Alan Wake
This is a very bad game, and one that almost perfectly exemplifies one of the worst trends I've noticed in story-driven games - completely divorcing the story from the gameplay. Look, if you want to make a game that's more about the story than the actual gameplay, that's fine. There's more than one way to make a good game, and just as great gameplay can be enough to overlook a weak story, a great story can also be enough to overlook weak gameplay. But you have to do it right, and by that I mean that the gameplay must tell the story. That doesn't mean that the gameplay necessarily has to be particularly unusual or profound, just that it's reflective of the story. It can be as simple as killing lots of enemies, provided that the story is reflective of you needing to kill lots of enemies, like if it's set in wartime and the main character is a soldier.
Alan Wake does not do that. The story of the game is at first the main character searching for his vanished wife in a mysterious small town, which later turns into something more complex when he realizes that an ancient cosmic power is making him write a book that's magically destined to come true. The gameplay, however, is mostly just you trekking from one end of a dark forest to another while fighting off zombie-like enemies the whole time. None of it advances the story in the slightest, because the story is not about traveling through the woods or fighting zombies. The story is a relationship drama and a metatextual rumination on the power of fiction, and 100% of this story is communicated through the cutscenes. If the way the hero traveled to each plot-critical location was by climbing into a spaceship and blowing up an alien armada before landing at his destination, the story would be unaffected. If he tunneled under the earth and fought an army of mole-men with mystical martial arts before emerging at his destination, the story would be unaffected. I don't think I've ever seen a ludonarrative disconnect this pronounced in any game before.
The above would be a fatal flaw in the game even if the story, taken as its own separate thing, was truly great. But it's not. There's an interesting central conceit to the story, but the execution is bungled by clunky prose, awkward, inhuman dialogue, and the characters all being either bland and forgettable or too obnoxious to take seriously. Alan Wake himself comes across as aloof and thoroughly unlikable, his design is of course that of another generic dark-haired white guy, and the game's efforts at demonstrating what a great writer he supposedly is by filling the game with samples of his florid, overblown prose and endless narration are just laughable. Seeing untalented writers try and write like how they think a talented writer would write reminds me of the morons at Bethesda trying to write dialogue options for supposedly intelligent or persuasive characters. The gameplay is similarly lacking. You point a flashlight at the enemies, all of which are very similar, and then shoot them with your guns, all of which are very basic video game weapons. You do this about a million times over the course of eight or so hours. Most levels take place in the same dark woods and look almost identical, and your objective is very rarely anything more interesting than "reach the next point on the map." To call it dull and repetitive would be an understatement.
To reiterate, this game blows chimp, and I have no idea why it got so much praise from reviewers, even after reading the reviews in question. Like, I don't believe that anyone who's played more than a handful of video games in their life could find this gameplay tense or frightening at all. Because it's not, and I would know. I'm scared shitless of horror games, and I didn't so much as raise an eyebrow out of fear at anything in Alan Wake. It's simply not a scary game. Likewise, I'm a little puzzled by how many reviewers praised the "episodic" nature of the game, meaning that the game would occasionally just flash the title screen and say that it was the end of episode whatever. Why is that so laudable? Seriously, how does splitting the game up into episodes actually make the game any better or more enjoyable in any kind of substantive way? I would argue that it doesn't, and to single it out as an especially praiseworthy detail rings a little false. I can't help but feel that something was a little fishy with this game's reception.