Control’s been out for the better part of a year now, right? So you’re thinking “Why is he covering this now? Nobody’s gonna watch/read this. Why am I watching/reading this? Why do I have this sudden urge to subscribe?"
Because I have to admit this game is kind of fucking awesome!
Welcome to EyeMakePlaysTV. Guys, I’m MrEMP and I don't think it’s a stretch for me to say that a good amount of the gaming community have written off IGN as a review publication. Pokemon fans will definitely remember that time they gave a game set in an archipelago, a lower score for there being “too much water.” Or how about the time the internet caught one of their reviewers plagiarising their takes on Dead Cells from a lesser known source. Funny thing on that one, he’d later dare the internet to find previous instances of plagiarism attached to his name on IGN. The internet immediately handed him receipts.
Knowing this, I didn’t know what to think when at the end of 2019, IGN awarded Remedy’s Control the “prestigious” title of Game of the Year. 2019 had some bangers from some of the industry’s heaviest hitters. Obsidian’s Outer Worlds. Capcom’s Resident Evil 2. Kojima’s Stork/UPS simulator. From Software’s Sekiro. Super Fucking Smash Brothers. These were 2019’s industry darlings. They could do no wrong. And, to be fair, they didn’t do much wrong. They were put on a pedestal for a reason, as the best representations of their respective genres. Even though I don’t think Death Stranding even had a genre. Honestly, a lot of times I wonder if Death Stranding was even a game.
Look, I didn’t know if I could trust IGN. I didn’t know if I should trust IGN. Well I knew I probably shouldn’t, but I knew a game like Control could slip under the radar for a good amount of people. That’s Finnish game developer Remedy’s M.O. That’s kind of their thing. I figured that’s a good enough reason for me to check it out. They're the team that brought us the perpetually underrated Alan Wake. A game that begs the question: If everyone says that you’re underrated, can you still be underrated? Everyone knows that Alan Wake is a fantastic game and if you don’t shame on you. You can redeem yourself by downloading and playing it right now. As of this video, it’s available on Xbox Game Pass.
Alan Wake checked all of my box’s. Almost eerily so. As a kid I loved RL Stine’s Goosebumps series. They gave me an appreciation for the disturbing that morphed into a love of Stephen King novels. A Stephen King obsession led to an infatuation with HP Lovecraft, or at least his work. These men and their supernatural stories are the reason that I started writing at a young age. I could see each of their influences in that game. In the setting of Bright Falls. In the supporting cast. In Alan himself. It was just so easy for me to immerse myself because the game knew what it was, what it wanted to accomplish, and the most interesting and immersive ways to get us there.
I’m pleased to say that, for the most part, IGN made the right call. Game of the Year? I don’t know. That doesn’t really mean shit anyway. I will say that Control is a good game that is able to replicate a lot of the same things that Alan Wake had going for it, while remaining wholly unique. It borders on great, though does fumble some things that Wake and other games are able to do very well. It’s another game from Remedy that wears its influences on its sleeves, yes, and it does lean heavily into some science fiction tropes but I don’t think that's a bad thing. It’s a bit like Men In Black, with some Twilight Zone thrown in, some X files for flavor, all wrapped up. Secured. Contained. Protected, if you will... I don’t know about you, but as a concept that sounds right up my alley.
Did Remedy nail the concept? How about the execution? As far as Control is concerned...Here’s how eye see it.
STORY ELEMENTS
In Control, you play as Jesse Faden. A woman with a mysterious past, defined by her childhood interaction with what is known as an Object of Power. After seventeen years of searching for answers, the game begins with you entering the Oldest House, the headquarters for the shadowy Federal Bureau of Control. From the moment you come off of the busy New York City street, it doesn’t take long to make you feel as though you’ve stepped outside of your comfort zone. Even before you can even get past the metal detectors, there’s paperwork laying around going as far as denouncing “any items considered iconic representations of an archetypal concept.” The Federal Bureau of Control makes it very clear that, inside of the Oldest House, they don’t do normal.
