my main hurdle with alan wake 2 is that, as a lifelong coward who doesn't touch much pure Horror Media, this is probably my first time playing a full blown survival horror game for myself (as opposed to watching someone else play or talk about them). and i'm not sure i particularly like the genre
it's less that i find it too scary and more that i find it tedious. the long stretches with no combat whatsoever followed by an encounter with one or two enemies that can very easily kill you while you're struggling to reload. the fact that most of the item stashes now require you to decipher some kind of puzzle or hunt down a corresponding key. i know this is, like, typical resident evil stuff, but i'm not an RE fan and the first alan wake (while far from spectacular in terms of gameplay) didn't play like this
i'm still enjoying the story and the atmosphere and the Weird Shit, but i definitely feel like it engages me the least when it's in this traditional survival horror mode (which is a lot of saga's side of the story so far - i just got done with return 3 which felt like a VERY long chapter). i'm debating switching it over to the easier "story" difficulty mode, but i worry that decreasing the tension of the gameplay and making everything a breeze will weaken the intended tone of the story - though on the flip side i ALSO worry that the constant tension is making it harder for me to sit back and enjoy the Weird Shit. idk!
