I played Alan Wake

I have a ton of older games that I never really got around to playing, and Alan Wake is one of them. I can't even remember buying it, horror games aren't really my thing. In truth, it isn't really a horror game, its more like a psychological thriller kind of deal. Basically, you're a writer who goes on holiday with his wife in the middle of nowhere, she gets kidnapped by an entity that lives in a lake and you have to try and find out what is going on. It is implied that you are insane and none of it is really happening, and there is a ton of backstory that reveals itself as the story progresses. Having finished the game, I am sort of pissed off. It isn't a bad game, I am annoyed because it had the potential to be great and fell short in a number of different ways. Firstly, it has a mechanic going on that is brilliant, but the execution is awful. As you go through the game and explore different areas, you find "manuscript" pages. It turns out that you, Alan Wake, wrote the storyline of the game, and you can read these pages to find out what is going to happen at different points in the game before they actually happen. I have seen this before in other games - the most recent one I can think of is probably Until Dawn, where you find totems that will show you snippets of information that will help you to make decisions later on in the game - but Alan Wake is totally different. The fact that it is tied in so closely with the plot of the game is brilliant, but they completely fucked it up by revealing too much information in the pages. If you are a complete autist like me and consider it ridiculous to complete a game without finding every collectible you can before progressing through the storyline, you will already know most of the plot before it even happens. If you don't collect any of them, you will miss out on information that can not be learned any other way. So the only way to actually know the complete storyline without ruining it for yourself is to somehow only collect certain pages, and there are about 100 of them. It is a linear game too, so there is no way to go back and pick up the shit that you missed, so half of the time you're just hunting around for the pages. Oh, and unless you play on the hardest difficulty, you can only collect around 70% of the pages. Another one of the collectibles is flasks of coffee. The significance of this is never explained. Overlooking this, the combat revolves around shining light on enemies before you can kill them. On hard difficulty, it is sometimes better to just run away. They did a pretty good job of finding that balance where you can either choose to fight or run, which I like. What I don't like is the dodge button is also the sprint button, so every time you want to sprint, you will do a retarded dodging motion before you start running. There are some _awful_ platforming bits, and the driving is horrendous in every way imaginable. The ending of the game is the thing that pissed me off the most. I still don't know how the game ended, and it isn't some magical "ohhh, the ending is whatever you want it to be", it's just pure bullshit. I actually looked up the ending of the game after I finished it, and there are some things implied in specific manuscript pages that I didn't find, along with some things in different DLCs that (if true) would make it one of the darkest, greatest endings I have ever seen in a game before. But if I have to do multiple playthroughs on the hardest difficulty to find your shitty pages, and play all the DLC just to figure out how the fucking game actually ended, it's not really worth it. I remember reviews for this game being very positive and I'm really not sure why. I want to like this game so much its infuriating.