Games

Two years after the nightmarish events at Bright Falls and Cauldron Lake, Alan Wake finds himself in Night Springs, a town from a fictional television show he once worked on. Wake is still trapped in the Dark Place, an otherworld where the fabric of reality is malleable and can be changed by acts of creation. Wake is on the trail of his evil doppelganger, Mr. Scratch, who was created by the forces at Cauldron Lake and now means to destroy Alan's life in the real world. Wake must end Scratch's plans and find a way to escape the Dark Place. Alan Wake was Remedy Entertainment's highly ambitious, mostly-successful follow-up their iconic Max Payne action games. A mixture of thriller and action elements, combined with a light frosting of horror, it was high on atmosphere and story but the actual gameplay elements were stretched by a limited number of options. American Nightmare is a stand-alone follow-up, not a true sequel ( Alan Wake 2 will likely follow in a few years), but...

Alan Wake is a successful novelist suffering from writer's block. He and his wife, Alice, take a holiday to Bright Falls, Washington, and rent a cabin on an island in the middle of a volcanic lake. When Alice 'surprises' Alan with a typewriter, hoping he'll feel inspired to start writing again, Alan becomes angry and storms out. He hears his wife screaming, only to find the cabin and the island have disappeared. Apparently the island was destroyed in a volcanic eruption in 1970. Wake discovers he has somehow lost a week, and keeps finding pages from a new novel he's been writing called Departure in which he himself is the protagonist. As shadowy creatures attack him and TV shows seem to reflect his state of mind, Wake must discover whether he has gone insane and attempt to track down his missing wife.   Alan Wake is the creation of Finnish developers Remedy, best-known for their superlative work on the first two Max Payne games. Like the Max Payne games, Alan Wa...

New York cop Max Payne is devastated to lose his wife and baby daughter in an attempted burglary. The attackers were high on a new designer drug, called Valkyr. Payne transfers to the DEA and dedicates himself to exposing the origins of the drug, going undercover in the Punchinello crime family to learn more. After three years he is called to an emergency meeting with his handler, Alex, who is promptly murdered in front of him. Max's cover is blown, he's been framed for the murder of his partner and both the police and most of the city's underworld is gunning for him. But with nothing to lose he also has an opportunity to uncover the secret his family died for, and find those responsible. In 2001 an obscure Finnish developer, Remedy, released one of the most defining action games of all time. Max Payne had been in development for four years, an unheard-of amount of time for the period, as Remedy attempted to get the game's tricky mix of film noir storyline, John Woo-in...