Alan Wake's American Nightmare

Click here to read the (long) review of Alan Wake.

What? I’m not done with this guy? Well, apparently not.

Treading known ground while adding new
stuff? All good sequels do that!

Originally released to Steam on May 12th, 2012 by Remedy Entertainment, Alan Wake’s American Nightmare is another DLC/expansion game for their horror/thriller masterpiece. It utilizes the original game’s engine and some of its characters. However, this time, the mood is radically different, with the gameplay feeling more like a survival shooter, and the story being more in line with classic pulp fiction. It’s also the proper appearance of a villain hinted at near the end of the original game, Alan’s evil Dark Presence-born doppelganger, Mister S        h.

Wait, that’s not right. It’s Mister Scratch.

Just a second. So if I say the word “Mister” alone or the word “Scratch” alone, it’s all good! But if I try to say Mister Scratch… Okay, something’s fucking with me and I don’t like it. I’ll have to roll with it.

But don’t worry, this time it should be just one article, not five.

Road to Nowhere

The cutscenes are live-action!?! Sweet.

An oil rig, huh? No way that's gonna be relevant.

The setting: Arizona. After countless attempts, Alan (seemingly) pops out of the Dark Place. It’s the night, and he’s in a canyon by an oil rig, with a motel, garage and diner nearby. We get a flashlight, a gun and we’re good to go. The Presence takes control of the area and begins spawning Taken from the rig. Alan runs to the garage and meets a mechanic named Emma Sloan. Alan’s doppelganger has already passed by and caused all sorts of mayhem (including murders) before leaving. Emma of course mistakes Alan for his copycat Mister S[DATA EXPUNGED]h… er… before he corrects her.

Alan and his evil self... in two completely
different mediums.

Alan can alter reality, but for that, he must first make it match his script. He needs to bring three items to the rig, and must collect them in the area. The game technically only has three areas, but in each of them, you have fairly decent freedom of exploration instead of following a linear path. Once again, manuscript pages scattered around can be picked up. Also, you can once more tune in to the radio to listen to a radio show, or find TV screens that will air pre-recorded messages by Alan’s dark half, who will blab on about how great it is to be a villain and ruin the writer's life.

As for differences with the previous game: The GPS on the top left doubles as a radar that indicates the location of manuscript pages, street lights, and red boxes to refill your ammo. You have access to more types of weapons this time, from 9mm pistol to combat shotgun, and can unlock better ones from chests by gathering enough manuscript pages. Red boxes refill between scenes, and instead of picking one item at a time, our protagonist grabs everything instantly.

We still have the basics from this series’ horror roots, but the genre appears to have shifted to an action shooter. Even into pure pulp fiction, as the writer himself will point out.

I forgot to turn on the subtitles for my playthrough.
For the record, Emma has this sort of airy tone
to her voice, like she's on weed or something.

Of course everything's on fire, did you see that
satellite fall onto the rig??

Alan sets the events in motion, which causes a satellite to be struck by a meteorite and come down to Earth, smashing the oil rig and destroying the nest of darkness. Investigating Mister S_____h’s passage, he gets the keys to other rooms of the motel, and finds the body of a man who works for the Mount Redtooth Observatory, from which he takes the observatory's front gate's keys. The Taken strike Emma's garage, and Alan fails to rescue her before she's killed.

There may be answers to be had at the Observatory. The Taken aren’t intent on letting him pass through easily, but he fights and gets to the main building. Dr. Rachel Meadows, its only employee present, recognizes him, having had encounters with Mister SAAAAAh previously. After he explains the situation, Alan is asked to retrieve an imaging ray from Dr. Meadows' car and release the three exterior coolant valves. Taken abound to stop him, but he succeeds; allowing the scientist to print out a strange signal from space.

Behind you, Alan!

Compare and contrast

A very smart woman; always in her lit office.
Never endangered by those Taken by the night.

The signal is a fraction of a manuscript page. Alan then heads off to the local drive-in theater. The only person there is Serena Valvidia, a film maker and a friend of his wife Alice Wake. She’s been touched by Mister S3181203h, brainwashed into a nymphomaniac idiot with the hots for Alan and his dark half. Say what you want about the Dark Presence, it never went down that road. Not even with Rose.

Good thing they went for live-action cutscenes,
'cause this dude looks kinda bland in CGI.

A lot of the different tone in this game can be chalked up to the new villain, Mister S𛲠𛲠𛲠𛲠𛲠h. The Dark Presence rarely interacted with Alan, and its Taken were fairly basic and unimaginative, though they spoke. The villain of this game, in comparison, always tries to chat with Alan through recordings, details with delight every malevolent act he partakes in, and has an ego the size of the Dark Place. Dude never shuts up. In a twist of irony, he hates other noises, killing noisy people for fun and keeping his Taken mute (barring grunts). He’s also far more creative with them than the Presence ever was.

