AMC has picked up the adaptation rights to excellent video game Alan Wake

That’s a good sign, and it’s also good that Alan Wake is a rare video game that would actually work pretty well as something other than a video game—at least partially because it’s so deeply indebted to The Twilight Zone, Twin Peaks, and Stephen King books. (That’s as opposed to something like It Takes Two, which doesn’t make any sense as a movie because the game was all about co-operatively play with two people.) Alan Wake was mostly good because of its story and the performance of its main character, voice and face done separately by Matthew Poretta and Ilkka Villi, and while its main gameplay hook was fun (flashing shadow monsters with a flashlight to weaken them before attacking), it could work just as well if you’re not actively moving the guy onscreen.

In the game, Alan Wake is a successful crime writer who used his last book to kill off his recurring protagonist, a hardboiled detective who is basically a stand-in for the character from Remedy’s Max Payne games, and leaving him with exactly zero remaining ideas. To help him cure his writer’s block, his wife takes him on a vacation to a small cabin by a lake in a Twin Peaks-ass town that has a reputation for inspiring artists. Almost immediately, Wake’s wife disappears, he begins discovering pages from a manuscript with his name on it that he doesn’t remember, the manuscript starts coming true, and shadow monsters start attacking. It has a very cool ending, but we won’t get into that here.

What we’re saying is: Hell yeah. Alan Wake rules and doing more with the Alan Wake brand is a good idea… provided AMC is more faithful than people have been with certain other video game adaptations. (For more Alan Wake, check out Remedy’s Control.)