Alan Wake blew my mind.

This thing stroke me down when I didn't expect that.

I thought I'll look into it, but I hadn't expected much. A PC port of some 2 years old Xbox game, whatever, they say it was quite good, why not?

In the end, I spent whole last weekend and today trying to finish off this darling.
And I am amazed.

Most of the gamers play games purely because of the enjoyment of the gameplay itself. But shooting people might tend to bore a seasoned player I consider myself.
And so, quite a long while ago actually, I started to try to focus on the storytelling. Because gaming, I believe is the ultimate storytelling medium. Things can come alive, you get sucked directly into whatever's happening. You don't just dream a world like with books, you don't just look at it either, like in movies. You can manipulate it. And that feels powerful.

Shamefully, gaming is as well the youngest genre of entertainment industry and so it's the least evolved, mature. It's not so startling to say, that game script writers haven't learned how to do their job yet. Everything is so focused on giving the player all he needs, whilst the world seems otherwise dead, and the dialogues and everything seem constructed.

And that's where Alan Wake comes in. And it shines in every part of this multimedia adventure. The storytelling is dazzling, using innovative way to make the story flow. I especially liked having glimpse of what will come through the manuscript pages you find. It will keep you expecting and you sure won't be disappointed. Music does a wonder as well. Again, not a typical classical music score, but rather orchestral elements mixed with modern rock prevail. Battle scenes have to be classical, since no other genre can bear such tenseness and thrill, but song at end of each episode always keeps you looking like someone just hit you with a bag of stones to the head. Gameplay, though I liked it the least, is perfectly balanced to keep you at the verge of heart-attack at all times. And finally, the graphics. The play of light is just gorgeous. The landscape of American Northwest is simply stunning as well; don't recall seeing such beauty in any game before. How the land shapes is very emotional; you get to the same cabin at the very beginning and at the end of the last DLC and even though it's still the same place, at the beginning it feels serene and lovely, however at the end it is a grotesque, vile and vicious place no one would want to get near.

And the end of the story? Well, I don't want to be spoiler, but it's truly great, more than I wished for. I've hated many games for how they end; especially ones with open world, that doesn't change a bit after the main plot ends and I hated to see NPCs completely unaffected by my heroic deeds. Here, the ending is epic. And just as lyric! It leaves place (just as the whole game does, considering games are the most specific media) for imagination and will keep you  begging for meaning. And so, thousands have joined to invent the craziest of theories and using the most trivial details and the most complicated logical presumptions the game has to offer, they have shown how they can appreciate surely one of the greatest adventures in history of gaming.