Among the new Taken are: Spiders, weak but always in large numbers; Splitters, which divide into up to 4 enemies when flashed; Birdmen, which can transform into flocks of birds before reforming elsewhere to strike; Bombers, which throw darkness grenades from a distance; and Giants, 12-foot monstrosities which take buttloads of bullets to destroy. Say what you want about Mister S[1]h, these are cool enemy ideas.

Birdmen frequently go for flights as a flock.
....They literally turn into a bunch of birds.

Electricity hurts! I know, big shocker.

Alan must restore the drive-in's power, which he does in the nearby power plant. He makes the trip back and turns the lights on, freeing Serena from the brainwashing. She gives him the code to enter the projector’s building, in which he needs to rewrite reality again, using details learned from the signal. However, Mister S!$£&#h blocks the way with Poltergeist fountains of darkness. Alan beats those and enters the building, setting up the scene. However, he's missing too many details; it fails and he's engulfed in darkness. He tries to fight his doppelganger, but is overwhelmed.

No! It should have worked...
It should have worked!!

When he wakes up, he’s in the canyon again.

Road to Nowhere (?)

Are we gonna have to destroy that oil rig
often?

Alan has become trapped in a time loop. Events play out very similarly to the first time, perhaps with more dangers. Alan finds Emma and learns that she remembers their previous encounter, to the point where she already got some of the items he was looking for. This makes his task easier as he sets things up around the oil rig again, provokes the fall of the satellite, and then returns to the motel to get the keys to the observatory. However, as soon as Alan leaves, the darkness attacks and kills Emma, again, by breaking her garage’s fuse box and leaving her vulnerable to the monsters. Whoops. Better luck next time loop, I guess.

We get the keys, and off to the observatory we go. This time, we pick up the imaging array directly from Dr. Meadows’ car before going inside, where we set it up. However, something else goes screwy, and Alan needs to secure the observatory’s primary pipes. He does so, and then has to run back to the main building, with numerous Taken and Poltergeists standing in his way. The author reaches Dr. Meadows, gets the printout, and off to the drive-in we go.

Boom, everythingshot.

Yeah, this is the creepiest thing anything
related to the Dark Place has ever done.

Hi again, Serena. Do not sexually assault the player character, please. This time, we do have the code for the projector booth, so we just need to turn the power back on in the plant, then come back to the protector booth. (We can actually head back to Serena and turn the lights on to remove her brainwashing again.) Same battle as before, then we get into the booth and change reality to provoke the scene… but it’s not enough, and once more, Alan is attacked by the darkness and Mister Sɔʇɐɹɔh.

And once again, he’s overwhelmed, defeated, and re-awakens in the canyon. Please tell me we’re not gonna go through this twenty times…

Road to Nowhere (???)

Let's save the only life that we know
needed to be saved in this story.

Everyone remembers the previous loops. Sick of getting killed, Emma has literally grabbed every single item Alan needed, and she has already set up the ones he needed to rewrite reality and bring down the satellite. Which he does. Immediately. He gets to the garage, and Emma refuses to hand olver the motel keys while monsters are roaming near her fuse box. She’s been killed twice and doesn’t want it happening again, goddammit! After we deal with those, she hands over the motel keys, letting Alan get his hands on the observatory’s keys once more.

Over there, Dr. Meadows has dealt with the imaging ray already; Alan still has to secure the primary pipes, though. After which it’s a short but rough hike towards the building. And it’s no safer inside, as the power has cut out and the writer has to fight a few waves of Taken… while the (then-)new single from Old Gods of Asgard, “Balance Slays The Demon”, blares over his head. Oh yeah, I didn’t mention it yet, but as we learn from radio shows heard during gameplay, Barry became the Old Gods’ agent and got them to make a new song. It’s pretty cool.

Jesus, these Hillbilly Taken are huge.

With this Alan can enter Dr. Meadows, lab and pick up the signal, which is complete this time. Off to the drive-in we go again, but Alan parks near the power plant to restore the power right away. Mister S?????h has caught on, though, and makes sure to put Giants in the hero’s way. Alan still restores the power, so Mister S₡Ɽ֎ꞱꞒh…. heh, joke’s on you, that looked like “crotch”… The dark half summons more Giants and enemies to stop Alan by any means necessary. The protagonist still gets to the projection booth (although, for the record, you can once again rescue Serena from the villain’s brainwashing beforehand, even though nothing forces you to).

Destroy the fountains, enter the booth, set everything into place to rewrite reality – and this time, we have all the info we needed. For this to work, Alan specifically has to play a movie made by his wife Alice out of snippets of their life together, which is planned to premiere during a film festival at this very drive-in.

Kindly fuck off back to where you came
from, Mister S- ...asshole.

