Game actually manages to improve drastically if you're willing to spend, I dunno, 10 hours to get to that point.
Finished it tonight. Thoughts in no particular order, first the unimportant ones:
-main gameplay works once you get used to it as survival horror instead of a shooter. Saga's sections are much better than Alan's, probably because she has a proper loadout and he has, like, a candlestick and a 2x4.
-the writing is just incredibly weird. It's not genius like some reviews have called it, but it's also not trash like some reviews have called it. I'd go with over-ambitious I think. Sam Lake has some very strange ideas in his head. Videogames may actually work better than movies would, but honestly, I don't know if any traditional medium can do him justice. Interesting how he tried to basically meld the two to the limit here, to mostly decent results I guess.
-the chase sequences are just dumb. How these weren't eliminated in testing is beyond me.
-casting European actors to do American accents was a bad idea. Saga's actress can't do a hard-r and it never stops being noticeable.
-amazing presentation. Best graphics I've seen on a console and the integration with video was very cool and mostly intuitive. Changing the voice actors for certain characters at key points worked REALLY well, and the musicals, well, no spoilers, they are awesome.
More critical items:
-the connections between
Alan Wake and
Control are cool, and I'm pretty sure they're going to be tidied up in
Control 2, but there could have been some bones thrown, so to speak, in this to help out. When Estevez makes her comment to Wake about how
she wishes she'd thrown him in a containment cube the first time she saw him, that's literally where he actually is in the
Control DLCs. Given that the end of AW2 makes it pretty clear that there are multiple timelines in play, it seems likely to me that
Control actually takes place after AW2 and after however many versions of the loop/spiral, Alan has indeed been placed in a control cube by FBC. Jesse is going to be a version of Logan I think (Tor and Odin as Saga's grandfather and uncle clearly establishes that race is, for lack of a better way to explain it, malleable here), or maybe (less likely) Saga. A version of Casey (once inhabited by Scratch but maybe or maybe no longer) is Dylan Fayden.
-lot of people seem to think both AW and Control will be full trilogies; I strongly disagree. The AW 2 DLC that has been confirmed will lead into
Control 2, circa 2025 or 2026, and will fully integrate both games/universes and finish up the story. Lake understands how to not overdo it, I think, and will end things properly there. If he wants to bring in Max Payne for a cameo I won't complain.
edit: the fact that the plot of the game(s) got me writing a post like this contemplating it is a compliment I suppose. Remedy does not make boring shit at least.
edit: fuck it, this spoils a little bit of the first 10% or so of the game but it's entirely too awesome to ignore otherwise:
