"They are drawn to the mystery. Obsessed. You set it up, they put it together. Their interpretation. And there's only one, because you give them no choice. And they believe it, because it's theirs now." -Alan Wake
Control has endeared me to its unconventional design for 7 years - so much so that I have ritualistically beaten it on Xbox, then on Playstation and have scoured its depths a fifth time on PC. But what is it that makes Control such a timeless story for me, one worth returning to repeatedly? Control is a third-person supernatural thriller action game, drawing much of its stylistic inspiration from the likes of Carter's "The X-Files" and the SCP Foundation with a deeply intense narrative framing that harkens to Mark Frost & David Lynch's Twin Peaks franchise (or Danielewski's "House of Leaves" for all my fellow book nerds.)
What separates this game from all the others is its excellently granular approach to worldbuilding. Redactions, warping environments, whiteboards and distant paranormal whispers; every square inch of Control is drenched in an atmosphere that screams, quite figuratively and literally, to be dissected and understood. The game's setting, The Oldest House, is a clever thematic representation of the sprawling amount of complex possibilities that Control's core mystery centers around. Where did your brother go?
Walk in a janitor's assistant, come out the Director of the Federal Bureau of Control, a secretive government agency with the primary objective of using many fields of science, both traditional and new, to explain, contain, and manipulate paranormal forces.
Let me pose a simple question: What do you get when you cross western bureaucratic office spaces with spiteful lovecraftian entities & the best physics engine in ALL of gaming? You get a high-art action game called Control, one that I think everybody who appreciates single-player narrative experiences should play at least once. Because talking about Control, theorizing late nights with fellow Remedy-verse nerds and scrolling through dozens of pages on forums just to appreciate everyone's interpretations, is just as fun as playing the game itself. The story is that much more powerful because you are a part of it; you are in Control. You've always been the new you.
