Hands-up if you’ve ever had fun wielding a flashlight (or ‘torch,’ for my fellow country folk) as a weapon in a game. I’m not talking about literally using it for its designated purpose (creating light), nor am I talking about clonking people on the head with the butt of one, but using the flashlight’s very beam to defeat (usually supernatural) enemies.
The reason I ask is because having played several games that weaponise the trusty old flashlight, I don’t think I’ve ever actually had fun with this mechanic, and I’ve been trying to figure out why that is.
It’s something that was probably most famously implemented inAlan Wake, where your flashlight sizzles the evil armour (or whatever it is) off of ‘Taken’ enemies, leaving them vulnerable to attacks from regular bullets. What got me thinking about it recently however, was not just the upcomingAlan Wake 2, but theLayers of Fear remake, which for reasons way beyond my undeniably limited comprehension decided to add in a weaponised flashlight so you could fend off the ghost of your wife.
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In a horror game that previously gave younoweapons to fight back with, this marked a significant shift in the entire feel of the game. Suddenly, you have a self-recharging and highly potent laser beam that you can point at your previously infallible assailant, turning them into a pile of goop in a matter of seconds. The ghost re-congeals after several seconds, but the very fact that you spend a good chunk of the remake facing down and taking out your threat—rather than fleeing from it while barely seeing what it actually is—took out much of the fear factor.
Alan Wake always had a bit more of an excuse in my book.As our Vlad recently pointed out, Remedy likes to make its shooters a little more than just shooters, and Alan Wake was the first game of theirs where they really dabbled in fusing shooting with supernatural stuff. It was bound to feel a little raw, but notwithstanding, I found little joy in holding a button then just keeping a Taken ghoul in its beam of light. It feels like there’s too little interactivity at the controls end, then too little feedback at the receiving end; sure, there’s a little screech and some sparks fly like you’re holding a blade to a grindstone, but therealimpact begins once you’ve burned their dark armour away.
In Alan Wake, it always felt to me like you’re doing something mechanically and visually boring just so you can get to the part where you do something mechanically and visually more exciting. Just keep that enemy in your little beam,poofits armour away, then the real fun begins. And let’s be clear, when that ‘real fun’ just involves firing one of several pretty standard-issue guns, that’s not great either (and something Remedy later addressed in Quantum Break and Control); if anything, the supernatural part of the equation should be more exciting than the shooty-shooty-bang-bang stuff.
It looks like Alan Wake 2 is retaining the same broad combat pattern of whittling the enemy down with a torch before blasting them away, butmando I hope it feels better this time round. Remedy’s more recent games had some super-imaginative combat, and I wonder whether going back to Alan Wake’s combat is a bit of a backward step.
But at the very least, looking at the Alan Wake 2 gameplay trailer, the impact of the flashlight appears to be quite a bit better. For a start, the player whips it out and points it way more aggressively than in the original game. As the light chips away at the enemy’s armour, the sound is more extreme too, then at the end the armourexplodesin an impressive display of sparks and noise. I stand by my wariness of just keeping enemies in your ray of light as a mechanic, but the fact that they’ve created a whole bunch of razzle-dazzle around it will at least make it look more spectacular.
I’ve always liked Alan Wake in spite of the combat rather than because of it. The fights to me were passable intermissions between spooky, twilight-zone atmosphere, and a cool meta kind of story that may not have aged that well, but certainly had enough substance that it can be built upon in a modern sequel.
When it comes down to it, for me the use light to fight off monsters or supernatural forces is such an overdone and hammy slice of symbolism for ‘good vs. evil/light vs. dark’ that I’d be perfectly fine without it in games (or maybe limit it to spells in RPGs rather than the core mechanic for awhole game). By all means use a flashlight to momentarily blind enemies, or, y’know, for its primary purpose of lighting up dark areas (which as a general rule makes for tremendously atmospheric game moments), but aren’t they just a bit of a cheap tool to use in the perpetual battle between good and evil?
Of course, being more of a horror game, Alan Wake 2’s combat shouldn’t be a power trip like recent Remedy games, and in fact I’d be happy to see less combat in general in the sequel, but what’s there needs to feel great, and when your main means of achieving that is a flashlight and a couple of Duracell batteries, history suggests that that’s no easy thing to achieve.
