Retroactive Recognition: Paula Abdul choreographed three of the music videos from this album. She appears as one of Janet's friends in the music video for "Nasty", though she did not provide any vocals.
Jesse Faden. When she isn't snarking at the events around her or kicking ass, she tends to be very excitable and nearly toes the line of having No Social Skills due to the bizarre things around her. Despite the horrors she has to face and fight and her lack of trust towards the staff, she's so thrilled about the intrigues of the Oldest House that she doesn't even want to leave. Taken to a whole new level when a side mission has her talk to plants.
Jesse: I wish my leaves were as pretty as yours.
Dr. Casper Darling is a cheerful bow-tie wearing nerd.
Emily Pope loves science, and she's energetic about expressing this love in an almost excessively wordy way, even as she's surrounded by danger. Even Jesse warms up to her as an earnest ally within the span of minutes.
If the Board are the Big Good, Ambiguously Evil, or just straight up The Man Behind the Man? It's clear they exert a powerful influence on the Bureau of Control and have made it their organization but their actual motives are unclear. At least two of the Directors have met horrible ends under their influence and they haven't stepped in to stop some of the FBC's more questionable activities. The Bureau of Control does deal with horrifically dangerous materials, though, and protects the Earth against other forces.
Similarly, what is FORMER's position in relation to the Board? We know he was kicked out after being blamed for something but the crime, if crime there be, is undetailed. It kills at least one innocent FBC worker, Phillip, and tries to kill Jesse in the main game. However, it also helps her in The Foundation as well as works to preserve the Oldest House.
What is the nature of Polaris and its connection to Hedron? Is it completely dead or is a part of it still living on in Jesse? Did it give Jesse her powers or did it awaken something inside Jesse? Is Polaris just an aspect of Hedron or is does Jesse just have a second personality?
Did Alan Wake create the entirety of the FBC, Hiss, and Board? There's questions as to just how powerful his Reality Warper abilities extend and it's entirely possible that the entire history of the FBC is retroactive. However, it's equally possible that he's just influencing events. We know that in Alan Wake he created much of the events of the Dark Presence invading the town but that was in the service of a greater good of keeping it contained. Just how many lives can we lay at Alan Wake's feet, though?.
esseJ, Jesse's mirror world counterpart. She starts fighting Jesse almost immediately upon encountering her. Is she an evil Mirror Universe doppelganger bent on killing Jesse or is she merely antagonistic for her own reasons? The extent of the Mirror Universe created by the mirror is somewhat limited (the exact extent has been redacted from the documents), and considering the deliberate imperfections that the mirror introduces, does it mean that esseJ is essentially Jesse's Shadow Archetype and is merely more aggressive/Darker and Edgierwithout having to beevil? Consequentially, could her status as a boss enemy only exist due to Hiss corruption of the mirror? The abovementioned comments that esseJ makes to Jesse, the Badass Longcoat she wears, and the fact that the mirror is located in a Synchronicity lab - synchronicity and psychological shadow both being Jungian concepts - seem to imply that possibility as well. The Shadow Mirror is infected with the Hiss as well and could simply be making a duplicate that the Hiss used to try to kill Jesse.
Annoying Video Game Helper: When trying to activate the device to create more HRAs, Marshall will repeatedly point out you need to find the punch cards and use the monitors every time you get too close to her while doing so.
Anti-Climax Boss: Jesse's final encounter with Dylan isn't particularly memorable considering that the "boss fight" consists of taking down several waves of standard enemies without actually fighting a boss enemy. Somewhat Justified in that it's made clear by that point that there is no actual Big Bad in charge of the Hiss, making their threat more akin to a slightly more intelligent Zombie Apocalypse than a strategic invasion with a mastermind Final Boss at its center.
Awesome Art: The game in general is stunning, but one standout is the Quarry Threshold, which features an absolutely gorgeous night sky that evokes the cosmos.
"Take Control", which plays on the Walkman given to you by Ahti so you can navigate the Ashtray Maze. It plays as you blast your way through over a dozen Hiss, and holds deeper meaning to Jesse and the rest of the game as well.
