Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.
There's a killer on the road... His brain is squirmin' like a toad...
"It was a scene from a nightmare, but I was awake."
— Departure, Wake Attacked by a Shadowy Murderer
Alan Wake tells a recursive story of a writer's horror story coming true around him, and is an appropriately tense thriller. With a shadowy presence surrounding the town of Bright Falls, Alan will learn to fear the dark.
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Base Game
- The Taken in general. You’re walking down a dark path filled with writhing shadows, then suddenly the wind picks up and you start to see black, distorted figures materialising out of the fog, gibbering nonsensical things to themselves that may have made sense at one point in time, but no longer, and armed with clubs, axes and knives, with every intent on using them on you. The worst part is the fact they can’t be saved from their Fate Worse than Death, burning away the shadowy shroud around them just pisses them off even more and reveals their Black Eyes of Evil. The Darkness has corrupted and bastardised them so badly that they’re no longer even human.
- The fact that all of the Taken were once townsfolk, and that Bright Falls is a small town. When you think about it, Alan's battle against the darkness may have cost Bright Falls half its population.
- The taken hitchhiker from Alan's dream. He's the only one who could talk more then just a few random lines. This allows him to yell death threats at you as he stalks Alan through the dream. Compared to the other Taken, who don't say much, he is quite possibly the most intimidating enemy in the entire game.
- The Dark Presence in general, but particularly its avatar Barbara Jagger, who is especially terrifying in the scene where Alan is talking to her, and she jumps at the screen and appears to be threatening the player. And, if you consider what you're doing at the time, well...she actually is threatening the player.
- Struggling to reach the light of a Safe Haven, only for the light to flicker out and/or the bulb to break as you approach. Many an expletive has been uttered out loud by gamers upon these moments.
- Manuscript pages dealing with every aspect of your life and other peoples' interactions with you, an unnatural force possessing people who did nothing wrong, having to kill half the town and have their blood on your hands, a woman with a hole where her freaking heart should be, and two cases in which a dog dies. How the hell did this game get a Teen rating again?!
- The beginning in the game is pretty creepy as well, when you go into the house and then all of the TVs turn on and all you can see is an eye staring at you, saying die about 15 times.
- Hitchhiker: "DIE. DIE. DIE. DIE. DIE. DIE. DIE. DIE. DIE. HEEEHEEYAAAHAAHAHAA!!!! HAAHAHAHAHHH!!!!"
- All while he's sending out a tornado to rip your shit.
- Finding this manuscript page: "The flashlight was heavy in my hand, and each pull of the trigger sent a painful shock up my arm. But I was finally out of the woods and things were looking up. That's when I heard the chainsaw."
- The poor drunk guy you hear when you enter a cabin, screaming and firing his gun as he's being murdered by his Taken friend. Who then smashes through the window when you come back downstairs. Just the sheer terror of the poor bastard is palpable.
- Later on in Episode 4 you can find one of the caches in a farmhouse and are attacked afterward by a Taken warning you to stay away from his daughter. Farmer's daughter joke, or was he protecting his family when the darkness took him? And just past the farmhouse you can find three marked graves and the Dark Presence uses the skeletons of the remains to attack you like it does with other objects.
- In Episode 2, if you enter the first cabin you see on the way to Rusty, and look closely at the left-hand window after entering, you can see a Taken walking slowly past the window. This isn't signified by a musical sting, or a pan, it's there to jump the player only if he sees it, and it works.
- Later on, you have to go through a session of the episode without a firearm. Fortunately, you have someone with you who has a gun, but he's got poor aim compared to you and focuses on the biggest Taken he can see, regardless of how far away they are. On higher difficulties, you will be screaming at him to shoot the others because the Taken aren't after him, they're after you.
- The game plays a sound when you shine a light on the light-sensitive paint that sounds a lot like heavy breathing. This is Zane, breathing through his diving suit-which he was in when he died.
- The poltergeist objects. They don't appear until you're a decent ways into the game, but they're really likely to catch you off guard. Unlike regular enemies they can't be killed by guns and are only vulnerable to the light. Plus, they almost always appear in large groups in hazardous areas (like the top of a bridge that slowly falls apart) where they can easily overwhelm Alan. Still, this is nothing compared to the massive poltergeist vehicle boss battles. If the idea of being chased by a possessed bulldozer that is only weakened by the light isn't scary enough, remember that you'll also need to fight several taken during some of these fights.
