I meant to write this one MONTHS ago and since then I’ve forgotten most of the things I wanted to say. That said, I think Control was my unexpected fave of 2021. It’s so rare these days that I pick up a game and get so into it that it becomes the only media I consume until I beat it. I’m not sure why Control wasn’t more talked-about. It didn’t seem that interesting to me in 2019, I guess because I just saw a lady with a gun on the cover and a one-word title and wasn’t intrigued by that alone. Then I learned that it was basically “SCP: The AAA Game”, and lo and behold, it totally is. I spent so much of mandatory high school “career” class reading the SCP Wiki, so I was very on board with Control’s aesthetic. Remedy totally nailed the “Lovecraft meets MKUltra” vibe. Fully half of the joy of Control for me was scouring the world for documents to read to learn more about the setting and the lore and the mystery of everything. The documents read so much like actual SCP pages that I wish the developers had credited the SCP Wiki contributors more explicitly. Like the SCP Wiki, Control’s records and research documents range from unsettling, to frightening, to completely hilarious.
I probably thought I wouldn’t like this game because I assumed it was a first-person shooter. It’s really more of a 3D metroidvania sort of a game. You do have a gun, but it’s one of several abilities that you unlock as you explore the world. I put all my points into the telekinetic throw ability and had a great time launching enemies at each other.
My biggest problem with Control is that it just kind of… ends. Beating The Bad Guy to resolve The Plot doesn’t completely solve the conflict of the game, because there needs to be a reason you’re allowed to keep playing after you finish the main quests. I’m not asking of all of the answers to the mysteries, because that would defeat the point, but the game is one continuous adventure with very little downtime, and the lack of a conclusive ending makes the story feel like it’s going to drag on into infinity which isn’t narratively rewarding. I get that they probably had to find a compromise between “game” and “story” here, but I wish they went with the “save your game now because this is the final quest and then the game is over” option instead of the “you beat the final boss but don’t worry you can keep playing” option.
I think this was/is the most AAA-y game I’ve played and I was really impressed by the motion-capture and ray tracing and stuff like that. Most of the games I play have fairly low-end hardware requirements even though I have a good graphics card now, so I’m still pretty overawed when a game looks “current-gen”. Also, all of the actors in Control are fantastic and they did a great job at integrating the live-action content into the game world, on top of all the great mocap and voice acting.
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