"Dyna-mite"note A cover of the first verse of the 1973 song by Mud, with the name Dyna/Dinah replaced with Jesse, which is played as a Silly Song during an otherwise very tense part of the game, is incredibly catchy and cheesy.
"My Dark Disquiet", which is tucked away in one of the research labs as a potential Altered Item. Complete with accompanying strange questionnaire for test subjects exposed to the song in the test chamber.
Red Glow Tunnel Rush from the Foundation DLC is a synthwave track (complete with 80s saxophone) that accompanies Jesse in a mission where she's riding through a Cassette Futurism/Cyberpunk-style tunnel on a high-speed platform.
Best Level Ever: "Polaris" is praised by many as the best part of the entire base game, in particular the AshtrayMaze. This is because it is a Twin PeaksRed Room inspired series of rooms decorated like a 1950s hotel with weird Geiger-esque geometry, hordes of enemies, and the metal song "Take Control" blaring throughout it.
While not as widely beloved as the Ashtray Maze, "Jesse Faden Starring in Swift Platform" from the Foundation DLC is a chase scene on - as the mission name implies - a pair of fast-moving platforms in an 80s cyberpunk-style tunnel with synthwave pumping in the background. It's considered one of the best moments of the DLC, even though it's an optional side quest.
Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Really early on during AWE, there's a trippy encounter in the Abandoned Offices where the furniture and decorations of one particular hallway starts endlessly replicating itself out of nowhere, combined with the lights turning on and off in a rhythm. This definitely isn't a bug, as Jesse herself will comment that it doesn't look like a House Shift, but what it actually is remains unexplained, and no similar events like it occur anywhere else.
Breather Boss: Other than having more health than your typical Mook, Horowitz is a standard Hiss-infected Ranger with no abilities or gimmicks, making him much more manageable than Salvador.
Broken Base: Some Play the Game, Skip the Story, finding the various Psychic Powers collected throughout the game enhance exploration and fighting styles and the Metroidvania-level design engaging but find the main story campaign to be lacking compared to the more interesting side-missions and the sheer number of unanswered questions in the lore. Others Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game because while the setting is interesting and the various characters are likable, they find the rapidly-dropping frame-rates during battles irritating, the enemies repetitive and unimaginative and the mod and weapon-system to be lacking. And, of course, some people like both.
Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Tossing debris at enemies with telekinesis is your most powerful weapon, with even your fully-upgraded arsenal not coming close to that attack in sheer damage output.
Hiss Distorted vanish into thin air after spawning, the only indicator of their presence being a warping effect. It's extremely difficult to force them out of this state because you can't target them, and they are hard hit with anything other than a large Launch object dragged into them. When they do choose to attack, you have about two seconds to dodge a stream of debris that will blast you down to critical health, and Distorted are bulky enough that killing them before they cloak again isn't always reliable.
Mold Hosts. The lowest level you'll encounter them at is Level 6. They often attack from outside Launch's Arbitrary Weapon Range, meaning you have to stop and line up a shot with Grip or Pierce... But they also throw Homing Boulders that, unlike the RPGs that the Hiss Rangers use, you can't throw back at them and instead must dodge. The damage each shot does is absurd, and they fire bursts of three, becoming the source of a great deal of "Wait, what was even attacking me?" deaths. Once you've cleared an area of them, most of them don't respawn... but that in and of itself is an issue, because they're the only enemies to drop the rare Corrupted Sample material, and the ones that do respawn are in the pit below Research, at level 9. Outside of the Final Boss, these are the highest-level enemies you'll encounter in the game.
Hiss Elevated are already Goddamned Bats, hard to hit while having their own deadly telekinetic powers. Armored Hiss Elevated graduate to this category. Armor's weakness is against Launch attacks, but the Elevated can easily dodge the slow-moving projectiles that you throw at them with your powers, so unless you get a lucky throw or manage to get one at close range, they will force you into a long, drawn-out gun battle as you whittle down their armor. You can get around their evasion by exploiting a feature of Launch only mentioned in loading screens: releasing the button for Launch will propel an object towards its target, regardless of its current position. Launching an object before it reaches Jesse will blindside the Elevated, since they can't see it coming, but anything in the way can block the Launch, making you waste energy.
