Xboxist

Alan Wake and Heavy Rain: Year of the Adventure Game?

This year will see the release of two groundbreaking games for the current generation of home consoles. Long neglected, the adventure game genre is not only poised to make a comeback, it has the potential to define and reinvigorate console gaming at a time when many observers are asking, what's next? To be sure, when the current generation of video game hardware kicked off in 2005, the public was thrilled with the ability of game developers to render bigger, badder explosions and thrills than ever before. However, missing from this generation of video game thrills has been a corresponding leap in terms of immersion and storytelling. Up until now, it has sometimes felt as though we are simply playing the same games from a decade ago, just with a snazzier coat of high-definition paint. All eyes will now be focused on Remedy Entertainment and Quantic Dream, to see if their upcoming creations can provide some new direction to the video game industry as a whole.

The two developers have taken radically different approaches to the adventure game on their respective systems.

Alan Wake is being billed as a "psychological adventure thriller" which makes heavy use of environmental features like light and shadow to deliver thrills. The plot, which kicks off when a horror novelist visits a sleepy town in the Pacific Northwest, delves heavily into the supernatural as players progress. Remedy's vision for Alan Wake on the Xbox 360 was originally to make the game as open and free as possible, allowing the player to uncover the story somewhat like a detective investigating a crime scene. Since the game was originally announced back in 2005, the developer has had to scale back this open-world vision somewhat, perhaps owing to hardware and storage limitations. The developer claims that removing some of the open-world elements was done in order to improve narrative pacing, something that is important in a story-driven title like Alan Wake. Nevertheless, the key concepts that describe Alan Wake are exploration, environmental creepiness and realistic interactions with NPCs. Current-generation hardware has helped developers improve in all of these areas.

Alan Wake features a creepy, nocturnal world full of supernatural frights.

The French developers at Quantic Dream have also harnessed the power of current generation hardware - this time on the PS3 - to create a strong narrative in Heavy Rain. The game allows players to take the role of one of four characters, each one trying to solve the mystery of the gruesome Origami Killer. Gameplay is a mixture of new ideas and old techniques. Despite complaints about the use of Quick Time Events (QTEs), Quantic Dream assures us that the game is very much a next-generation experience. There is a lot of interacting with NPCs through dialog trees, and at many places players will be given the option of making completely different choices which can have an outcome on the story. The emphasis is much less on action and much more on telling a realistic story, according to the game's Director David Cage:

"Heavy Rain is about normal people who have landed in extraordinary situations. I wanted a much more personal story. The first thing that came to my mind, as a father of two little boys, was that the main theme should simply be a father's love for his son. This is not a game about saving the princess or the world. Its [sic] purely about a father's love."

Heavy Rain features realistic graphics and characters, with a story pulled straight from the nightly news.

There are some major similarities between Alan Wake and Heavy Rain that go beyond the number of syllables in their names. Adventure games have always been primarily about exploration, and both of these games will require the player to explore their respective worlds, talk to residents and get to the bottom of a mystery. Also, both stories are more or less linear in nature, guiding the player from start to finish (albeit with some opportunity for branching along the way). If you fancy yourself a bit of a Sherlock Holmes, and you like the linearity of a good book, then you probably won't go wrong with either of these titles.

However, there are also some subtle differences that set Alan Wake and Heavy Rain apart. Judging by the gameplay of Alan Wake, which involves a basic arcade shooting mechanic in which light can harm supernatural enemies, this game could appeal to a more mainstream audience. Heavy Rain, which deals more with philosophical ideas about morality and focuses on realism rather than on arcade gameplay, might end up being more of a niche title. Purely based on our own distaste for quick time events, which force players to memorize a sequence of button inputs, we can't get fully excited about Heavy Rain. And that's a shame, because its graphics, animation and story appear to be somewhat more polished than Alan Wake.

It is likely that Alan Wake could be a huge commercial success for Microsoft, but only if the developers at Remedy have been able to appropriately polish the gameplay in its four plus years of development. That long timeline, coupled with the fact that developers had to cut out a major portion of the open-world component, leave us a bit cautious on Alan Wake. At the end of the day, though, we sincerely hope that both games are a commercial and critical success, because they could light the way for future adventure games on home consoles, a genre that remains largely under-represented in the current retail lineup.