Episode 1:
Nightmare
Tropes featured in this episode of Alan Wake:
- Celebrity Is Overrated: Alan came to Bright Falls specifically to get away from his job as a writer, suffering from writer's block brought on by exhaustion. What happens? He gets routine calls from his agent bothering him about it, the first guy he meets is a local radio jockey who wants to interview him, the diner he walks into has a cardboard cutout of him standing there and the waitress is a fan who geeks out at him. Later, Rose makes a call on that very radio station to announce that he was there to the whole town, earning a resounding "uuugh!" from Alan when he hears it.
- Construction Vehicle Rampage: The office in the lumber mill gets crashed through off the cliffside with a bulldozer by a random tainted.
- Creepy Crows: When the lights in the cabin go out and Alice starts screaming, Alan tries running back, only to get attacked by black birds, the first enemies he encounters in the real world.
- Cut Phone Lines: When Alan is hiding in the office in the lumber mill and tries calling the Sheriff's office for help, only for the phone-tower to spontaneously fall, leaving Alan with no way to call for help.
- Establishing Character Moment:
- Rose Marigold is introduced squeeing at Alan Wake when he first walks into the diner, having been the one to put the cardboard cutout of him at the entrance.
- Cynthia Weaver is seen holding a lantern and ominously warning Alan Wake about the dark hallway to the bathroom where Mr. Stucky supposedly is, implying that she knows a lot about the Darkness haunting the town and comes across as crazy because of it.
- Establishing Series Moment: The game starts with an ominous, overhead shot of mountains and forests as our main character quotes Stephen King about the Nothing Is Scarier nightmare-logic of Horror, followed by Alan showing us a recurring nightmare he is suffering from where he is being chased by a character he wrote, shaming him for the kind of power being a writer gives him. This establishes the game's primary sources of inspiration, the poetry logic of the conflict and to tell the player to expect not to trust reality as far as events of the story is concerned.
- Foreshadowing:
- The nightmare Alan has at the very start foreshadows both his encounters with the Taken and the greater story at large.
- In the darker part of the diner (the one that Cynthia outright calls dangerous), he is given keys to the log cabin he is staying at by an ominous woman in black Widow's Weeds. Right as he and his wife leave, Mr. Stucky runs out to give them the actual keys, cluing us in on something dark and predatory manipulating the Wakes.
- One of the first things Alan finds in the log cabin is a box full of books from Thomas Zane, an author he had never heard of until right then.
- On the dock of the cabin, Alan thinks to himself how unsettling the black waters are, and how he’s disturbed thinking about what lurks beneath.
- When Alan starts encountering Taken, he routinely finds graffiti only visible in the light pointing him towards supplies and giving him advice, implying that while there a malevolent force out to get Alan, there is also a benevolent one looking out for him.
- When Alan enters the gas-station, the TV suddenly turns on showing Alan himself back in the cabin, writing and mumbling frantically about how he has to keep writing or else "she will be lost."
- King Mook: Carl Stucky is not only the first taken Alan encounters in the real world, but he lasts much longer than the other taken, looming in the distance for a chunk in the episode, takes more to make vulnerable with light and can move at great speeds.
- Offscreen Teleportation: After talking to Barbara Jagger for the first time, if you leave and return to the hallway, she will have disappeared despite having nowhere to leave without him seeing. He even has a line in his Inner Monologue mentioning exactly this.
- Rage Against the Author: The tainted hitchhiker Alan is forced to run from in his nightmare is a character in a story he has been writing, angry at the author for creating him in the first place.
- Recursive Reality: When Alan tries navigating through the woods, he finds a manuscript of a novel that he had planned on writing — Departure by Alan Wake — but never gotten around to actually putting onto paper. The story is about a guy being hunted by an axe-murderer in the woods, a fact that becomes very real when the first tainted he encounters is a tainted Carl Stucky wielding an axe in a lumber-yard.
- Shout-Out: Alan openly compares Tainted-Stucky going at the door between them with an axe to the
Signature Scene from The Shining. - Wham Episode: The episode ends with Alan having finally found safe haven at the gas-station. When he calls in for help, Sheriff Sarah Breaker tells him that there hasn't been an island (or a cabin on it) since the caldera beneath erupted in The '70s. With the concussion Alan had, one can't help but wonder how much of the events of the episode are all real or Alan suffering from psychosis from brain damage.
- Video Game Tutorial: The game starts teaching the player how to interact with the environment, including sprinting, dodging, that Light Is Good, Dark Is Evil and the combat mechanics during the nightmare sequence.
