Pioneering a new game genre might sound like an impossible task but the developers behind Alan Wake reckon they have pulled it off. That's a pretty big claim considering video games have been in production for decades but Finnish studio Remedy Entertainment is standing by it.

In an interview with PC World yesterday, Remedy managing director Matias Myllyrinne said Alan Wake relied on "intrigue and mystery" and was best categorised as a mix between an action game and a psychological thriller.

"Horror has been done lots before. Making a psychological thriller is about doing something that's much more cerebral," he said.

Due to be released on Xbox 360 on May 20, Alan Wake puts gamers in the shoes of a fictional best selling author of the same name as he searches for his wife who has gone missing near the small town of Bright Falls. As time goes on, Wake realises the nightmare he is living is straight out of a thriller novel he has written.

Myllyrinne said the game was controlled in the third person view, had a linear storyline and was cinematically rich. However, that didn't come at the expense of gameplay and gamers could still do a lot of exploring and learning about the game's more minor characters if they wanted to.

Remedy was the studio behind the Max Payne series of games that popularised bullet-time -- a slow motion technique gamers could use during combat to warp time and dodge bullets more easily. In Alan Wake, Remedy had tried to revolutionise the use of light in the same way, Myllyrinne said.

"We wanted to use a constant. With the Max Payne games we used time. We thought that light and dark were two things that resonated with all cultures. Light symbolises safety. That comes to us from religion... and it's also built into our DNA.

"Basically light in Alan Wake is a combat tool for the gamer and a source of safety. We use light to burn away enemies and it's always more effective than a firearm. Anything from the headlights of a car to flashlights can be used. We spent a lot of time working with the lighting and making sure it looked really good."

To ensure scenes in the game struck the right emotional chords with gamers, developers had consulted psychologists and put significant effort into effects and audio, Myllyrinne said. For example, playing the sound of a baby crying in a scene where a tornado was heading towards a house could create a strong emotional response in the gamer, he said.

"Something only needs to be slightly off to make it really disturbing for us. There are a lot of things that you don't necessarily pay attention to... We rely on movie realism and doing things like making it feel dark even if it's not dark [on screen]."

Another area where developers had tried to improvise was with the game's difficulty levels. Myllyrinne said Alan Wake included an advanced "dynamic difficulty" system that could alter how aggressive enemies were as players progressed through the game. That meant the game could cater for players of all abilities, including those with "less dexterous thumbs".

For more hardcore gamers the dynamic difficulty would ensure they faced a challenge for the 8 - 10 hours it took to complete the game, he said.