Alan Wake is a game where you play as a Writer. He literally says "My name is Alan Wake, and I'm a Writer." I capitalize the W because the word is used in the same way someone might say they were a Member of Parliament or Supreme Court Justice, where you really would only need to capitalize the title if it was part of their name, and even then it would look silly. All I'm saying is I bet Alan Wake capitalizes the word Writer when referring to himself any chance he gets, first of all because in reality he is a terrible writer and wouldn't know that's not how you do it, and secondly because if you take that from him, he has no identity whatsoever. Kind of like his "wife", a gormless mannequin who we'll get to later.

(Note to self - look up "gormless" - not entirely sure it means what I think it means.)

I know all these things because I see them in my own personality. In often tell stories from work because I don't have much to tell outside of that. I don't really have any exotic vocation to keep referring to in the hope of elevating my status, so I just settle for "used to live in America" and "once helped shoot an episode of Prime Possum with the Governor General". Such achievements in my twenty something years. Anyway.

My housemate is a forty something man who believes 9/11 was a controlled demolition, the moon landings were faked, the Port Arthur massacre was an ASIO operation, you name it, and he sees me as gullible for "blindly swallowing" what I see on the news as fact. I found this position laughable, because he believes every conspiracy ever, and because I'd consider myself to be a lot more cynical and critical than that, but recently I realised he might be partly right. I am a sucker for good hype. And damn, did Alan Wake have some good hype.

It was five years in the making, had all the stylings of a great sci-fi TV serial a la Twin Peaks and Lost, and was set in the Pacific Northwest, one state up from where I used to live, so there was bound to be some very familiar scenery to get all nostalgic over. I can't describe how hard I was craving this game, probably because I'm not a brilliant Writer.

But then it came out, and I completely lost interest. I played through the first chapter, then part of the second, and decided that the gameplay was too repetitive and that was that. In the time between then and now I haven't touched it, but I've somehow completed Kane and Lynch 2 which is to repetitive gameplay what Eminem is to mummy issues. All you do is shoot bad guys and move forward, for the entire game. And I even liked some of it. If I'm prepared to play ten hours of an objectively atrocious game (and yes, it's only six hours long, I started playing it again from the beginning until I somehow warped back into the universe where bad games are not fun to play) then I should really give Alan Wake a second chance.

I'm going to ask you now to picture in your head a famous writer. You're in the supermarket, sneakily taste-testing the grapes before purchase (That's shoplifting! TAZER THAT MAN!) and this famous writer is there. And your recognise them in a crowd. Seriously.





Did you picture J.K. Rowling? Because I put it to you that besides her, there is not a single famous author that is constantly being recognised in public. Alan Wake is an A-list celebrity. If he's not currently being recognised by a stranger, something must be wrong. His publishers use giant cardboard cutouts of his likeness to promote his books in stores. So my prediction is that by the end of the game you find out he's not really an author but just some guy with delusions and a blog that work in tandem to feed an ego the size of three space stations.

I'm going back to this game now, I'll let you know how it goes.