The Well-Lit Room

Last night I put the wrap on Alan Wake, and I have to say the longer I played it the more it grew on me. I still don’t love the conceit of shining a flashlight at shadow demons in order to drop their invulnerability and then having to figure out some other way to actually kill them. I think the game should have gone for one or the other. Either we kill them with mechanical means… or we use the flashlight to burn them away but the combination of both just feels awkward. When you get to needing to burn away shadow manifestations like possessed objects and the ever present shadow goo… that feels way more synchronous with the setting.

I think my biggest complaint is still the sheer number of times the game resets any advantages you have and forces you to go fumbling helpless through the dark. Now I get what the game was going for. This is literally a horror story being acted out by you the protagonist and the game tells you that directly. The story is about all of the near misses and times you were placed in danger along the way, and in order to do this the game keeps taking tools away from you only to force you to fumble around until you replace them. However… holy crap Alan… learn how to secure your gear because exiting a vehicle should not cause you to lose all of your shit. You would think if you need these things to survive you would be less careless than most toddlers.

The thing I am learning about Remedy through playing these games is that they are really damned good at setting up some pretty cool visuals. There are a lot of sequences in the game that are very memorable and designed in such a way as to give you an interesting vista while you are struggling through them. This is very much the case with Control, and given that I somehow completely missed playing any of the games from this studio. In theory I should have played Max Payne, but I think at the time my PC wasn’t quite sturdy enough to really tackle it and I had strayed away from consoles. All told it took me about eight hours to play through the main campaign of Alan Wake, and I am glad that I did. I have no real interest in playing through the two DLC episodes however.

I do this thing where I hyper fixate on a specific franchise, or connected franchises. Two years ago I burned through almost all of the games by the developer Spiders, and now I am seemingly revisiting anything that might be connected to the Control universe. I wrapped up Alan Wake pretty early last night and started Quantum Break which is the game that came between those two titles (three if you count Alan Wake’s American Nightmare… which does not appear to be canon). First up it is a gorgeous game, and dealing with some very different subject matter. However it appears that Alan Wake is a television show in this universe which I find interesting. I have no idea if this one is going to grab me but I figured I would give it a shot.

Blue and Rainy

There are times when I suffer through something that I do not otherwise enjoy… so that I can achieve greater understanding. There have been many times where a sequel has hooked me on a franchise and then I find myself obligated to go back and try and experience the original game so I can fill in the gaps in my knowledge. Alan Wake is one of these games, and to be truthful… this is not the first time I have attempted to play the game. I can think of two other times where I have installed this game and made a vague effort to get engaged. The first was due to the critic acclaim the game received and the second was an attempt to prepare myself for playing through Control. In both cases I bounced pretty hard because I have to say the game play… is not exactly endearing.

In Alan Wake you spend most of your time playing freeze tag with a bunch of shadow monsters… that apparently they call “Taken”. I am wondering if Bungie sniped this term at all for the very similar shadowy reflections of baddies in the Destiny universe. Essentially in order to destroy one of these shadow clones you have to burn away the darkness with the flashlight and only then can you actually harm them with the array of guns that you pick up along the way. Guns mind you that you seem to constantly be misplacing because multiple times during the game have I found myself whistling in the breeze with nothing to protect myself. The only really satisfying weapon… is the flare gun which is effectively a one hit kill… but there is never more than a few rounds at any given time so you ration it heavily.

Why I am sticking around however is that the story is really damned compelling. The entire game is divided up into multiple episodes and presented like it were a television show. At the beginning of a new episode the game gives you a “previously on Alan Wake” segment replaying the highlights of the previous section. Another thing that is super interesting about the game is how it utilizes full motion video, which I am guessing is a hallmark of a Remedy game based on how much it happened in Control. I find myself stopping to watch whatever happens to be on television or listening to each radio broadcast before moving on with the game play.

At this point I am committed… but honestly had I known then what I know now… I maybe would have just watched a lets play series on the game. I don’t really find myself enjoying the actual game play at all, and quite honestly… HAD I played Alan Wake first, I maybe would not have played Control. All said I am glad the events went down in the order that they have, and I am hoping that Alan Wake 2 ends up feeling a bit more like Control. It isn’t that this is a bad game, it is just a game that is doing a gimmick and has fully committed to said gimmick. It succeeds in doing the thing that I think it set out to do… which is making you feel outmatched and mostly useless at every turn. Side note… I don’t love the horror games where you find yourself fumbling around with only an iPhone knock off to protect you. I want to face evil with guns a blazing… or at least a really good bullwhip that has a knack for making candles produce power ups.