- Another thing to keep you up at night — Many of the poltergeist objects are things that seem to move from the corner of the screen. How many times have you woken up from a nightmare, only to find your eyes darting back and forth through shadows that seem to menacingly writhe when your head is just barely turned away?
- The paintings by Lane in Hartman's office. Creepy doesn't even begin to describe them. They're scary enough on their own, but the implication all of the paintings are drawing on the power of the lake and may not be entirely fictional is something else.
- Some of the Night Springs episodes are really unnerving.
- Take for instance, "The Dream of Dreams". It starts out with two guys discussing the fact they are in a dream and they have to do everything they can to make sure the dreamer isn't shocked awake. Then a rumbling starts and one guy starts to panic when he realises it's an alarm clock. The last words as the dreamer wakes up: "Please, man! I've got a wife and kids! Please don't wake-" *static*
- Then there's the one found in the fifth chapter. It's actually one of the lighter episodes (no one dies) yet manages to be really unnerving. It opens with a man running from two strange men. When they catch him they remove his free will and destroy it, leaving him a mindless drone. Who are these men? Are they working for someone or do they just go around making slaves for kicks? What are they gonna use him for? Why did the man's free will manifest as an organ that could be ripped from his body? Was the whole thing a metaphor for something? It leaves just enough unanswered questions and is surreal enough to really disturb the viewer.
- Not to mention the "Quantum Suicide" episode where the guy shoots himself in the head in front of an audience as part of a probability experiment, thinking/knowing he's going to kill an alternate universe version of himself. Of course, something goes horribly wrong.
- Nightingale getting dragged away by the Dark Presence. In the end, he is seen lurking in the dark amidst the festivities, seemingly ready to replace Barbara Jagger as the avatar of the Dark Presence. Possibly.
- While an unpleasant man in general, Nightingale's final moments are quietly existentially terrifying. Mid-way through threatening Alan, he suddenly realizes he's repeating the same words from Wake's manuscript. He barely has any time to process the weight of this before the Dark Presence makes its move, creating the same events he thought he was avoiding by arresting Alan.
- Mr. Scratch. What the hell are you smiling about, ya creepy bastard?! He's the Big Bad of Alan Wake's American Nightmare.
- The Taken yelling out random things as you fight them. Having no meaning to you, and gives off a huge insane feeling.Taken: You get TWO PILLLLLLS IN THE MORNINNNNG and then YOU'LL BE NICE AND CALM ALL DAY LONG.
- Made worse by the fact that these lines are all that's left of the person's personality.
- The image of Alice being dragged into Cauldron Lake by Barbara Jagger.
- The scene in which the Dark Presence consumes the cops that are hunting Alan. It's a prime example of Nothing Is Scarier. All we see are the cops' flashlights winking out one by one as we hear them screaming in panic that something is coming after them. Then the forest goes silent and we find nothing but broken squad cars...
- The noises the Dark Presence makes while stalking Alan in the darkness. There's just no possible description for it sounds like. Not a roar, not a scream, almost like the wind itself hissing as the darkness and fog sets in. Coinciding with the above example about the disappearing cops, it heavily implies the Dark Presence has another, unseen form that stalks the woods surrounding Bright Falls, looking for new people to be Taken.
- The ending of the main game (prior to the DLC) is a chilling stinger that opens the door for some terrifying possibilities about what it could possibly mean:Alan: It's not a lake. It's an ocean.
The Writer and The Signal DLCs
- Both of the 2 DLCs take place in a twisted world that is made up of the places Alan has visited as well as his memories, but everything is jammed together wrong. To make matters worse the entire place looks like something out of H. P. Lovecraft and appears to be falling apart. Not to mention that both the DLCs are harder than the main game and have far more platforming elements that can result in an instant death if you fall.
- There is one moment in the DLC where Insane Alan screams, and the TV distorts so that his gaping mouth is where his eyes should be.
- The ending of "The Signal" DLC. The televisions Alan's been seeing of himself almost going insane actually are what's happening to him. He manages to fight off several possessed TV's showing him losing hope and giving in to the Dark Presence. He suddenly has a blinding headache and wakes up in Cauldron Lake Lodge, a ghostly Dr. Hartman standing over him and calmly telling him it's all in his head. As Alan struggles to leave his room, the camera moves out of his eye to reveal him lying on the floor in the cabin, twitching and mumbling incoherently to himself about being unable to escape. Cue credits.
- And as "The Writer" reveals... it's entirely sane in it's insanity. You see... the rational part of his mind is trying to re-unite with the part of him that's ready to give up. So neither Alan you see or play as is the 'real' Alan until they are reunited.