Welcome to this guide for running Alan Wake's American Nightmare. This guide is currently a work in progress as I collect and process all the information available, but I hope it can become a full fledged guide which can make it easier for new players to learn the run.
If you have any questions, feel free to join the community Discord. Any feedback and/or suggestions can be sent to myself, TaintedTali.
The fastest way to move in AWAN is by sprinting. However, Alan only has a limited amount of stamina before he needs to recover. Jumping is the second fastest movement, and has the added benefit of allowing Alan to recover stamina. As a result, the overall fastest movement is achieved by sprinting until stamina is low, then jumping until it's restored. On average, this should only take 2 or 3 jumps.
Another key thing to improve your movement is to memorise the rough location of the cutscene triggers. The game has a lot of cutscenes that you can't skip, but you can save some time by jumping over the trigger, which will land Alan slightly ahead of where he'd normally stop with a run/walk. This saves time as you will be slightly ahead when you regain control and can start running again.
The game likes to use slow motion sections, and you will see these when the game wants to alert you of enemies or when you dodge during combat. Obviously, these are something we want to avoid as they are slow. Luckily, we have ways to minimise or avoid these slow motion segments altogether.
For enemy threats, the game will primarily use slow motion as a tool to show you that there is a threat nearby. As a result, you can mitigate this by being aware of where these threats are yourself and make sure to look in their direction. Examples where this is consistently useful is by looking towards the poltergeist outside the Diner and the poltergeist in the second Observatory cycle.
As for dodging, this is something you should learn to avoid completely. However, this may take a fair bit of practice, so don't feel too discouraged if you sometimes accidentally dodge during combat. Instead of dodging, you can use your flashlight to temporarily stun enemies who get too close to you.
For the most part, combat is something that just slows you down and should be avoided. And the majority of enemies you can run past and rely on your flashlight stun to make it through safely. However, there are some instances where combat is necessary.
The game will offer you more than enough resources throughout the game via resupply cabinets, so don't be afraid to spend both ammo and batteries generously.
One neat thing to make a note of is that Alan can reload his gun while focusing the flashlight on an enemy. Use this to optimise your fights and keep your gun loaded at all times.
The run is timed with RTA (Real Time Attack). The timer starts when you select your New Story difficulty from the main menu, and ends when the game fully fades to black after placing the movie reel in Act III.
The run is NG+, and to be able to accurately follow along you should already have an existing playthrough of the game where you collected a minimum of 10 manuscript pages. This will allow you to pick up the Magnum, which is our weapon of choice for this speedrun.
There are no requirements for the difficulty, however Normal is recommended as it's the easiest one. Easier = Faster.