Alan Wake: The Writer Critic Reviews

The Writer simply offers a lot of really cool amazing general stuff. Combat takes a bit of a backseat in favour of gigantic spectacle, but you will still have your fair share of frantic reloads and cinematic dodges.

There are some intense moments here, from working your way through a rotating house (while struggling to stay alive) to killing "shadow people" with the help of explosive barrels, which you summon with your flashlight. It's very cool.

Offering up a different, but complementary, experience to The Signal, The Writer is an excellent way to cap off the first "season" of Alan Wake.

Alan Wake: The Writer is a stunning farewell.

The Writer was the best part of whole Alan Wake "Season 1": Nicely drawn together story parts, variations in fights, innovative ideas, and a story driven content make the DLC a must-have for fans.

Remedy has a masterpiece with Alan Wake and with each new installment I enjoy the universe more and more.

There have been a few bumps getting here, but The Writer caps off the experience to near-perfection.

The Writer is a terribly short but so entertaining experience, full of fantastic settings drowned in the surreal and game situation of great intensity and singularity. A must buy for every Alan Wake fan.

While surely not the tidy bow that gamers who wanted a finale would hope for, especially with many questions left unanswered, The Writer does do what it is intended to do, get Alan back to a somewhat sense of reality and get you geared up for Alan Wake 2.

The pacing is one of The Writer's biggest strengths but also the means to what some might consider its greatest weakness.

The Writer is a much more confident and focused piece of content than The Signal. Above all else, it solves the problem of creating a canonical piece of post-game content that's neither required nor unnecessary. Not quite essential, but hardly regrettable either.

The Writer follows in the footsteps of The Signal. In terms of gameplay, thanks especially to a better, more daring level design, it will serve fans with some nice sequences. And story-wise, well, it wouldn't be a compelling thriller setting if all questions were answered, but it still delivers a fulfilling end to this first season, while leaving a door open for a second one. But if we are to dive in it one day, it will need to rise up to an entirely new level in terms of gameplay, this time.

A must-play for anybody that downloaded The Signal as it wraps up the mini-story arc.

It's a good bonus chapter, as it has all the best features from both the original game and The Signal. But it fails to amaze as the previous games did, and its story is not as great as we all wanted it to be. A great game for lovers of the original, but it could have been something more.

The DLC as a whole doesn't take long to complete, a couple of hours at the very most, but it's incredibly well paced, peppered with memorable set pieces, some narrative bombshells and just the right amount of combat to stitch everything together.

After playing through both The Signal and The Writer, the biggest impression I'm left with is that these two chunks of game (hateful combat aside) are better than anything that came on Alan Wake's retail disc. They illustrate Alan as a character, they immerse him in a world of his own internal madness, and they play to the strength of the premise in a way that actually makes sense. I can honestly say that if these levels had been included in the main campaign, my overall evaluation would've been significantly higher.

Players who are prepared to forego closure for intrigue are in for a treat.

The last chapter of Alan Wake is without any doubt the best one among the DLCs released up to now, but it's a little bit too expensive considering you will complete it in around one hour and a half. Same goes for The Signal, but that one was for free with the original game.

The Writer is the perfect wrap for Alan Wake's jouneys in to his twisted mind, and in just 90 minutes it conveys all the best we have seen and played in the original game. Unfortunately is too short, and a little bit easy but it's a great experience, almost unforgettable.

The Writer focuses on the type of psychological subject matter that Alan Wake has been best with since its initial release, making it one of its better, more interesting episodes, despite its brevity.