New gameplay teaser released for Alan Wake: a voice calls out in the darkness

French gaming site Game Blog have published a new video featuring snippets of gameplay for the highly anticipated Xbox 360 game Alan Wake, first announced in May 2005, and finally due out on May 11th of this year.

The game is named after a bestselling author whose bid to overcome crippling writer's block leads him to find solace in a secluded lakeside town.

Suddenly, his wife goes missing, the town and its surrounds are plunged into an oppressive gloom, and pages from his latest horror fiction start coming true - a book that he has no recollection of writing.

Armed with only the most basic tools and pursued by shadowy creatures, Alan goes about unravelling the mystery surrounding him before it's too late.

The game's developers, Remedy, have said that they turned to film, literature, and television series for inspiration rather than other video games, in order to make something both recognisable and new.

In this latest teaser, a mysterious voice addresses Alan and refers to his dark world as a 'dream'. So instead of being a straight-up 'survival horror' game like the Resident Evil series, Alan Wake can now be cast as psychological thriller with more similarities to to the 1997/2002 film Insomnia, James Mangold's film Identity - itself based on an Agatha Christie crime fiction - Paul Auster's darker postmodern novels, and of course the classic Silent Hill series of video games.

The five minute video can be seen in full at GameBlog.fr