Unfortunately, the bureau is facing a powerful internal threat that prevents Jesse from getting the answers she’s looking for right away. In order to get what she came for, she’ll have to assist, and at times rely on, an organization that has repeatedly raised red flags when it comes to whether or not they can be trusted.
A game like this lives, dies, and lives again by the quality of its story. While gameplay is important, the narrative for Remedy titles like Max Payne, Alan Wake, and Quantum Break are the driving forces behind many fans' desire to know more and more about what’s really going on. And there’s always more going on than meets the eye with these games. Over at Remedy, they know that if you give all of the answers up too easily, nobody’s going to be asking questions. They’ve seemingly mastered the art of drip feeding content to players in order to present new layers of complexity to a world that is initially designed, from location to art style, to feel very familiar. I’ll bring this familiarity back up again later.
Things often come together in this game through the use of collectibles. If there’s something mentioned for even a moment, chances are there are things strewn around nearby that shed some additional light. We’re given accounts of bureau day to day, past bureau missions, and insight into Altered Items. These really help the world feel alive in a way that many games don’t bother to even attempt, though ultimately it doesn’t feel like they matter all that much in the grand scheme of things.
Within an hour of play I had gotten an achievement for finding 40 collectibles. That was the first of many achievements I got for collecting so I can easily say that if collect-a-thons are your thing, this game is for you. Some people may think it’s overkill though. If you’re someone who likes to read everything available to you, be prepared to spend a good amount of time staring at official bureau correspondence.
Your goal is relatable, if not cliche. The missing family member thing has been done to death by every form of media you can think of. Still, who wouldn’t want their brother back after seventeen years? I’ll give them a pass for that. Seems more like a Macguffin than anything. An excuse to show up and raise hell.
Once you do show up, things get pretty interesting pretty quickly. You’re given a fancy gun, title, and free reign over the building within a few minutes. An entity known as the Hiss has gotten loose and has been corrupting the bureau. That includes both the agents and the Oldest House itself. The few people that have managed to hold out either don’t have the answers you’re looking for or refuse to help you until you help them. You’ve played video games, you know how this works.
These side characters they introduce throughout the game feel just as fleshed out as the environments. Each of them feels very different from one another but decidedly real. Emily Pope and her cheery demeanor give way to a destructive determination to move up within the bureau. Marshall’s icy stares and short responses speak to a hardened battle veteran who has seen more than she’s willing to discuss. Langston’s disarming normalcy...actually makes me kind of like the guy. I have nothing bad to say about ol’ boy. And Ahti the janitor. The less said about him, the better. And then we have Doctor Darling.
The problem with these characters, is the problem that I have with the game as a whole, that they don’t do enough with them. I’m not going to say that I’ve played through every side mission and dlc that this game has to offer but I will say that in the main campaign, these characters have their moment and then are largely forgotten about. They don’t factor into things as satisfying as you would think. Especially in a game where, like I said, little things frequently come together like puzzle pieces.
This story, and really the entire game, would have more lasting power if they had used the things they so expertly set up to stick the landing. The strong cast of side characters eventually gave way to what I consider the most glaring weakness of this game, a hero and villain pairing that I found especially weak. I found myself more interested in the bureau and the building itself than the struggles of our heroine. And the villain, while menacing, wasn’t very villainous.
The good news is that Control is a game with endless sequel and anthology potential. I believe that we will eventually see more games in this universe and that Remedy will expand upon their successes and learn from their mistakes.
VISUALS + AUDIO
The first thing I noticed when I started playing is that the game is downright beautiful. I’m playing on a 1 TB Xbox One S and I couldn’t help but notice that the character models look and move great. Jesse, the main character played by actress Courtney Hope, is a dead ringer for her real life counterpart. As are other characters in the game. This allowed Remedy to do some really cool stuff as far as marketing goes that I’d like to see more games do in the future, if they can do them as well as Remedy has done here.