Last night I wrapped up episode four and if my reading is correct that means I have two left to go until the official end of the main story. I am deeply uncertain I will stick around for the DLC, especially if it is more of the same. Great story however, so ultimately I guess that will be the determining factor if the writing and narration can keep me hooked. I mean I get why this game was heralded, because I am sure at the time it was doing something wildly different to what the rest of the games were offering. However steam is now full of hundreds of fumble around hopelessly in the dark while something stalks you games, and that is not really my genre. It is interesting however piecing together what happened here, because the AWE DLC in Control only gives you the vaguest of overviews. For now I am going to keep my head down and push through so I can see the rest of the story.

Control Review

Over the last week I have been spending quite a bit of time playing Control. This game was always on my list but is something that I never quite got around to playing. So far 2022 has been marked by me playing a large number of single player titles and for the moment I am going with the flow. In past years I had set a goal of playing more single player titles rather than spending month after month pouring hours into MMOs, and it seems like maybe that is coming to fruition. I feel like before I dive into this much further, you have to know that I have never played a game by Remedy all the way through. I remember playing a bit of Max Payne and I have tried several times to get through Alan Wake… so I am coming into this experience fairly fresh.

That said something you also need to understand is that I love SCPs and have a Sunday ritual of listening to the latest Volgun episode after I have finished editing podcasts for the day. For the uninitiated, SCPs or Secure, Contain and Protect orders are directions for containment of otherworldly entities. It is part open source art project and part shared hallucination and effectively ANYONE can add to the mythology of this world pending they follow the general guidelines of the setting. They set up a world where a shadowy government organization known as “The Foundation” is the only line of defense from various entities which are classified on a sliding scale from Safe to Keter. The SCP universe is a combination of stratified late stage bureaucracy and cosmic horror.

So why do I bring this up? Control is effectively a game set in the SCP mythos without being actually OF the SCP project. Everything about this game screams Foundation, and while it borrows heavily from themes there is very little that I could tell that is lifted as whole cloth from this setting. To be fair, Control seems to be the culmination of a lot of loose threads that have been presented through Alan Wake and Quantum Break, finally connecting them all into an overarching narrative of this shared Remedy universe. Again having not played these games… I am drawing these conclusions based on moments I have experienced in Control that clearly point back to other titles.

You play as Jesse Faden and you happen upon the normally hidden Federal Bureau of Control at exactly the right moment. This is something you had been searching for your entire life, because as a child you were involved in an AWE or Altered World Event. You escaped but your brother was taken by the Bureau and a sequence of events has lead you to be at the doorstep of their offices in New York at exactly the right moment when you are capable of not only comprehending it but also entering it. I am hesitant to go into much more detail because the game does this excellent job of weaving together a tapestry of information and letting you know only as much as you really need to know at any given time.

A hostile force colloquially known as the Hiss has taken over the bureau and it also seems that some individuals saw this coming and tried to protect against it. Anyone without a Hedron Amplifier is turned into a seemingly mindless zombie like appendage of this hostile entity. So it is up to you… to try and figure out how to save the bureau which you once considered your enemy. You also enter the complex seeking out information about your brother Dylan. In your journey you will learn that you can assert control over structures and cleanse this malevolent influence.

Combat is that of a third person over the shoulder shooter, and you pick up a firearm that is an “Object of Power” allowing you to assert your will in order to wield it. This also offers the ability to upgrade it into other forms. While initially it starts out as the rough amalgam of a revolver, you can quickly convert it into a shotgun or a mega man style charged blaster… or my personal favorite the submachinegun variant called spin. You will also encounter other objects of power that grant you new abilities like telekinesis, flight, the ability to shield yourself, and much much later the ability to take over hiss infected enemies and turn them into vassals to fight at your side. The combat is interesting but nothing really exciting, and late in the game everything feels fairly bullet spongy.

What makes Control so great and why I would consider it a must play is the atmosphere. Not only is this game a great showcase for raytracing… but it also serves as an artistic achievement in set design. The world of the bureau is so richly textured and constantly shifting, that it feels like you have stepped through the looking glass and keep going down deeper into bottomless mystery. While I am certain that there are prefabs at work and that I am seeing the same object over and over… the game arranges things in a way that every corner I turn feels fresh. This helps greatly when it comes to actually navigating this otherworldly labyrinth giving you tangible landmarks that you can guide yourself by.

Another way that this game excels is in its use of pre-recorded video. It made me realize just how rare it is that we see full motion video in games these days. Control uses video adeptly to add additional knowledge as you move throughout the world in a sequence of training videos, dairies, and even a children’s puppet show. I remember the first time I played Bioshock, how enthralled I was by all of the audio logs left laying around… and in Control there are plenty of these as well that help to flesh out the setting. Through these they introduce a “whodunit” mystery of a sort because you realize that someone inside of the bureau had to have let this hostile force in… and you are trying to determine who exactly did it. In many ways this aspect reminded me of Myst and trying to determine which of Atrus’s sons caused the problems that you are trying to resolve.

