“Beyond the shadow you settle for, there’s a miracle illuminated.”

Alan Wake is an extremely linear third-person shooter propped up by a janky pulp horror story papered over with lush atmospherics. That those elements are strong enough to warrant plowing through six episodes of clunky ghoul-slaying combat is a testament to the power of storytelling and aesthetics. Unfortunately, they only partially redeem the game’s shortcomings.

You play as the title character, Alan Wake, a crime fiction novelist suffering from a nasty case of writer’s block who has heeded his agent’s advice and rented a lakeside cabin in the middle of nowhere for a few weeks of R&R. With his wife Alice in tow, Alan travels to Bright Falls, Washington, an idyllic little town peppered with eccentric residents, quaint shops, and the remnants of abandoned business ventures. The kind of old timey place where raffle tickets, pie-eating contests, fishing competitions, and parade floats are a normal part of life. Where dementia-addled rockstars eat donuts and drink coffee by the jukebox every morning and the sheriff is on a first name basis with every waitress at the diner.

But evil lurks in the shadows of Bright Falls, hiding in its old sawmills and dank public restrooms, haunting its mysterious caves and rickety old barns, inhabiting its rusty junkyards and mountaintop gazebos. After an hour or so of exposition Alice is captured by the malevolent presence, plunging Alan into a weeklong psychogenic fugue state that he’s shaken from only when he wrecks his car in the woods at night. Oh, and the backcountry is now crawling with hordes of demon-possessed townsfolk armed with axes, sickles, and chainsaws.

The setup should sound awfully familiar to fans of Twin Peaks (1990–1991), The X-Files (1993–2002, 2016–2018), or the work of Stephen King. Indeed, Alan Wake is not bashful in the slightest when it comes to wearing its influences on its sleeve, as it includes numerous overt references to inspirational works and presents itself as a television serial. The game even opens with a quote from the pulp horror maestro himself: “Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there’s little fun to be had in explanations; they’re antithetical to the poetry of fear.” Initially, the game sticks to this sage advice, presenting vague clues and creepy obscurities that kickstart the imagination, successfully instilling a fear of the unknown with flavorful dialogue and the lingering possibility that the entire ordeal might be a wild outgrowth of Wake’s fractured mental state. The latter notion is reinforced as the player begins stumbling upon the scattered pages of a manuscript that the author doesn’t remember writing which seem to predict the events that are unfolding.

Unfortunately, as is the case in many of King’s own works, Alan Wake gradually loses its terrifying edge as it tries to solve its central mystery in a satisfying way. The source of Alan’s waking nightmare is gradually revealed and eventually defeated in a convoluted climax that reads like parody instead of homage.

To be clear, though, it is not the story itself, but its presentation that is the game’s calling card—the ambiance of the backwoods podunk conjured up by all the little details: the peculiar musings of the local radio station DJ, the trailer park owner who wears camo pants, walks with an unaddressed limp and rambles about the Indian underworld, the televisions that exclusively play reruns of a knockoff version of The Twilight Zone (1959–1964), the profusion of mounted animals, the sore-thumb presence of Barry’s funnyman literary agent, and so on and so forth. All of these work in conjunction to produce a weird little boondock that’s both charming and dangerous, a place where you can never quite feel at ease.

Regrettably, when it comes to actually playing the game, Alan Wake is a mediocre experience. The combat is clumsy and uninspiring and comprises the bulk of your non-cutscene playtime. It’s brutally simple if initially intriguing. Enemies are nigh indestructible until you hit them with sufficient lumens from your flashlight. Once their shadow shields are destroyed, you can plug them with whatever weapon is at hand: revolver, hunting rifle, pump-action or double-barrel shotgun. Your arsenal is fleshed out by a flare gun, individual flares, and flash-bang grenades, but the developers saw fit to reward the player’s conservation of precious ammo by resetting their inventory at the beginning of each episode (and sometimes more frequently than that). While the flashlight idea is neat but poorly realized, I was quite pleased with the implementation of flares, which briefly ward off all Taken (that’s what the redneck ninja demons are called) but also obstruct the players vision—a crucial hindrance as the player is not granted the use of an aiming reticule.

Despite the verisimilitude offered by the rich setting of Bright Falls, the majority of the levels involve fighting groups of Taken in the woods as you hike between radio stations, power plants, and logging yards. And even when you do find yourself in a memorable area—a trainyard, a neon-lit gas station, an abandoned mine—the approach to combat remains consistently bland throughout. There’s a hatchet-chucking Taken, a hulk Taken, a speedy Taken, murders of crows that dive bomb the player, and an occasional inanimate object brought to life via demon possession. In each case, the approach is to hit them with light, then shoot them in the head. Close quarters are to be avoided because Alan Wake is incapable of punching or kicking. But it’s rarely challenging once you get the hang of it. Even in Nightmare mode, the enemies rarely feel like legitimate threats. Which is a problem when they are supposed to serve as the primary in-game cause of terror for the player. I didn’t love The Evil Within (2014), but at least its supernatural enemies felt sinister and dangerous and diverse level designs and enemy types forced the player to strategize a bit.

The lack of variety is perhaps made more disappointing by virtue of the illusion of depth achieved by the setting. For instance, when you enter a park welcome center early in the story, the game all but implies that you’ll have a showdown with a taxidermied Columbian mammoth nicknamed Buck-toothed Charlie, but this never happens. You might think the psychological bent of the story would require some detective work or puzzle-solving, but the few environmental puzzles take roughly ten seconds apiece to decipher. You might think that one of the times you hop in a rusty old pickup that you’ll accomplish something more than wasting a few minutes for no good reason, but you never do. Many of these shortcomings can be blamed on the shift in playstyle during the game’s development. As detailed by Game Informer, initially Alan Wake was supposed to be an open world game. But Remedy Entertainment decided to ditch that plan in favor of focusing on the drama of the story. However, by narrowing the scope and discarding the potential pleasures of exploration, the game’s dense environments play second fiddle to the humdrum combat gameplay. This design choice, while perhaps correct in the grand scheme, causes the player to overlook the painstakingly-rendered world of Bright Falls because they’re never given the opportunity to immerse themselves.

Though its repetitive and unpolished gameplay slightly undercut its small screen aims, the chilling ambiance, lush environments, and pulpy story of Alan Wake are enough to scratch the psychological horror itch in video game form, even if it doesn’t justify its lengthy development cycle or the lofty expectations set for it.