VideoGame Control: A Flawed, but Entrancing and Unforgettable Experience
Control is a Third-Person Shooter Metroidvania heavily inspired by surreal, quasi-horror works like the SCP Foundation and House of Leaves, and produced by the folks who created Alan Wake and Quantum Break. If you're familiar with any combination of those things, you probably know what to expect: a labyrinthian Action-Adventure romp with emphasis on stylized atmosphere, an esoteric, somewhat metatextual plot, issues with integration of story and gameplay, and a whole lot of love for its inspirations.
Remedy Entertainment has always made interesting games, and even if they have clear struggles working with the paradigm of gameplay, they've at least found intrigue in hitching players along for the ride. If I had to mark Control with a single theme, it would be "discovery", and it's a crux much more robustly defined than usual for Remedy. The game being much more nonlinear/explorative than their usual work ties in nicely with the uncovering of the The Oldest House, the various extradimensional threats, and the fate of your mysterious brother. The Oldest House is a beautifully unsettling world that gorgeously blends the mundane with the truly alien in ways you rarely see being explored with games with budgets as big as this. Esoteric, perhaps, but adventurous and imaginative, creating many really fun scenarios, puzzles, and story beats to get lost in.
The biggest faltering point is, unfortunately, the main gameplay loop of combat, which once again for Remedy feels conspicuously detached from their strengths, like a token addition to justify what it really wants to do. This lack of tact manifests in some enemies and especially bosses as being not as palatable as they should be, brought on not necessarily by harsh difficulty spikes, but the game throwing a few too many patterns and combat paradigms at you to work with.
Not that the combat lacks merit; the alternating gunplay among a vast array of psychic maneuvering and firepower is overall functional, the joy of psychically launching the environment is a fun enough "hook" to build on, and there is catharsis to be found in these volatile clashes in such an aesthetically pristine world, but it definitely deserved more ambition and refinement to put it over a baseline of "ok".
This is a tricky experience to rate: it's a game that sets off to achieve very ambitious goals and pulls them off very well, they just have an unfortunate problem of being mostly secondary-to-tertiary when packaged as a "game," and the perfunctory core loop of gunplay may very well be enough to alienate those who prefer experiences which weaves these aspects together better.
But from me personally, if you're willing to overlook the occasional jank, it's worth it. Dark and confusing as it may be, there's so much intrigue, uniqueness, and just plain love that Control has to offer that's worth remembering. It's a flawed, but unforgettable experience.
VideoGame 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.
VideoGame Almost a good game
Control is especially frustrating because it's got enough good ideas that you want to like it, while everything is mishandled just enough to make it difficult.
The gameplay has some very cool ideas that I haven't seen anywhere else, introducing mechanics that really lets you feel like you've got Mind over Matter. What's not to like about getting to fly around and throw vending machines at people?
The problem is that those nifty widgets are tied to a core system with a lot of fumbled elements. Jesse is far too fragile to just run in guns blazing, often going down to a single hit from an enemy you didn't even know was there. And the problem is not helped by the fact that a lot of fights are against red enemies in red rooms shooting red missiles at you. Yes, great, scary otherworldly vistas, fine, very evocative... but I need to be able to see what I'm doing so I can actually play the game, people!
And at the same time, while there is a very rudimentary cover mechanic, the game doesn't work as a cautious tactical cover-based shooter either; there are too many things that can get around covers, and enemies keep spawning behind you. What it amounts to is that you end up running around like an idiot, hammering buttons and hoping that you'll randomly manage to throw off the aim of the enemies outside of the screen for a few more seconds.
As for the story, it's similarly promising but flawed. The Oldest House is interestingly trippy, with some quirky humour in the many documents you find, but after a while one bland offices space with creepy chanting people hanging in the air starts looking the same as the next. And the actual characters you meet are not nearly interesting enough to put a human face to it all. They all fall pretty firmly into the two categories of "super-nice and wise and generally perfect" and "annoying, clueless git."
The two exceptions are Darling and Trench, both of whom are Posthumous Characters, and both of whom also get pretty thoroughly vilified for not being as bland as their peers. I was especially disappointed at where Trench's arc ended. For most of the game, the most interesting thing for me was seeing how his personality, priorities and formative experiences had informed his way of running the bureau and thus set the stage for the current events, for better or worse. Revealing him at the last second to have been brainwashed by the Hiss and thus solely responsible for the disaster didn't sit right with me.
Also, in conclusion, I wasn't thrilled with the heavy undercurrent of Women Are Wiser. While it never gets too blatant, I didn't miss the fact that all female characters are infallible and all male characters are either ridiculously meek and submissive or egomaniacs who ruin everything with their filthy masculine need to assert themselves. The definite hint at the end that everything's going to be okay now because we've finally got a team-player female Director after two authoritarian male Directors stuck in my craw, especially since Jesse never does seem like much of a team player - she spends the whole game keeping her own council and dealing with every problem personally. And wasn't that supposed to be Trench's Fatal Flaw, that led to this whole mess in the first place?