The 2019 Goaties: #3 - CONTROL
2019 has given us very good games, profoundly bad games, and some of the most confident releases in a decade. Perhaps that’s a result of it being near the end of this console generation, but whatever the reason, it’s been an absolute joy to see developers with some ups and downs over the last decade or so come out with their best work, and there aren’t many studios that embody that description better than Remedy.
By all records, the decade-opening Alan Wake was reasonably well-received, 2016’s game/television hybrid Quantum Break a fair bit less so. The ideas in the latter’s approach to combat, however, involved telekinesis playing a heavy role in your offensive suite. Those ideas found a home in the delightful, unapologetically weird CONTROL, a game that marries an excellent power curve with a phenomenally realized setting and some of the most striking visuals I’ve seen to date.
“CONTROL
(EGS, Xbox One, Playstation 4)
”
CONTROL puts the player in the role of Jesse Faden, a take-no-guff woman searching for something dear. That search leads her into the depths of the Federal Bureau of Control, an SCP-like organization tasked with managing and...well, controlling the public’s responses to Objects of Power and the Altered World Events they cause. The Bureau’s taken residence inside The Oldest House, a monolithic, brutalist structure under attack by the extra-dimensional entity known as the Hiss. Opposing the Hiss is the Board, another extra-dimensional figure that seems to simply be a gigantic inverted pyramid communicating in garbled, muffled radio-speech subtitled in [ Incredible | Fascinating ] ways.
There’s so much about the world of CONTROL that’s engrossing. The numerous Objects of Power that twist and contort the world around them are fun to read about, archetypical objects given immense, bizarre power: a rubber duck that moves when it’s not being observed, or a fridge that will eat people whenever someone is not making eye contact with it, to the point where someone within the Bureau is always on “fridge duty.” They all seem right at home within the Oldest House, which shifts and reconfigures itself time and time again, revealing new paths and changing the landscape of combat arenas in a deliberately Escherian manner. It’s a stereotypical government office mixed with the fantastic, gray slabs of concrete that come to life and make this place feel alive. It also feels like a real location, where you can use signposts within the world to actually navigate and conceptualize it, which is rare and appreciable!
The brutalist architecture bleeds into the UI and text treatments as well, department names within the Oldest House just appearing in title-card fashion with no real pomp or circumstance. As someone who loves both late title cards and fun text treatment, the way areas are introduced is so fucking cool. Imagine turning a corner to see a giant skirmish taking place, seeing the red light of the Hiss bathe the room, and then THIS greets you, cold and impassive.
IT’S REALLY COOL.
It’s also worth mentioning that the members of the Bureau stuck within the House are diverse, fleshed-out characters as well, even if there are some that Jesse...never actually interacts with. The enigmatic, eternal optimist Dr. Casper Darling, for example, is only seen in collectible FMV sequences (set up as instructional videos from the Bureau), but he has such a distinctive, overflowing personality that quickly made him one of my favorite characters this year.
Though the characters and setting could do a substantial amount of the heavy lifting on their own, there’s plenty of combat and some very light puzzle solving to be done. In the game’s opening sequence, Jesse is promoted to the role of Director, which comes with a reconfigurable, ever vibrating Service Weapon and a host of increasingly potent powers. Telekinesis, mind control, and straight-up levitation are all within your arsenal, and they synergize with the different variants of your Service Weapon extremely well. The telekinesis feels incredible, and more importantly, it’s really smart about what it’ll pick up. When you don’t have any obvious objects nearby - tables, doors, or shipping crates - you’ll rip out chunks of the walls or floor and send them hurtling just as quickly. The flow between gunplay and power usage is tight, and unlike most third-person shooters, it never feels like you have to rely on your gun to progress.
The twists and turns of CONTROL’s narrative are fun, laden with set piece moments and only a couple mandatory boss fights. The optional boss fights are diverse and flashy, even if a couple of them can be a little chuggy to get through. Beyond that, however, there is so much incredible worldbuilding and fleshing out of that universe. It’s the first game in years where a developer made collectibles capital-C Cool. There are countless text documents riddled with classic black-site redactions, plenty of the Bureau-produced videos with their own subtle narrative arc to them (including the genuinely unsettling puppets found in the Threshold Kids), and monologues from the previous Director, who has his own methods of communicating with Jesse from beyond the grave. I actively sought out and was excited to find these collectibles every time, because they’re so well-written, wildly varied, and they ask just as many fascinating questions as they answer.
In a year full of bold, new experiences, it’s still refreshing to see a game that, at its core, is just an exceptional third-person shooter. CONTROL drops you into a tremendous, endlessly fascinating world with a diverse, excellent cast of characters, and gives you the tools to thrive within it. It feels like the culmination of so many ideas that have sprouted up in the third-person genre over the last decade, and so much of it just works. It’s a game I genuinely think anyone can get something out of, and even if you know, without a doubt, you’ll never play it, you should at least look up the Ashtray Maze, which is without a doubt one of the most elaborate, unbelievable sequences I think I’ve ever seen in a game to date.
That goddamned Ashtray Maze. Good grief.
This is not the Ashtray Maze. It is Dr. Casper Darling.