The character models help to ground Control, which I believe is important to the entire package of what we’ve been presented. The realistic style begets familiarity. An important thing to set up, before the game begins to try its hardest to upend the familiar.
The environments in the game bring this almost sentient, shifting, maze of a building to life in ways that border on the uncanny. Use of things like dynamic lighting, fog, shadows, and reflections give way to the idea that the Oldest House is as much of a character as any of the supporting cast, if not more. Like I said earlier, this is a good thing and a bad thing.
There’s a variety of environments to explore, with secrets in/on/ and behind every nook and cranny. Honestly, each area can feel so different that it’s easy to forget that the entire game takes place in one building. You’ll go from decidedly mundane hallways, to underground passages overtaken by mold, to shifting mazes and each is wonderfully crafted by Remedy’s amazing in house engine.
The environment doesn't only look good when intact. Just about everything can be destroyed and boy is the destruction and the aftermath satisfying. There’s no way around it, you’re going to trash this building and when you do, you’ll be surprised at just how nice the mess looks. Walls collapse, concrete crumbles, paper flies, and metal bends all as they would in real life. The pieces each have a weight to them that the player can both see and feel as they lift objects into the air. As you chuck them at someone, you can see the impact when it wipes them out and where that copier you just launched crashed through the row of desks that were in its way.
Even better than how that copier looked when you threw it across the room, is how it sounded. Every action in Control is accompanied by an appropriate sound. Glass shattering, walls exploding, metal slamming against walls. Everything in the environment sounds like it does in real life when you destroy it. Every time you fire your gun, or launch a desk the sound is devastating as it looks. Every time an enemy screeches bloody murder at you, you tense up as if someone had taken nails to a chalkboard.
My favorite thing about the sound design in Control though has to be the constant hissing. The hiss are called that for a reason. As you make your way across the bureau, it’s almost as if you can hear it attempting to burrow its way into your mind through your ear. You’re always on edge because the hiss is always there. You never feel alone or safe for too long. The hiss is always whispering.
I’m reminded of Ninja Theory’s Hellblade: Senua Sacrifice. That game used binaural audio to attempt to accurately represent a failing psyche. On your quest to kill Hela, voices inside of your head would lament your chances. They’d cheer at your failures, jeer at your successes.
Control does not use the binaural audio effects that Hellblade does but achieves a similar feeling of making the player feel as though there is a force out there, maybe even inside of you, that doesn’t want to see you winning.
GAMEPLAY
Most times, when someone says third person shooter, their minds instantly transport them to a room with wide open space and waist high cover. Control has some of that, and you can certainly take the boring route and play cover to cover most of the game if that’s what you want to do for whatever reason, but that’s not where Control shines.
The game is not exactly easy, no, but there’s never a moment in Control’s combat where you don’t feel...well... in Control. You are Heisenberg. You are the danger. Your myriad of telekinetic paranatural abilities guarantee as much. You gather these throughout your time in the Oldest House, some of which are only available through side missions. There’s launch, evade, levitate, seize, and the shield. Most of these can be upgraded, to be combined with one another for devastating effect. For example, evading while you have your shield up acts as a sort of battering ram. You can do this while flying to bring the fight to a flying enemy without ever having fired your gun. On top of that, each of these can be leveled up RPG style and fine tuned to a degree with craftable mods.
More importantly than that though, each of these are crazy fun to use. For example, the launch. Ooh boy. Remember when I said just about everything can be destroyed? This is my favorite tool of destruction. You can rip just about anything from the environment and send it hurtling toward opposition. The first time I picked up a rock and launched it, I just about squealed. It feels really good. Just saying that is a gross understatement. By the time it’s entirely leveled up, you’re able to throw grenades back at enemies. You're able to throw the enemies themselves. You’re able to throw forklifts.
Madness. And I love it.
