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.