Control starts with Beth entering the lobby of the "Federal Bureau of Control". She finds the place deserted, except for a Nordic janitor, who directs her to a lift that appears out of nowhere. Beth soon discovers she's been appointed Director of this mysterious building. She is handed a magic gun by a talking pyramid and is ordered to rid the place of the former staff, who have turned homicidal thanks to the effects of some mind-altering artefact.
So Control is a Sci-Fi/New weird fiction game that borrows its concept from the collaborative works of the internet horror wiki, The SCP Foundation. With this premise, I was immediately hooked. Lots of things about this game and setting are purposefully strange and fun to think about. One of the first things you find is a piece of paper, asking visitors to not bring in - among other things - rubber ducks and ketchup bottles. Beth also has an invisible friend she keeps whispering to who is probably you, the player. Even the building itself is a strange character; a humongous brutalist space that routinely shuffles its insides. The only boring character in the whole game is Beth herself. I think she
is purposely as bland and boring as possible, that way we've got a normal straight-woman to react to the wacky companions and situations.
About half the game is spent shooting glowy red humanoids. It's fun at first, but it eventually gets repetitive. The enemy all look the same, and its not enough to slap some funky particle effects on them to hide the fact that you are killing the same half dozen enemy types over and over. It's the exact same problem Prey has in this regard; the novel sci-fi concept gets undermined by repetitive enemies in same-ish looking locales. I miss the days of Half Life, where you could be fighting a three legged screaming pig alien in the first room, an army tank in the second, and who knows what in the third.
The other half of the game involves reading through endless notes, letters, audio logs and other ephemera you find lying about the Bureau. You have to stop the game dead every time you want to look at anything, and reading only makes things worse. Explanation is the death of wonder, and all the exciting mysteries you are exposed to have a long, detailed analysis sat on some desk somewhere. I would have preferred there to be less exposition and more left to the imagination.
Long before you finish Control, you feel an urge to get it over and done with. When you finally do start to rush to the end, you discover there isn't even a proper ending. I completed every last side mission and additional objective, just to see if this brought about something less anti-climactic, but alas it makes no difference. So whilst I enjoyed Control for a while, it is a game that wears out its welcome.
Tintin and the SCP Foundation
Control starts with Beth entering the lobby of the "Federal Bureau of Control". She finds the place deserted, except for a Nordic janitor, who directs her to a lift that appears out of nowhere. Beth soon discovers she's been appointed Director of this mysterious building. She is handed a magic gun by a talking pyramid and is ordered to rid the place of the former staff, who have turned homicidal thanks to the effects of some mind-altering artefact.
So Control is a Sci-Fi/New weird fiction game that borrows its concept from the collaborative works of the internet horror wiki, The SCP Foundation. With this premise, I was immediately hooked. Lots of things about this game and setting are purposefully strange and fun to think about. One of the first things you find is a piece of paper, asking visitors to not bring in - among other things - rubber ducks and ketchup bottles. Beth also has an invisible friend she keeps whispering to who is probably you, the player. Even the building itself is a strange character; a humongous brutalist space that routinely shuffles its insides. The only boring character in the whole game is Beth herself. I think she is purposely as bland and boring as possible, that way we've got a normal straight-woman to react to the wacky companions and situations.
About half the game is spent shooting glowy red humanoids. It's fun at first, but it eventually gets repetitive. The enemy all look the same, and its not enough to slap some funky particle effects on them to hide the fact that you are killing the same half dozen enemy types over and over. It's the exact same problem Prey has in this regard; the novel sci-fi concept gets undermined by repetitive enemies in same-ish looking locales. I miss the days of Half Life, where you could be fighting a three legged screaming pig alien in the first room, an army tank in the second, and who knows what in the third.
The other half of the game involves reading through endless notes, letters, audio logs and other ephemera you find lying about the Bureau. You have to stop the game dead every time you want to look at anything, and reading only makes things worse. Explanation is the death of wonder, and all the exciting mysteries you are exposed to have a long, detailed analysis sat on some desk somewhere. I would have preferred there to be less exposition and more left to the imagination.
Long before you finish Control, you feel an urge to get it over and done with. When you finally do start to rush to the end, you discover there isn't even a proper ending. I completed every last side mission and additional objective, just to see if this brought about something less anti-climactic, but alas it makes no difference. So whilst I enjoyed Control for a while, it is a game that wears out its welcome.