After they relinquished control of the Max Payne series to Rockstar the Finnish games studio Remedy Entertainment proved they were anything but one-trick ponies by coming up with new franchise Alan Wake, a survival horror third person puzzler type thing where you play as Stephen King. Except he's younger and fitter and called Alan Wake and never gets hit by a van. You play as the bestselling novelist Wake who's searching for his missing wife, and whose books seems to becoming true. Pretty spooky! There's some goofy gameplay elements, like using your torch as a weapon against villainous bits of paper, but overall its an effective little chiller. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH3lG9C7MaA At least it is until you get to the end. Capping off a horror story is especially difficult, as the multiple endings that come with each new Silent Hill game will attest to. People have compared the finale of Alan Wake to that of Donnie Darko or 2001: A Space Odyssey, suggesting its open to interpretation. Which is all well and good for those films, but is a lot less satisfying when you've been controlling the main character for forty odd hours and then it turns out that there isn't actually a proper ending. Seriously. When you type "alan wake ending" into Google and it completes it with "explained" and everybody has a different idea of what jumping into a lake, finding a cabin with a typewriter and then saying "It's not a lakeit's an ocean" means. It means nothing.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