This can be generalized to encompass any and all flying/levitating enemies regardless of what they do and how they attack, simply because their agility and erratic movement patterns make them so much harder to hit, which in turn makes them much more durable and dangerous than most ground-bound enemies. Their height and distance from solid surfaces also makes them mostly immune to the blast radius of Charge and Surge attacks. That almost all flying enemies are powerful Elite Mooks only makes them more frustrating. Special mentions must be made of Airborne Rangers for dealing at least as much damage as Hiss Elevated while also throwing grenades and spawning in much greater numbers simultaneously.
Disappointing Last Level: The beginning parts of "Take Control" are rather climactic for Jesse's character arc, but once the climactic realization is reached, the actual combat with enemies and complete lack of a true Final Boss, on top of the realization that Dylan is just another victim of the Hiss rather than their leader (meaning he is merely The Heavy without any actual Big Bad) leave a lot to be desired.
He only appears in on-screen TVs, but Dr. Darling is immensely popular with the fanbase for his cheery demeanor, making infodumps engaging, and his absolutely hilarious performance of "Dynamite" near the end.
esseJ, due to the ambiguity surrounding her nature, her boss fight, and one of the rewards for defeating her being the fan-favorite Asynchronous Suit.
Friendly Fandoms: The game quite obviously gained some appreciation from fans of the SCP Foundation. The devs have even cited SCP as an inspiration and were going to thank them in the credits, but were unfortunately advised not to by their lawyers.
Hiss Charged, which explode as soon as they get close enough to Jesse, and do high damage if they connect. While on their own they aren't very dangerous, they almost always come in groups and make an effort to surround Jesse, which is very frustrating in heated fights due to needing to focus on them at the expense of other dangerous enemies.
Hiss Demolition Experts can become this as well. Similarly to the Charged, they are weak and easily defeated on their own, but deal a ton of damagenote typically a single direct hit will reduce you to below half health unless you've fully upgraded it with their [REDACTED]-seeking RPGs. They also spawn in large numbers while you're fighting more aggressive enemies, and have a frustrating habit of hanging back and attempting to sneak up on Jesse from the sides or behind, with you only noticing them once you hear the rocket-launch sound effect.
Good Bad Bugs: During the fight against Mold-1, it's possible to position Jesse in such a way that it will never attack. Specifically, when Jesse drops down the hole there's a large cube providing natural defense to her right. If Jesse is standing slightly to the right of that, Mold-1 will never attack while Jesse can. Moving out of cover will cause the boss to attack, but moving back to position will again result in it not attacking. This trivializes the fight..
It's Short, So It Sucks!: The most prevailing criticism of AWE is its short length (est. 2-3 hours) compared to Foundation (est. 4-5 hours). While AWE is generally liked for what it is, players and critics were mostly disappointed with the lack of overall content, especially given the hype of crossing over directly with Alan Wake (it's been speculated that much of the development was rushed and scaled down due to its production taking place during the start of the COVID-19 Pandemic).
The fandom likes declaring that any areas lit by red light or colored red are infected with the Hiss.
A particular corridor in the maintenance sector has become infamous for causing performance to tank if traversed while Ray Tracing is on, leading Digital Foundry to nickname it the "Corridor of Doom" and use it for their graphics card benchmarks.
Porting Disaster: The base PlayStation 4 version had notable performance problems at launch, with the frame rate falling to 15 fps in battles in complex areas. Hopefully, many problems were later fixed.
Quirky Work: The entire setting takes place in an Eldritch Location where reality constantly changes and warps. Jesse becomes the director of the Bureau simply by picking up a shapeshifting gun. Your crafting materials include patterns and memories. You'd be forgiven for thinking the entire plot was basically a huge acid trip.
Scrappy Mechanic: The in-game map has given players a lot of trouble, as it only represents broad sectors that tend to have multiple stories in a single-layered illustration, with vague indications on how to traverse between them. Especially as you're exploring early on and need to clear through new areas and paths to advance, it can get pretty confusing if you rely on the map given it doesn't make clear if you're in need of a staircase or elevator that may or may not be present at the end of certain paths. Many players recommend to newcomers to ignore it entirely as the in-universe signage tends to work surprisingly better in telling you where you need to go.