The gunplay itself can be satisfying. You feel the impact when firing most weapons in the game and, judging by how the enemies react, they feel it too. This is reflected in the amount of damage the enemy takes. They can dwindle a health bar pretty fast especially when combined with your abilities to almost sort of stagger the more powerful of the bunch.
Sometimes the hiss can overwhelm you. The game is not above spawning a good amount of enemies. The problem here is that you can easily use the environment to cheese things. At times I’d find myself clutching to my last bits of life behind a wall, popping out to take a few pot shots. And the enemies for the most part would just stand there and take it. They weren’t particularly good at forcing you to vary your playstyle. It’s up to you to do that and if you’re not very creative or are the type of player who feels like dying for style points is a waste of time, I can see how this combat system can get boring.
I did find myself wishing that the different weapon types were more distinguishable from one another. At the end of the day, everything boiled down to a different sort of pistol. From a machine pistol, to a shotgun pistol, to a railgun pistol, to....that’s just a pistol.
The charge gun though. This thing’s amazing.
The enemies are varied enough in name, but not so much in role or design. There were normal baddies and then more normal baddies but this time with armor. There are heavies and then there are heavies with armor. Flying and then - I’m sure you get the picture by now. In the main story even the bosses were some variation of each of these leading to almost run of the mill encounters. They would have names, but rarely would they have a face. As a matter of fact, there was never a face. Only the same enemy model that we’ve fought a million times before.
I mentioned earlier that the game wasn’t always a walk in the park. Even though you are really strong, you are not invincible. As a matter of fact, even with fully upgraded health most enemies can take a good chunk away from you if they’re able to make contact, especially the ones with similar telekinetic abilities to your own. That’s right, you aren’t the only one who can beam pieces of the wall at someone’s head. Parkour voldemort here knows that trick too so you’re going to need to keep moving. If not, be prepared to see this screen a lot.
You’re not fighting all of the time. Exploration of the Oldest House is a big part of the package in Control. Throughout the game, you have a rising clearance level that opens sections that may not have been available to you the first time you were in that area. This allows you to gather additional lore, access additional material, and see areas of the bureau that would otherwise remain classified. This means that there’s some backtracking. What keeps things interesting in this regard, is just how strange some of these things could get. The threshold kids are nightmare fuel. Straight outta of a creepypasta.
There are also some puzzle elements in Control, though in the main story these are few and far between. I always think of games like God of War, The Legend of Zelda, or the Tomb Raider reboot when it comes to puzzles in a third person action game. Compared to those games’ offerings, Control doesn’t even come close. It’s a shame too, being that the very nature of the bureau and the things they work to contain are so puzzling. Darling speaks as though there's a piece to that he’s missing and that once he has it, everything will make sense. These puzzles don’t feel fleshed out enough and because of that I can’t help but feel the same way.
FINALE
If I could use one word to describe the total package of Control, it would be atmospheric, though one word would make for a pretty shitty review. Like I said earlier about Alan Wake, Control knows what it is, and what it wants to accomplish. You can see that Control laid the groundwork for something far greater in scale. Where Control misses the mark, is in the journey. Alan Wake took the most interesting twists and turns to tell Alan’s tale. I can’t help but feel we haven’t seen the most interesting thing that the Federal Bureau of Control has hidden inside of the Oldest House.
That could be because, by the end, I was left wanting so much more. That’s the sign of any good piece of media, yes, but in this case I wanted more in the worst ways. I wanted more out of the side characters. I wanted to be able to relate to the main character more. I wanted to hate the villain more. I wanted more guns. I wanted more powers. I just wanted more.
I’m going to go ahead and give Control an 8 of 10. Which is the general consensus. It’s an enjoyable game that has a lot to offer gaming both right now and in the future. The concept is amazing and the execution is getting there. Given some more time and new tech, I’m excited to see what Remedy has for us going forward. I hope it’s more of this, because this type of shit is right up my alley. I’m MrEMP, signing off for EyeMakePlaysTV.