Control (2019)

The three phases of my relationship with Control:

1. Woo, I like this haunted municipal office vibe! I love these small puzzles that are actually more complex than the usual triple A fare! Mh, combat is not bat, it's dynamic, it doesn't let you stay too much in cover, and I like beating the shit out of people by throwing furniture at them! I'm gonna do all the side quests!

2. Jeez, you really spend the whole game shooting with the same weapon and throwing furniture, you don't need anything else, it's kinda boring. I want to complete it, I'm still intrigued, but I'm giving up on side quests.

3. OK, the game doesn't force it on me, but what happens if I start using all the weapons and powers just for fun? What happens is I have a lot of fun! And I end up doing all the side quests, even the DLC one with the floating islands. Nice! And I like this weird ending.

Side notes:

1. This thing that it gives you a lot of stuff you can do but it doesn't force you to do it, it lets you do whatever you want with it, reminded me of Metal Gear Solid 2. It's not a comparison, not a good thing, not a bad thing, it's just something that happened.
2. When I found the ashtray maze for the firtst time, I thought it was really suggestive and I wondered about how much fun it was gonna be to explore it and "solve it". Then, at the end of the game, I went through it and it bored me to death: there's sooo many better things before it.
3. I've got the two big DLCs, they are looking at me, I had just started the Alan Wake one but I had to leave on vacation and then life happened. But I will play them.

Well I was gonna write a review of my own but this one will do lol https://www.grouvee.com/user/Cold_Comfort/reviews/1890614/

I can't get how it was lauded as a masterpiece by many many people. I only built up the will to beat it now because 1: Alan Wake 2 came out, and this is connected. 2: I found the settings to god-mode it through the combat.

But I do want to clarify one point of this review I linked: No, having read more of the SCP wiki didn't make this better, it made it WAY worse lol

Not only are MANY of the objects and notes almost direct recreations of SCPs from the site, even with the same writing style and redacted nature, but they don't do anything with it!!!

I thought the reason to blatantly copy or reuse SCP material was precisely to give it more life, to flesh it out, but the game is content with just having notes or static models behind glass for 90% of the objects it describes. And then when you actually interact with some of them, it's a super boring "kill this wave of hiss" and then you get a double jump. What does this have to do with the object you cleansed? Nothing, but was it cool reading about it?"

the AWE DLC was a bit better at having you not just do combat against the same 5 zombies over and over, and had some interesting SCP.. I mean sorry, objects of power, but even then it was limited by the systems of the game itself.

Rewards can only be RPG crap that I didn't even look at. Interactions can only be "Press F" or "Shoot at it".

I love SCP, i want adaptations of it to give me the fantasy of actually investigating and having to interact with them, and "there are zombies around an SCP, shoot them and move on" is the worst possible way to take advantage of it. (For an actual good SCP-esque story hunt down the tv show The lost room)

And even leaving aside the SCP stuff, like the other review said, the plot is just forcefully thrusted into the setting, with their systems not allowing for any meaningful NPC interaction or event other than "in this room you can go through an info-dump dialogue tree". I'm replaying Alan Wake and even tho that game is also guilty of repetitive TPS mechanics, at least you move around a lived in world with NPCs that can WALK and MOVE with you, and have needs and wants and agency.

Control I imagine was very limited in budget, going independent from microsoft and whatnot... But it feels like they spent it on visual fluff and nothing else. Very pretty, mind you, but not a balanced recipe.

I guess I ended up writing a review huh lol I was very frustrated by this whole game.

While it was fun in the beginning, as you progress you realize the game is kinda stale.

The premise is basically SCP Foundation, which is interesting, but the story is boring. Everyone you encounter is an emotionless brick wall, even the MC. Every time it pans to us talking to someone, her face is so blank and her eyes are staring daggers into whoever is in front of her. Other times, her eyes arent even focusing on the person. Her animations and voice acting isnt helping in convincing me she cares about her brother that she is here to save.

The gist of the gameplay is fetch quests and running around like a headless chicken trying to pick up health points as youre bombarded with 20 enemies everywhere you go. The supernatural abilities after launch are tedious to use, as is weapon upgrading. You need to grind the materials, as they drop randomly.

After being away from my computer for a while, I realized I was pushing myself just to finish this game. While the premise is interesting, everything else is either boring or tedious. Sadly, I did not finish it and dont see myself ever finishing it.