In total it took me about eighteen hours to get through the main story of Control and play through the two expansion missions. One of the things that this game gets extremely right is the way it resolves the main story and how it connects to the subsequent expansion content. There are effectively two ways that games deal with the post credit roll “endgame”. The first which I consider to be the bad way is to roll back the character to a save point before the final conflict allowing you to roam around and tie up any loose ends. The correct way for me however is to resolve the conflict and show you a world in a state that acknowledges the final resolution, while still allowing you time to go explore some more. Control does this expertly and the first of two expansions takes place immediately following the final events.

Foundation gives you more information about how the Bureau was formed and how it came to find itself in The Oldest House… aka the headquarters you have been exploring. The second expansion entitled AWE however serves as a direct sequel to the events of Alan Wake, or maybe more a prequel to Alan Wake 2 which is coming out in 2023. It is THIS portion of the game that has really made me determined to go back and make my way through Alan Wake. Control talks some about the larger cosmology of how the Remedyverse is connected and it feels like maybe there are broader forces at work that started in Alan Wake and continued through Control. I might be reading too much into it… but I would still like to see how Alan Wake plays out for myself.

One of the things that I find terribly interesting about this game is that while it does not have a traditional “difficulty slider” system allowing you to choose to play on Easy or Hardcore, it does have something called Assist Mode. It is my understanding that this was patched into the game later, and it allows for you to make a number of specific tweaks in order to dial in the difficulty level to something you feel more comfortable with. If you only care about experiencing the story, you can dial up your aim assist, turn on immortality, and set combat to one hit kills. I am always on board with companies giving more options to make their stories more accessible. I am very much not in the camp of “games must be hard to be enjoyed”.

I loved this game so much, and I greatly enjoyed both the protagonist as well as the supporting cast of characters that you come to know throughout the game. I highly suggest checking it out and giving it a shot. I talked about it on the podcast this weekend and Grace was already hooked before then, but I am happy to hear that Tam has dusted off the game since that discussion as well. Right now it is available on so many different platforms and is generally fairly cheap. It is back up to $40 on steam, but recently this was around $20 or less.

I am now finding myself diving back into Alan Wake Remastered edition so that I will be better prepared when Alan Wake 2 comes out or I desperately hope a sequel to Control. Have you played Control? I would love to hear your thoughts below.

More Snow More Control

It is day two of the snowpocalypse and so far our sanity is mostly intact. To be honest… being snowed in would be much harder were it not for the fact that for the past three years I am leaving the house like once or twice a week. I’ve gotten exceptionally good at staying home. On Wednesday we received around four inches of snow, and over night it appears that we gained another three or so. This means the level of the snow is now above our front porch. My wife is off right now due to snow days and has seemingly made it her personal mission in life to clear the front porch.

Throughout the day yesterday we saw no signs of life from our neighborhood cats. I largely took this as a good thing because it probably meant that they had found some warm hidey hole and were safe and happy. However over night they started to roam again which prompted us to put some food out on a plate. Throughout the night we were visited by three cats… but sadly no “greybie” which is the one that lets us pet him. I am hoping he found some warmth and food elsewhere. I suppose we will keep putting out food on the front porch in the hopes that the neighborhood cats can at least come get it if they need it. In the backyard we have seen no signs of tripod, but with her I know she has access to some rabbit burrows where she hid out during last years much colder weather.

On the game front I have continued my journey into Control. I think probably the most remarkable thing about this game is its set pieces. Like this level design is just gorgeous and framed with cinematic flair. The Bureau has this characteristic of simultaneously looking like every government office you have ever been in. while at the same time evoking an otherworldly and “not quite right” aspect that is very hard to place. Sure the rugs are very reminiscent of the Overlook Hotel from The Shining, but other elements also serve to create this timeless unreality of the place. If anything it reminds me of the treatment of the TDA from the Loki series, which admittedly came out after this game. It does make me wonder if anyone on the staff drew inspiration from Control.

The other aspect of the game that I am absolutely in love with is all of the care that has been placed in the educational materials scattered throughout the Bureau. There are a number of how to videos reminiscent of the educational films of the seventies. There is even this series of films that are puppet shows about a group called the “Threshold Kids”. All of this only serves to add additional texture to this world and make it feel all the more real as you explore it. I’ve never beaten the original Half Life or Half Life 2… but this game continues to remind me of what I have played of both. Additionally there is a gigantic spoonful of X-Files and Parasite Eve in play. The more I get into it, the better the story gets.