E3: Alan Wake

And combat itself revolves around light. Spookily reanimated diggers and cars seem to be palette cleansers for Wake, with the bulk of his enemies coming in the form of "Takens", local unfortunates who have been transformed by a malevolent darkness into depraved, murdering zombies. Open up on them with Wake's spectacularly loud handgun and they stagger on regardless, as if you'd tried spraying them with Glade - light from his torch, however, makes them look like they've just swallowed a Catherine wheel, as ghostly flesh sizzles and sparks, weakening them up for a final bullet in the head which sends them scattering into the air in speckles of flashing gold.

The one-two punch of the combat is complex enough to keep you in a multi-tasking panic as waves of enemies get closer, but it appears to walk just the right side of being unnecessarily fiddly. On top of that, the old survival-horror classic of making room for yourself and controlling a crowd is livened up by a couple of extra weapons, one of which is a flare gun, which cuts a blood red swathe through your attackers, while the second comes in the form of carefully placed generators, jump-started with a mini-game, which allow Wake to spark dormant streetlamps into life, blowing nearby baddies to pieces, simultaneously allowing him to progress through the darkened woods, one pool of light at a time.

Elsewhere, some Hollywood staging is on hand to keep things moving, alternating sandbox woodland arenas with set-pieces which see Wake crossing a ravine on a rather shaky cable car while being dive-bombed by nasty black birds, or cowering in a house until a construction lorry barrels through a wall to spoil his fun.

Besides ducking vehicles, you'll also have to drive them, and our demo ends with Wake escaping a pitched woodland battle, and hitting the road to uncover a batch of manuscript pages hidden at a nearby lighthouse. Behind the wheel, and with a break from the carefully staged combat, it's suddenly apparent just how special Remedy's game might be. There's something uniquely promising about tooling around a mysterious mountain town, with firs wreathed in mist, and nasty things lurking in the darkness. Foggy moonlight trailing through the trees brings back all the right memories of eighties Spielberg, while the narrow tracks with their flickering streetlamps and rocky tunnels seem perfect for exploring. It's a setting that's rather standard when it comes to slasher films, but for a videogame, it seems fresh and faintly sophisticated, and ensures that, despite some pretty traditional survival-horror encounters, it's very hard to confuse Alan Wake with anything else.