Fade to black, then cut to live-action. Mister S😈👤💢💥😆h stands on top of a car, not believing that the writer could surpass him. The light from the booth blinds him. It gnaws at the psychopath’s form. It takes Mister Sc̴̛̼̱͍̲̞̳̝̣̎̀̑̈́̑r̷̢͍͈̖̘̖̫͎̞̈̅̋̂̀̐̏̈̉̀͋͘͜͝͝a̴̤̮̣͉̘̪͌͂͂͌͗̉͑̈́̋͂ť̶͖̖̯͕̼͚̲̊̐́̽͊͜ç̶̺͚̟̪͙͙̱̠͔̝͉̺̇̃͛͑͒̄͆́̏ͅh’s darkness away slowly, then rapidly. Bemoaning his fate, Mister S↑↑↓↓←→←→h yells out as he gets, at last, evaporated. On the screen, the film shows an Alan of days past reuniting with Alice, a vision that the writer, still in the booth, hopes to see come true soon.

Roll credits.

It’s Got An Arcade Mode Now?

This title also includes an Arcade Action mode, in which you can fight waves of Taken in five different locations. Each Arcade level involves 10 minutes of survival on a large field, in five different flavors: A cemetery, a ghost town, an oil field, some caves, and a trailer park. These all sound like places that would have been visited around Bright Falls. The mood is similarly creepy, a bit more in line with the feel of the original Alan Wake game. So, the best of both worlds!

The player character appears in a large field that has a handful of weapon caches as well as at least one street light, and must fare against whatever enemies are being sent. The waves get progressively tougher, with more enemies each time, and they also appear more spread across the fighting field. As an example, the cemetery is located just by a church that has a red box attached to it, but the church is atop a hill so the enemies can attack from multiple angles if you go there to refill your inventory.

If you get overwhelmed, that's kind of the point.
Just fight better.

As for scoring: You get points for killing Taken and dodging their attacks. This increases your score multiplier. Said multiplier goes back to 1 when you get hit. Try for a high score! You’ll even get up to three stars depending on how well you performed. And by getting three stars on a stage, you unlock a Nightmare version of that stage, which is even harder. Good luck! You’d better hope that the sunrise comes quickly – it arrives at the end of the 10-minute countdown, and instantly wipes out all of the enemies. It’s a pretty cool idea in a game series that normally treats its conflict rather seriously, thus confirming American Nightmare's lighter tone overall.

Final words

You can get access to some pretty impressive
weaponry if you bother to collect the pages.

I did like this one, as it attempted to tell a much shorter story using concepts we had seen before in the series. This installment was actually foreshadowed in Alan Wake’s Chapter 6, where Alan meets Mister S♪♫♪♫♪h in person. Also evident is the fact that the writer wrote himself into a pulp fiction hero role, more confident overall and a lot more capable in battle... although he does get caught off-guard by the machinations of his evil twin and the new enemies that were created. The types of Taken invented for this game provide a challenge that’s a lot different from anything we saw in the original Alan Wake, though they all feel a lot less creepy (though some make it up by being annoying, like the Splitters or Birdmen).

Speaking of, Mister S𓀀𓀑𓀽𓁿𓃳h is an absolute delight, Ilkka Villi is having the time of his life playing him, and he is just as threatening in gameplay as he is hilarious(ly evil) in the recorded segments you can watch. I loved the blend of CGI for the game proper and live-action for important cutscenes, as well – something they did not need to do, but I’m glad they did.

This genuinely feels more like a shooter than a horror game, which isn’t really a problem. I don’t really think it loses much as far as gameplay goes. The story is a little weak and the new characters aren’t too memorable, although they do have interesting dynamics with Alan considering they, too, remember the loops. I do like that they quickly become sick of it when they realize it’s happening and wind up doing your work for you; well, those who CAN do said work, anyway. In spite of her importance as Alice’s friend, I feel like we never get to learn enough about Serena, whereas Emma and Rachel get decent screentime.

I also liked the addition of an arcade mode, further proof that this is meant to be more of a fun adventure compared to the somber atmosphere of its predecessor. Still, it doesn’t feel like it measures up to the original. Which, granted, may have been the point. Going directly from a horror game, in which your options are limited on purpose and you’re always on your toes, to this more action-oriented gameplay, was inevitably going to feel like a step down, especially for someone expecting something closer to this game's predecessor.

That said, I do want to see Alan Wake return. Remedy’s other games since, Quantum Break and Control, have referenced him and the events of his games, and there does seem to be plans for a proper sequel. After all… Alan might still be in the Dark Place…

October celebrations will continue. I'll take next week off to write the next (quick) reviews. Perhaps I should go down to the world’s most famous haunted pizzeria once more…

...MISTER SɸҖ֍۝╬H! ...Dammit.