Pacing in Alan Wake

Lately, I've been replaying Alan Wake. It's a survival horror game heavily based around contrasting light and dark. Enemies are surrounded by darkness, which needs to be burned away with the beam of a flashlight before they can be hurt. I could talk for days about all the things Alan Wake does right, but I'm going to focus on one thing: pacing.

In order for a survival horror game to work, it needs to be scary. And in order for the player to feel scared, they have to feel threatened. Previous survival horror games, like the original Resident Evil and Silent Hill, did this by crippling the player's supplies. The player never really had the tools to fight back, so the best course of action was always to run. More modern games, like Dead Space, have tighter controls, but they still rely on giving the player too little ammo to properly protect themselves.

Alan Wake - I assume through incredibly strenuous playtesting - manages to give exactly enough for the player to fight their foes while still feeling as though they're lacking. Every time I run out of ammo, I turn the corner to find a checkpoint with an ammo cache. And while it was predictable, it didn't lessen the tension. I still felt like I could run empty and be left helpless.

Part of this is due to brilliant level design. Enemies generally require a very specific amount of ammo to dispatch; standard foes take three pistol shots, more difficult foes can take a whole clip. So when the designers build an encounter, they can know exactly how much ammo a player will need to face it. By stringing these encounters together cleverly, they can ensure that the player has just enough ammo to deal with the dangers they'll face. There's still enough wiggle room that the player doesn't feel that they have more ammo than necessary, but they never feel that they need to run rather than fight (unless the encounter is specifically designed that way).

Proper pacing makes or breaks a game. I wish more developers would play Alan Wake and see that.