Knights of the Cardboard Castle

This is a standalone DLC for Alan Wake. It’s smaller in scope and shorter than I expected. It also brings with it a change of tone. This one is all about fighting as opposed to the original’s strong focus on atmosphere and survival horror.

• Story-wise it does at least go somewhere, unlike the two actual DLC to the base game. Alan Wake carries out his plan to return to the real world by inserting himself into a story about Night Springs and turning a small town in Arizona in the real world into Night Springs for his purposes. It’s a pretty cool way of imagining a way to escape the dream-like Dark Place. The antagonist this time around is Mr. Scratch, the doppelganger of Wake that can travel at will between the Dark Place and the real world and seems to be embodiment of Wake’s dark side.

• The levels here are much more open and expansive than the corridor-like designs of the original game. You can and are expected to crisscross them as you go about accomplishing objectives, which makes this game feel very different. Unfortunately there are only three areas in the whole game and to prolong the length of the game, you’re forced to repeatedly cover the same ground and perform the same actions under the guise of a time loop effect. That’s mildly annoying though I do like that the characters are aware of the time loop and react accordingly to the repeated events.
• A key point in the design of the original is that your resources were always constrained. Ammunition and supplies were always limited. Not so here. There are refill points scattered across the areas that instantly refill your ammunition and batteries to full. The safe haven lamp posts also work differently now. You instantly heal to maximum health and autosave there but it turns off the light for a short time. Even your flashlight seems to recharge many times faster here. No resource shortage here at all.

• That’s because this game is all about the fighting, so much so that there’s an extensive arcade mode with new areas that would probably take more time to play through than the story-based game. This actually makes the main game pathetically easy because it’s so easy to spam shots at enemies now though the arcade mode, which is a time-based survival game with increasing waves of enemies, is a decent challenge.
• Also in are new enemies with new powers, including a cool enemy who splits himself into two every time you shine light on him. Strangely the axe-throwing enemies from the base game are out, which actually makes combat in this game a tad easier since those guys had unerring accuracy and ridiculous range. Now the only enemies with ranged attacks is one who throws some kind of darkness grenade, nasty if you get caught in it, but easy enough to dodge.
• Also in to deal with the new enemies are new weapons, many of which are much more powerful than those available in the base game. Apparently after spending time in the Dark Place Alan Wake the writer is now fully proficient with assault rifles, combat shotguns and sub-machineguns. These make the already easy combat even easier. I barely needed to use flares in story-mode and never saw the point of the flare-gun or the flash-bang grenades. But I guess that’s what is needed to turn this into a complete and unapologetic action game.

Overall I liked the whole thing well enough. I especially enjoyed the dialogue of the self-aware characters though it is weird that all three of the helpers in each area are women. It’s also great to catch up with what Barry and Alice are doing in the real world through the radio broadcasts. The combat in the base game is too easy but arcade mode takes care of that. Finally one thing about the game amused me. This game uses full motion video with actors pretty extensively to tell the story but while it’s competently done and looks good, it also felt archaic to me because my brain associates FMV with 1990s-era games. Weird, huh?