I'm gonna bring this back from the dead, because I've been listening to music from the game and it makes me think about it some more.
Now thing is, yeah, totally, a lot of what's talked about in this thread is valid, and you could go see Yahtzee Croshaw's review and I'd say that's fair as well: not enough variation of core mechanics, levels sometimes drag on too long, some lost chances at short-term drama and suspense, hits the Stephen King tropes pretty hard, etc.
This is still one of my favored games, though. While they do need *something* to break them up a bit more, the mechanics are usually neat, the game excels at delivering creepy set pieces and situations, the story unfolds in a usually neat way (though I'm a real sucker for the kind of work King tends to put out, so take that as you will), and for my money it's one of the best uses of licensed music in a video game ever, let alone the couple songs Poets of the Fall did for it.
Also, because I just remembered it, I'm gonna go ahead and paste in a little thinking I did about the core game last month or so (because I overthink these things sometimes).
On a semi-random note, I need to play Alan Wake again, and the extra episodes. And the side content, like the live episodes. I really liked it, and the glimpses of alien...ness... that it doesn't really explain is the sort of thing that almost always delights me.
Also I assume that most of the Taken that you fight are not really individual corpses made animate with the dark will of the Taker (for lack of a better term), like the bosses of the gas station owner and the park ranger, but more like...carbon images, copies of people it took throughout the century. The body count gets as high as to be ridiculous otherwise, I think, and it fits in more with my suspicion of it as, most of the time, being a dozing predator, picking off the occasional hiker, lumberjack, hunter, drifter, miner, etc. as it tosses and turns and hungers.
Then Alan comes along and it sits right the fuck up and is all 'DO WANT OMONOM", but even then the content seems to imply that the fatality rate during the game is much lower than it could have been.
Oh, and that fucking commercial. I laughed, and laughed, and laughed so hard. I had to put the controller down and just breathe for a minute.
Some people were pretty pissed off by it though, and I can see why; the juxtaposition of everything going to hell around you and then BAM! Real-life commercial. It just...it just tickled me.