Scrappy Weapon: Spin is widely considered the weakest Service Weapon Form. It's a machine pistol with a blisteringly fast rate of fire, but is so inaccurate it's only really effective at close range, has a low ammo capacity, and never really packs enough of a punch to make up for this. It's overshadowed by Shatter as a powerful close-quarters weapon, and Grip can deliver a reasonable rate of fire with far greater accuracy and range.
Signature Scene: Jesse's traversal through the Ashtray Maze after Ahti gives her the cassette player. The song "Take Control" plays throughout the whole scene and not only helps keep the pace of the level high, but it adds a level of Power Fantasy to the scene that was mostly absent in the rest of the game. In what was originally an untraversable part of the game, the Ashtray Maze becomes accessible, creating constantly shifting rooms that not only look cool, but half the time it helps Jesse by trapping some enemies, bottle-necking others and providing props that she can throw at them with her Launch ability.
The Federal Bureau of Control has drawn numerous comparisons to the SCP Foundation: Government Agencies of Fiction tasked with locating, securing and containing various supernatural phenomena, maintaining warehouses stuffed with various Objects of Power/SCPs, seeking to maintain the Masquerade but undermined by slightly suspicious upper management, leaving documentation lying around that has tons of redactions and always starts with whether the Object has any special containment procedures, and constantly vulnerable to Containment Breaches. The developers cited the SCP Foundation as an inspiration for the game, and it shows.
There is a somewhat shared theme with The Lost Room, which could be considered an AWE that wasn't picked up by the FBC and number of Altered Items and Objects of Power left running loose across America.
This could include Warehouse 13 as well. If the Warehouse was in New York City instead of rural South Dakota, was explicitly a Federal agency instead of an Ancient Conspiracy hiding within the Government, and had more than six people on staff at any one time.
Then there's the fact that it takes place in a large building called the Oldest House, which has vastly different interior and exterior dimensions (to the point where a scale diagram of the Oldest House based on measurements taken within has it being at least three times the size of the Empire State Building) and the fact that the Foundation of the Oldest House is called its Roots by the Board— trees, and the concept of the World Tree specifically, were a common motif throughout House of Leaves.
Whatever similarities Control does not share with the SCP Foundation, it shares with the Southern Reach. A government foundation staffed by fairly normal people struggling with typical obstacles one might find in a US bureaucracy trying to tangle with paranatural forces it really only occasionally understands. Area X and The Oldest House are both hostile to modern technology and those that attempt to use it, necessitating its agents to struggle with outdated equipment when they enter. Their directors are former drifters with pasts linked to the department that fell into the position partly due to their unfinished business with said department. Hell, the game even shares its name with the "name" of one of Southern Reach's main characters.
To some, this is probably the closest we'll get to a Psi-Ops sequel.
The game has been noted to evoke themes that remind one of Mage, specifically drawing on an NWO view and can be interpreted as Jesse awakening, Polaris or the Board being Jesse's Avatar/Genius and the whole game being about cleaning out an overrun Construct. Her powers are all aligned with a Forces user.
With the release of the Tales from the Loop series released just under a year after Control, some make the comparison between them and assume that Control is a video game adaptation of the books and their tabletop game adaptation that spawned it; a World of Weirdness caused by and/or being investigated and controlled by a government facility who's headquarters is a large concrete building (The Oldest House/The Loop), a floating spherical Applied Phlebotinum that is the source of the some of the anomalous stuff happening (Hedron/The Eclipse), a shakey grasp of linear-time and the aesthetics of the setting done in a mid-century modern style.
In AWE there is Vending Spree, where you must destroy about five possessed Vending Machines. The issue being they appear at random and only when you damage a Vending machine. Some players have complained that they have spent hours and haven't yet encountered one.
Supportive Staff unlocks once five enemies have been killed by a Deployed Ranger. The AI of Deployed Rangers is mind-numbingly dumb, easily the worst of any entity in the game. Most of the time the Ranger will just be running around the area while the Hiss take potshots at him, and in the rare case he actually decides to shoot back, he'll usually miss his target. It can take a long time for a Ranger to kill anything even if you took pains to whittle multiple enemies down to a sliver of their health. The achievement's one saving grace is that the five kills needn't be done by a single Ranger, allowing you to collect them over multiple attempts and campaigns.