Either I'm too dumb to understand the story or Remedy is just bad at storytelling. I felt this same way about Alan Wake. At least the gameplay is decent. Sure, chucking things things at enemies gets repetitive quick but the game has a smooth feel to it, feels polished. Don't bother with exploration and collectibles though, they're not worth it.

My playthrough highlights:

Note: this includes the AWE and Foundation DLC releases. They will be considered in the game's final product.

Control is a game that's chock filled with strange narratives and stranger happenings, woven together by an amazing combination of combat, exploration, and narrative.

A woman (Jesse Faden) with a mysterious past enters a surreal building in New York, The Oldest House. Finding herself chosen as the Director of a shadowy government bureau, the player controls her and her power to cleanse the bureau of a dangerous entity known as Hiss. This involves exploring the Oldest House and its various spaces which have been corrupted and morphed by the Hiss.

Fighting the Hiss can be done a few ways - either by using a gun called the Service Weapon which can morph into various different modes that the player can upgrade, or gain supernatural abilities from Objects of Power scattered throughout the Oldest House. This can range from telekinetic throws to shields to an immensely satisfying levitation. While the player can be encouraged to stick with a basic power or gun the game's difficulty is punishing enough to encourage playing around with different builds and powers.

Apart from combat, the player can also explore this gorgeous building inside and out with these powers. As a 3D Metroidvania Control encourages flying around and searching every little corner for goodies. This can range from hidden items and upgrade points to complicated puzzles that present quite the mystery to newcomers. The game splits out combat with similar adventure game elements (i.e. the Motel) that relax the pacing of the game and hammer in the strangeness of this world. There are also a ton of different bits of story lying around, with correspondence papers, how-to videos, audio logs, and children show episodes. Control has a LOT invested in its strange narrative of strange objects doing strange things and will have plenty of little stories to keep people hooked past the main story.

Speaking of exploring and cleansing the Oldest House, the setting of Control is perhaps one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen in video games (graphics issues notwithstanding due to the PS4). Concrete walls and sculptures adorn shifting spaces and lush foliage lights up an otherwise dreary research center. For an office building Control is one of dreams, unrestrained by any physical limits. The music varies, with either ambient works that trickle into the back of your brain and that spike up just as combat hits or one of the better uses of an in-game musician that I've ever seen in media. Characters are also well worth engaging with, as their personality quirks are charming but all mean business in the face of everyday life and death.

Control is a game that may take some time to get used to with regards to playing with abilities, weapons, and exploration but when it clicks (and it will definitely click by the time you hit DLC content) you've got an amazingly wild and weird adventure on your hands.

FINAL THOUGHTS.

After all is said and done, I still stand by my overall statements. "Control" is style over substance, mostly because the substance is based on a pre-existing internet website, and what "story" they created for the plot is mundane as hell. That doesn't mean the game isn't worth the time, however. Despite all my irritants with it - its vagueness, its bugginess, its overall refusal to lead you anywhere at all - it was certainly a unique and interesting ride that nothing else will ever come close to, and that's what Remedy does best.

The Alan Wake DLC was a dream come true, but that's just because I'm the worlds biggest Alan Wake fan. The Ashtray Maze might be one of the single coolest things I've ever seen in a game and I cannot for the life of me fathom how they did that. And, above all else, Casper Darling is hands down the greatest thing to come out of this game. Every single second watching that man was a joy. Love my boy.

But...even within its good moments, they aren't often enough to block out the bad, and it is a lot of bad. Like I said the other night, "Control" is the video game equivalent of the TV show "The Walking Dead", in that it's very very mediocre, but it's very very good at making you think it's better than it is. Unlike The Walking Dead, however, Control is worth the time, even with all its faults and flaws. It was a fun ride, I still have a lot of cleanup, and I still have The Foundation DLC to do to wrap it all up, but all in all I'm glad I played it, even if I didn't really enjoy it.

However, I am happy it exists because its success means Remedy will make better games, like Alan Wake 2. God I cannot wait for Alan Wake 2.

Remarkable. That's the only word I can use to describe this game, but perhaps not the reason you're thinking. It's remarkable to me that a game of this caliber, from a studio this established, can win so many awards and attain so much hype when it's so fundamentally game breaking broken in so many ways that render it almost outright unplayable at times.

