14 DAY TRIAL // Alan Wake is the upcoming psychological action thriller from Remedy, Max Payne creators and action oriented game developers. The Xbox 360 and PC exclusive was first showed last year, during E3, and received significant recognition from the media, being generally regarded as one of the best looking titles at the expo. Alan Wake is a best-selling thriller author and insomniac which is looking to escape the grief caused by his fianc?e's mysterious disappearance within the idyllic landscape of Bright Falls. Eventually, things go wrong and Wake ends up fighting for his life, with a gun and a flashlight in his hands, trying to understand why his nightmares are literally turning to reality. It strikes me that the main idea bears semblance to John Carpenter's "In the Mouth of Madness".
Creatures descending from Alan Wake's nightmares are threatening his life and sanity. Their vulnerability to light actually makes the flashlight a way more effective weapon than the gun, pushing players to creatively take advantage of any and all light sources. As you might have guessed it by now, Alan Wake is a tightly character-driven and story-oriented game. The game promises intriguing photo-realistic graphic quality and considering what I've seen thus far, it raises up to the challenge. You'll be amazed by the realistic pixel shading, dynamic shadows that change according to the position of the sun and the general uncanny detail in open spaces.
Yesterday, during the second day of the San Francisco Intel Developer Forum, Remedy demonstrated the games prowess with a tech demo. Running on an Intel Core 2 Quad processor clocked at 3.73GHz, the experience was just breathtaking, showcasing engine features such as the day and night cycle, volumetric light, physics and three different types of weather. In fact, a tornado simulation could also be seen, wrecking havoc in a very realistic fashion and taking everything apart, like watching castles made of matches crumbling down. The geometry and object complexity was jaw dropping but this doesn't come cheap. The game engine is multi-threaded being able to make full use of the processor's four cores, enabling different threads for physics, graphics and sound processing for seamless streaming of world data. In this respect, the Xbox 360 actually takes advantage of its Xenon CPU's three cores. Unfortunately, Alan Wake is unlikely to run on single core processors. Hyper-threading enabled Pentium 4 CPUs may be able to run it, but with significantly reduced detail so that's not an understatement.