Salvador. Enjoy fighting a Super Elevated with armor, telekinetic attacks that can easily two-shot you, a tiny arena, and hordes of minions, including (naturally) rocket-firing ones. Also enjoy the walk of shame back, which involves some Armored Elevated.
Mold-1 for the most part can be a real pain in the ass, as the arena in which you fight is quite limited in cover, and each of its attacks — from ramming its tendrils into you, to dropping explosives all across the ground, to firing swarms of homing missiles — are very cumbersome to dodge and are all able to tear chunks off your health, and the only damage points that create health pickups are on the fast-moving tentacles and can't be easily hit from the front. There is a well-known A.I. Breaker strategy to cheese your way to victorynote Jesse can just barely peek over the right side of the large rock mound in a way where she can freely shoot, ideally causing Mold-1 to just stand still until it dies, there's a possibility that it can still unleash poison gas from the ground specifically to flush you out of your position.
FORMER alternates between physical strikes and energy blasts, both of which are reasonably easy to avoid, but the most frustrating feature comes from how they create holes in the arena, creating death pits. That itself isn't so bad in concept either, but because FORMER floats well above you, you're not able to pay attention to it and the floor at the same time, which will usually result in a lot of dumb deaths of falling into pits you couldn't see. The fight was later patched to make the holes only appear when the FORMER directly strikes the ground.
The Anchor can be surprisingly difficult, mostly due to the Hiss enemies who spawn in the middle of the fight. It is relatively easy to hit the Anchor's core with a clock when you're not being threatened, but the Hiss make it much harder to focus on the narrow window to throw the clock, and there's no way to mitigate the damage if the Anchor is able to fire on the platform Jessie is standing on. Fortunately, the difficulty can be mitigated with Charge, which has splash damage that can hit the Anchor's core from any angle while it is charging up its attack.
The Third Act Villain during the 'Jesse Faden Starring in Swift Platform' mission in the Foundation DLC can be a surprising headache. While it's just a boss-level Hiss Elevated, your encounter with it takes place on a small platform over a fast-moving rail that doesn't have much room to maneuver around, with the only other option being jumping across to the other moving platform. The boss's powerful attacks can easily drop you to low health, few other enemies will appear to generate health pick-ups, and most that do spawn on the other platform, meaning getting to the pick-ups is a risk unto itself. The cherry on top is dying means you have to do the entire cart ride gauntlet again, which will lead many to just giving up on the mission in frustration.
Corrupted Samples are needed to construct some of the more powerful Service Weapon Forms, their tier-two upgrades, and in advanced mod crafting. But while most other resources in the game can be acquired in reasonable quantities by completing side missions and Bureau Alerts or opening caches, the only way to get a Corrupted Sample is to kill Mould Hosts. What makes it even worse is that not every Host drops a Sample, and there's only one small area in the entire map where they actually respawn.
There's also Untapped Potential, a rare resource required to complete the tier 3 upgrade for each of the Service Weapon Forms. While you can get one instance of it for 'free' by completing the first "Langston's Runaways" side mission (which is fairly easy), every other instance must be gained through beating one of the game's Optional Bosses — (esseJ, FORMER, Mould-1, The Anchor and Tommasi). Given that every single one of these is a tough fight and can kill you in a handful of two hits, you're in for a rough time if you want to max out your full arsenal.
The "Personnel Protection" side missions are easily the worst of the three types. You're tasked with protecting three Rangers while attempting to kill a large number of Hiss. While this sounds simple, the Rangers are stupid, uncontrollable, and of no help whatsoever. Meanwhile, the Hiss only grow stronger as you progress in the game, and while the Rangers do scale with you, it's not enough to change the fact that the stronger Hiss will just kill them quicker. It's not even worth doing them after a while, because failure is almost a guarantee.