There's so much I wanna like about it, but it is testing every nerve of my patience, and on the whole, I think my ultimate review will be "Control is a bad game that should've been good, and is very good at tricking you into thinking it's not as bad as it is."

I enjoyed this overall. The setting is just fantastic fun. I did have some gripes though: The story isn't all that, and the mechanics work and are good but don't exactly raise the stakes.

I thought the game really shines it's most when playing the Foundation DLC/Add on/Whatever, by the time you play this you'l be fully leveled/skilled and all your powers flow seamlessly into what the game is throwing at you.

I don't consider it perfect, but it's a damn good game with enough going for it I'd recommend it for it's fun and sensationalistic (and oftentimes zany) world building alone!

Control was not an easy game to get into, but it ended up being one of the very few games that I explored 100%. I’d comb through each map looking for the next errant page of mail or a forgotten recording, hoping I’d be able to piece together at least one of the numerous mysteries of the Oldest House. I am not usually such a meticulous gamer, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Control had won my heart solely with its strong setting and narrative.

The beginning of Control might look like an absurd mess. It certainly put me off a little at first. There were tons of new concepts being introduced, with words that felt like bricks of nonsense such as “Altered Items,” “Collective Unconscious,” or the mouthful “Hedron Resonance Amplifier.” Eventually, after sticking through the first few hours, the dots started to connect and Control’s pseudoscientific logic became decipherable. I was kind of turning into a paranatural researcher myself, making discoveries that were sometimes funny, sometimes terrifying, and always very interesting. The more I learned, the more curious I became. Soon enough, curiosity became enthusiasm and I found myself thinking about Control even when the game wasn’t running.

I think the success of Control’s lore building came from Remedy’s efforts to make its setting as realistic and varied as possible. I was impressed that there were not only case files which I had expected, but also lost mails from concerned civilians, educational videos, creepy children’s shows, radio programs, whiteboard scribblings, and so much more packed into the Oldest House. The Federal Bureau of Control felt like an actual organization where people had lives, careers, and personal drama. The devs had put a lot of thought and love into this setting, and the details kept the story grounded even as events became crazier.

Of course, even the excellent setting would’ve still fallen flat if the gameplay wasn’t competent enough to hold it all up. The game mechanics weren’t anything groundbreaking or innovative in the genre, but it sure was fun, fast paced, and exciting. Certainly a great improvement compared to Remedy’s older games like Alan Wake. Everything felt smooth and the progression was satisfying. I especially liked how the healing system encouraged me to be in the middle of action, always moving, always reacting to the chaos around.

I do wish there had been an option to turn off the timed Bureau Emergencies, which popped up from time to time but had no bearing on the story. I ignored these after doing it once. Also the weapon and personal mods could’ve been more developed. It didn’t take long for me to find out that some mods were useless even at the “absolute level” while others such as the percentage damage mods were good at all levels. I think for some people this sort of thing might take away from the game experience, but I personally didn’t care too much because the abilities skill tree already offered enough combat variety that I was happy with.

I’d strongly recommend this game to anyone who enjoys the “weird fiction” genre. Books like House of Leaves and Annihilation often came to my mind as I played through Control. Any other lore focused gamer with a love for exploration would likely enjoy Control as well. Just remember to take the time to look around, pay attention, and don’t worry if things don’t make sense at first.

Not willing to write a long review for this one, but I simply loved it. It's a great game, the atmosphere is enveloping, creative and weird. It can sometimes feel like a kind of edgy horror game, but it's not.

This is a must play. I didn't know if I wanted to buy it, but I got it on PS Now and it really delivers! Lights give a great feeling to this game, I can't imagine what this can give on a RTX pc.

Every so often there are some games that are so simple that they capture your heart - Control is one of them.

With its dark undertones, weird black humour and ever so brooding atmosphere packed with stellar action gameplay that sometimes gets a tad bit repetitive, Control is one of those games where you can't get enough. You'll be left waiting for the DLCs.

No amount of words can do this game justice. An amazing story from Sam Lake, really fun combat and Metroidvania style exploration. Did I mention the gorgeous graphics yet? I've been waiting for this game since the day it was announced and I can say I wasn't disappointed. The ending is kinda ehhhh but I was mostly satisfied. I can also see how Sam Lake was inspired by the SCP Foundation, which is an exceptional concept.

Might be my game of the year.

P.S. Casper Darling husbando of the year