessed axe wielding maniacs and malevolently animated everyday objects. Wake finds pages of a manuscript through the game which explain, foretell and expand on the story in which you are playing. This dual structure provides a richness which makes Alan Wake feel like "an art game" in the sense that it feels creative, adds to gameplay and is something which only videogames could do.
This multi-faceted narrative wouldn't mean any thing if the story wasn't up to scratch. Luckily Alan Wake has a deep storyline, one of the interesting I have ever encountered in a video game. It was 5 years in the making, by Finnish developers Remedy, and it shows. The story could easily be a Hollywood thriller, in the vein of Shutter Island, and be a high calibre one at that. Wake, the protagonist, is layered as the game progresses so that you're not sure which is the real Wake and which is the fictional. It is rare for such sophistication in plot in a videogame. Epics in the space opera mould such as the stellar Mass Effect series or in JRPGs like Final Fantasy have grandiose stories but they are largely linear and the expectation of lenghty play time allows them to flesh things out in a grand arc. Alan Wake is, in contrast, fast paced and episodic. The story and game are linear but it never feels restrictive.
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