Control is one of those games that definitely isn't for everyone.
Most people will probably bounce off it within the first couple of hours: vague storytelling, an abstract choice of words and themes, a very confusing setting, and the list of reasons to quit Control can continue on endlessly.
But I stuck with it, and even 100%-ed this title. My thoughts and feelings regarding this game are… mixed, if I am being totally honest.
Let’s start with the genre choice and storytelling.
Everyone knows what vibe the Remedy Entertainment games have. Max Payne is a neo-noir psychological thriller. Alan Wake is the same but swap “neo-noir” with “survival horror," and Control is a supernatural thriller with the elements of FPS, metroidvania, and a couple of other genres.
Sam Lake is at it again: Control doesn't rely on straightforward storytelling and instead throws a riddle at the player, which one must solve. It unfolds step by step in a surreal world that constantly changes its shape: lore-wise, practically nothing stays the same.
Even the ending, instead of explaining the riddle mentioned before, is left rather ambiguous, suggesting the player connect the dots themselves, which leads to the different interpretations of the story itself, and there is no definitive answer to all the questions the story can raise.
There is a negative side to all of this though.
Huge chunks of lore and the story itself are explained through various notes, recordings, and other collectibles. Some of the notes’ text is plainly redacted, which, once again, makes it all very ambiguous. This is a type of game whose story expands heavily based on whether you examined every minor detail possible or just rushed through the story in order to finish the game ASAP.
Also, the characters. Outside of Jesse and one particular lead-scientist, I honestly don't remember anyone else who would stand out. Every other character is being called a weirdo in one way or another by Jesse herself, which… says a lot, honestly.
Regarding the gameplay, it’s decent, but not perfect.
The main feature of the game is the interactable world. You can interact with almost everything to an extent of tearing concrete from the walls and throwing it into your enemies. You can pick up various projectors and TVs, and they will keep projecting the light and image to the surfaces you point them at. Some objects even have multiple destruction stages, and the list of interactivity features goes on.
The level of environmental interaction is genuinely impressive. No one else could ever pull off this level of interaction which Control managed to do. At times even by the end of the game, I was amazed by the vast majority of details the in-game world has.
The flipside? The world itself is very bland, bleak, and cold. I think the best word to describe all this is… liminal. Sometimes I felt some really uncanny pressure applying to me after playing for a couple of hours in a row: it felt like I was exploring an asylum of some sort. Endless corridors, very grim lighting with the colors like dark green and blue prevailing, very unsettling sound design, and the absence of music… The whole game feels like one giant liminal space.
The game itself isn’t scary, but it sure can be unnerving. Not by the mobs’ design, not by some “artificial horror” (jumpscares and such), but by the world’s design itself. This is something you don’t see much in the [b]gaming[/b] industry outside the horror genre.
The graphics are decent, but there is a huge problem from the technical side: texture streaming is messed up tremendously. Seriously, without mods, the textures don’t load up properly, which makes the objects look blurry to the extent of you being able to count visible polygons on them.
The dialogue cutscene direction is rather weird too. There is a nice gimmick of showing the inner monologues of Jesse during the talks, but the camera angles and animations are rather strange at times. Jesse can look at the person she is talking to at a very weird angle or experience a very weird, non-human-like facial animation.
The gameplay is basically one-sided: all enemies are plain bullet sponges and can be brute-forced by Launch ability.
The bosses? Even worse: some of them are even easier than Heavy enemies.
The balancing by itself is all over the place. At first, you can blast through the enemies like the low-level fodders they are, and half an hour later you get blasted into oblivion by a group of the exact same enemies because the game decided to make them stronger and smarter and overwhelm the player with them.
Speaking of the abilities mentioned before, you guessed it: 90% of them are useless.
Once you level up the Launch, almost every other ability becomes obsolete. Some abilities result in Jesse’s quick death rather than getting rid of your enemies (Ground Slam).
DLCs? They are seriously lacking: there are new locations and some story expansions, but not as much as you would expect. The AWE DLC is focused around Alan Wake and doesn’t even have a story; it felt like a compilation of easter eggs and vague lore implications of the in-game universe.
The Foundation DLC? Well, the location itself is something new and is rather interesting, but it doesn’t serve justice to a lot of characters that were in the base game. Don’t want to cover much here because, once again, spoilers.
Overall, it’s a very decent game: nothing more, nothing less.
If you like mystic, cryptic, and confusing stories with a bunch of psychology sprinkled in — you have to give Control a chance. Get ready to be patient with all the aforementioned inconveniences, though.
If not, and if you prefer something easier to comprehend (chill out after a very long day at work/university) — this game might not suit you at all.
