// PC GAMER — GAMING
The best feature in the original Alan Wake is an absence: the man has no reticle
Remedy forgot the rules of third-person shooting to build its inaugural horror game.
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Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it's the canon height of Thief's Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
There's a recurring motif in Alan Wake which isn't played for laughs, yet is pretty funny nonetheless. Whenever the alcoholic FBI agent has a chance to peacefully capture our fugitive novelist, he blows it by firing his service pistol wildly through the air. The local police chief tells him to cool his jets; the late night radio host wants to know what's the matter with him. But Agent Nightingale can't help himself.
It's as if the pressure of having a target in his sights is simply too much. He flips the board, all the pieces fly everywhere, and Alan Wake is lost amid the trees. "I'll get you yet," Nightingale hollers into the dark. "Even if it kills me, y'hear me HP Lovecraft?"
Wake, meanwhile, remains impervious to the man's vendetta. "I'd fallen off so many cliffs it was ridiculous," he thinks to himself as he slides on his arse down a steep embankment, escaping Nightingale's clutches once again.
It's all a little embarrassing. But I do sympathise with the humiliated drunk behind the badge. There's something about aiming a gun in Bright Falls that messes with your head and gets the better of you. And I've identified precisely what that thing is: a missing reticle.
We don't talk about reticles a lot—in the same way you don't tend to notice your own nose, even though it's bang in the centre of your vision. But they're a standard of the third-person shooter genre: a way to indicate what direction you're firing without literal crosshairs. More broadly, they're part of how you orient yourself in a 3D world; some players find that without a reliable point of focus in the middle of the screen, motion sickness gets the better of them.
Given that reticles often didn't feature during the shooter boom of the '90s, you can think of Remedy as early adopters. The studio equipped Max Payne with one in 2001, and stuck with the idea for the sequel two years later. The implementation of the reticle in those games was minimalist—a single, unchanging white dot—but it kept us steady. Steadier than a diet of painkillers did, at any rate.
Alan Wake, though, messes with the fundamentals. Its combat is rooted in a supernatural one-two punch. First, you direct your torch at the shadowy silhouettes that assault you to make them vulnerable to ballistic fire. Then you reach for your revolver or shotgun and shoot them in the head and torso until they burn up like a waste paper basket exposed to a cigarette. "I'd never fired a gun outside a shooting range," Wake narrates. "And now I'd just killed someone, or something." Typically for the genre, though, he soon gets over it, and starts shooting shadows in their dozens.