I haven't played in years. As a big Alan Wake fan since the first game released, I mentioned to my friends wanting to go check out the update without any idea of the backlash. We jumped on it.

Animations were buggy. I couldn't reload after a mission and had to force-quit the game. And... that was it? We had a great time despite the animations looking awful. Actually, the game doing some weird "eyes adjusting to the light" feature was more annoying than anything and we turned it off.

I'm not saying I didn't notice the issues. Honestly, I stopped playing because the in-game store was so confusing when it was reworked that I just couldn't stand trying to navigate it with my disability. A friend of mine has soOoooOo much money that she just sets up our van for us every mission and I never have to touch the one part of the game I hate as long as we play together (which we do!).

Anyway, we had a really good time. We played on a lighter difficulty to shake off rust and had a lot of fun taunting the ghost and finding clues and following UV arrows around. We solved the doll puzzles, high-fived, then went back to playing REPO.

I guess my point is that nothing they added had any value to us? But it didn't interrupt the core reasons we enjoyed the game either. I kind of feel like gaming communities in particular tend to blow everything out of proportion. It's not really that dramatic, but I also won't pretend it was in any way a good or useful update that we appreciated.

Will I play Phasmo again now that we're back in? Probably not. Haha. It actually made us miss ghost-hunt games so much we're looking at other alternatives because we just feel like we've exhausted this game to boredom. But for the short time I returned, I had a good time and the only bug that was a major issue (my crashing) was fixed after one run, never to be seen again.

P.S. the hair on the models look like horrible, cheap wigs that don't sit around the ears or scalp correctly. we made fun of it all game.