Pick up a flashlight, grab a thermos and get your typewriters ready because it’s time to return to Bright Falls – with Alan Wake at last making a jump from Xbox 360 to other consoles, the first time it’s done so since its first release in 2010. Now remastered on PC, alongside PlayStation and Xbox consoles old and new, the recent release comes courtesy of D3T Studios in collaboration with original developer Remedy Entertainment. Alan Wake was a visually impressive game for its time for sure, but this remaster certainly does plenty in refreshing the title for the modern hardware specs.
Comparing to the original Xbox 360 release, the game is perhaps by necessity reworked in several key areas. Effects, lighting and shadow quality are bumped up, character models are reworked with new shaders for skin and hair, while texture resolution is increased. And of course, on high-end consoles like Xbox Series X, S and PS5, you get a resolution boost, plus 60 frames per second gameplay. Looking back, Alan Wake was something of a technical showcase on release, as an Xbox exclusive. Fog, object physics, and dynamic shadows all impressed 11 years ago, and largely still hold up – though the game’s 544p resolution was somewhat controversial. Interplay with light also proved crucial. Not just technically, but also as a mechanic for the game: for weakening the Taken and for solving puzzles. As a precursor to Quantum Break and Control, this was the start of something special for Remedy.
The remaster is essentially a revamp of the 2012 PC release, with no changes or tweaks to the core game itself. Remedy makes it absolutely clear this is the same experience, running on the same engine, albeit with a suite of visual upgrades – though no HDR or ray tracing support is a touch disappointing (DLSS is at least an option on PC). For Xbox Series X and PS5, the native resolution is boosted to a 2560×1440 target. Interestingly, we keep the 4x MSAA that Remedy used to embellish the Xbox 360’s 544p resolution (and to make foliage look presentable!) many generations on from the Xbox 360 release. MSAA isn’t at all common these days, especially in this age of post-process techniques and reconstruction but given we’re using legacy code, it makes sense to see it return. As for Xbox Series S? Perhaps not surprisingly, 1080p is the render target. The rest of the comparison points between the three are minimal based on close testing: shadows, textures and lighting upgrades all benefit from the remaster in equal measure, and there isn’t much to split the three consoles here.