The Jukebox Missions. You have to traverse four sectors and complete their specific goals (King of the Hill three times, three waves of enemies, search three bodies, and throw three Hiss-corrupted cubes into the furnace), then kill the Distorted Elite Mook guarding the prize. Each mission comes with random mutations for Jesse and the Hiss. That alone can be tough depending on who gets what. The real tough part is that there's a 25 minute time limit, and dying doesn't eject you from the mission. You simply respawn at the starting point and the sector you were trying to clear resets, which can be hell if you die on the wave battle. If you fail it you have to start the mission all over again, making it feel like a Luck-Based Mission. Then to just start the missions you need to Tokens, either taken from named enemies or crafted. There can be times where you are just hunting down Hiss to grind for materials to make said Tokens. It is completely different than any of the gameplay up to that point. The only positive thing most players have said about this mission is that it is completely optional.
The AWE DLC features SHUM, an arcade cabinet that sends wave after wave of troops, for 10-20 solid minutes of combat. Beating it is one of the final missions of the game, but even with a fully upgraded character, you are a bit of a glass cannon, and an extended combat encounter like that makes it darn near impossible. Fans particularly dislike "Deadline (Challenge)" (a Timed Mission where killing enemies gives three seconds back) due to the strict and unforgiving timeframe required to beat it, the heavy reliance on lucky spawns to get through, and the fact that the usually aggressive AI likes to camp out or hide in corners when there's one enemy left, seemingly deliberately trying to stall out the timer.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The set-up of "What a Mess: Burn the Trash" is that Ahti wants Jesse to burn hazardous material in the Furnace in the Maintenance Sector. Notes and a recording imply that the Furnace houses an Eldritch Abomination that needs to be fed or else and that it drove one of the workers there mad. Maybe. Some players thought that the mission made for a fun first mission that perfectly encapsulates the Mundane Horror the game tries to evoke. Others think that more should or could have been done with this idea, either as a boss fight or introducing a new enemy type or a noise at least to clue us in that there is more to this part of the building than a fire pit made for burning trash.
The PC version was one of the first to support full Nvidia RTX raytracing, and it shows, providing jaw-dropping real-time lighting, shadows and reflections that would be otherwise virtually impossible. In particular, the raytraced reflections shine through, as demonstrated by the sheer number of reflective surfaces that populate The Oldest House and the Astral Plane in particular.note Raytraced reflections are significantly more accurate than the type of reflections used for quite a while, called "screen space reflections", which can't reflect anything that isn't directly on the screen, whereas raytracing can do this. Some older games like Half-Life 2 and the original Deus Ex had proper reflections, but this stopped when polygon counts and shader complexity became high enough that full reflections become far too costly for traditional rasterizer renderers. When RTX reflections are enabled, the Hotline Room becomes a room of incredibly accurate mirror reflections, and even certain monitors will show Jessie's reflection when the camera is zoomed in on them. Nvidia's DLSS 2.0 tech also makes good-quality raytracing far more achievable at 60 FPS at decent resolutions.
Alan Wake in the original game looked pretty good for 2010's graphics. Here? Alan looks stunning with the Northlight Engine, eerily looking just like his real life model. In general, it's clear that Remedy improved the Northlight Engine from Quantum Break, an already very stunning game, making the settings and characters feel much closer to real life than they've ever had before.
A small but very cool effect comes from the various film projectors which are fully mobile world objects. You can pick those up with Jesse's telekinesis and move them around, and the projection will move accordingly to be displayed on whatever surface the projector happens to point at.
Like explained in Porting Disaster, the PS4 version had performance problems at launch, but Remedy corrected them quickly.
Remedy announcing the PlayStation 5 optimized edition would only come automatically to those who bought the Ultimate Edition led to backlash. However, the Ultimate Edition being offered to PS4 owners as one of the PlayStation Plus free games upon the release of the PS5 port of the game, complete with the option to upgrade to the PS5 version, can be considered a good apology.
The Woobie: The "Fridge Duty" mission gives us poor, poor Phillip, a random FBC agent who's been stuck over a day in a room with an Altered Item that will kill him if he looks away. By the time Jesse finds him, he's a complete wreck and desperately waiting for someone to get him out of there, which makes the fact you can't save him a pretty huge Player Punch.
", which plays on the Walkman given to you by Ahti so you can navigate the Ashtray Maze. It plays as you blast your way through over a dozen Hiss, and holds deeper meaning to Jesse and the rest of the game as well.