PSA for people buying Alan Wake today for 90% off: If you find the idea of "survival horror" more interesting than "a third-person shooter with a flashlight gimmick that is completely devoid of any challenge" load up the developer menu and unlock Nightmare difficulty for the first playthrough. It's not ball-crushingly hard or anything, it just makes you have to be at least a little careful with your ammo, and you might actually die a few times. I didn't like the game much after playing a couple episodes on normal, so I restarted on Nightmare. Ended up loving it by the end.
It also unlocks additional manuscript pages that tell more of the background story, though if I remember correctly at least a couple of them contain spoilers that you might not want to read when you first pick them up. It's a great game, but there's very little reason to replay it, so I imagine most people end up looking those manuscript entries up on the internet if they care about reading them. Better to just pick them up the first time through.
Anyway, to unlock it, add -developermenu to your Steam shortcut (right-click the game in Steam library, click Properties then click Set Launch Options...). Go into the game, access the menu and unlock nightmare. Then exit the game, remove the -developermenu switch, and then play normally.
