Control - supernatural third person action-adventure from Remedy

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/20...fully-strange-new-hands-on-preview-interview/

Control is a delightfully strange shooter with outstanding telekinesis noises

The sphere is loose. A spiky black void, jittering between realities as it loafs towards me like a murderous billiard ball from a higher dimension. It’s one of many paranormal horrors to break out of the Bureau’s containment, and I do not like it one bit.

Except I do, because weird balls and their ilk are the main reason I’m excited about Control. Those, and all the telekinesis.

I’ll tell you more about the short demo I played at GDC in a moment, but first let’s get our bearings. As best we can. Control is Remedy Entertainment’s upcoming “supernatural third-person action adventure”. That’s the Remedy of Max Payne fame, though Control cuts closer to Alan Wake or Quantum Break, their previous story-centric games. But like, way stranger.

You play as Jesse Fadens, an outsider who stumbles into the Bureau (an agency dedicated to controlling supernatural phenomena) and instantly becomes its boss. She does this by picking up the last boss’s gun, in a scene I wasn’t shown but did have real-life director of Control Mikael Kasurinen explain to me. “The service weapon has a lot of meaning to the Bureau – whoever is able to wield the service weapon is the director,” he said. “It’s like the sword in the stone, except the consequences are more brutal. If you’re not worthy, then the gun will kill you.”

Such hiring practices might explain why the Bureau is overrun with the Hiss, a corrupting force stemming from a dimension known as the Astral Plane. I think. Control has a lot of Planes.



Not that I’m comPlaning. I don’t just relish Control’s weirdness, I relish the very different places that weirdness goes to. At one point I went from wandering around open spaces built around the Bureau’s brutalist architecture, and into a maze where the walls wibbled in and out of existence. They made a kind of shuffling noise, as if I was somehow inside a collapsing house of cards. Magic.

I felt like Alice delving into sci-fi wonderland, and asked Kasurinen if he saw Control the same way. “Sure, there is that ‘going down the rabbit hole’ kind of feel to it. Jesse arrives at the Bureau and the deeper she goes into that place, the more strange and complicated it becomes.”

If the full game can sustain that, the glee of never knowing what’s around the next corner (or if the next corner will even stay moored in the same reality), then I’ll be a very happy bunny indeed.



I say that despite the way that doing murders with that murderous service weapon mostly feels… mundane. Like everything else in Control, it looks the part: an unintelligible swirl of floating black geometry, conjuring ammo and explosions through means unknown. It’s technically the only gun in the game, but it can morph into different forms at the touch of a button. I imagine I’ll rarely use the default sub-machine gun mode, what with the way it slowly whittles at health bars. I imagine the gun will spend most of its time obliterating them in one shot as a mini extra-dimensional cannon.

In truth, though, I’ll probably make very little use of the gun at all. Why shoot someone when you can telekinetically tear out a chunk of wall, launch that wall into the air, and then hurl that wall at someone’s face?

Jesse has superpowers, see. Her abilities drain a swiftly-replenishing bar of psychic energy, but there are a few at her disposal. She can grab rockets out of the air and send them flying back at her foes, or clobber them with nearby office chairs. She can raise a shield of rubble, then bury people in it. If their health is low enough, she can hack people’s minds, converting them to her side. Or she can just punch them real hard.

It’s not perfect. Something felt off about many of the animations, punches killed people without connecting with them, and by the end of my twenty minutes Jesse’s pool of abilities had already started to feel shallow. The telekinesis noises are fantastic though, which makes up for more than you’d think. The thwump of displaced air that accompanies every telekenetic grab might be my new favourite sound. Top five, easy.



Some of those combat kinks might get ironed out before release, and I doubt I’ve seen all that Jesse can do. Kasurinen didn’t comment on additional powers, but he did show me a hub point where abilities can be customised. You might be able to take control of multiple enemies at once, dodge-dash more often, or levitate for longer. Even sans upgrades, I still got up to a generous amount of swooping. It’s a liberating way to explore a world that is itself liberated from sense.

That weirdness comes at a cost, mind, considering Control’s structure. “There are a number of sectors”, Kasurinen told me, “and each sector is a relatively large area with a lot of rooms and spaces.” Those rooms might contain characters and side missions, but I’m concerned I might never reach them. My demo featured multiple dead ends where I was told I didn’t yet have the ability to move forward. Areas like that maze, where I’d initially assumed I could puzzle my way to progress. That confusion is a frustrating tenet of metroidvania style gating, exacerbated by Control’s fundamental oddity. Was Kasurinen not concerned that players might get stuck?

“We don’t want to handhold the players and say this is where you need to go at all times, we want the player to stop and look at the world and find their way through it. So you have to pay attention to what’s around you, you can’t just follow a quest marker – we don’t actually have quest markers in the game.

“Sure, there are moments where you might not realise what’s possible and what isn’t, but we try to explain the situation through Jesse’s voice as well as we possibly can. We don’t want to mislead the player, but we don’t want to lead either.”



That’s a goal I can get behind, even if it doesn’t allay my concerns. As fond as I am of the flying and thwumping, it’s the prospect of delving deeper into Control’s world that has me pulling faces at all the months between now and the game’s August release date. There are so many different flavours of weird, and Control tastes of them all. I’ve still only seen a snippet though, and wondered how Kasurinen would characterise the strangeness.

“I like the word awe, because it connects the ideas of terror and fascination. You’re kind of unsettled, but at the same time you’re engaged, you want to find out more any way you can.

“There are definitely moments that are horrific. It’s a brutal, realistic world, and we want to show how bad supernatural consequences can get. We don’t want to shy away from that. At the same time, it’s not a horror game.”

Hearing that, my mind went back to my billiard ball. We sealed it away in the end, behind a metal barrier of questionable security. It’s still there. Still lurking.

I can’t want to see it again.

 

[LESS T_T]

Man, they really like exclusive and things:

 

[Bad Sector]

Eh, i'll buy it in 4 years when it comes on GOG with all the extras packed in :-P.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

Why do they have to make Max Payne clones with dumb gimmicks? Just make Max Payne again but without the character names. Just make another noir shooter without these gimmicks that nobody cares about to begin with.

 

[Cromwell]

Eh, i'll buy it in 4 years when it comes on GOG with all the extras packed in :-P.

just pirate it, epic already paid them for your copy.

 

[Infinitron]

Spoiler

 

[Morgoth]

I imagine hovering around in those dull environments gets boring really fast.

Needs more colors and capes. Like Anthem!

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/hands-on-with-control-remedys-most-ambitious-game-yet/

Hands-on with Control, Remedy's most ambitious game yet
The Alan Wake developer's latest is strange, compelling and visually inventive.

As I levitate with almost complete freedom around the Brutalist atrium of the Central Research area—all clean concrete walkways broken up by formidable trees—I have a sense that this is finally the game that Remedy always wanted to make; the developer’s creative Promised Land.

Conversations around Remedy games usually revolve as much around their constraints and shortcomings as their weird brilliance and ambition, but Control feels like it doesn't have those same limitations.

A big part of that is the hub-based and more systemic structure of the game. Control has something of the immersive sim, encouraging you to explore rooms and areas you might otherwise miss to pick up new powers. You can watch eerily over-saturated videos of scientists talking about dimensional fissures, and shuffle through documents that fill you in on the disaster that befell the place you’re exploring.

This place is the Oldest House, the headquarters of the FBC—a government division that investigates paranormal activity. You are new boss Jesse Faden, and it’s your first day on the job. The thing is, instead of being shown to your gold-plaqued desk and arranging a ‘Getting-to-know-you’ conference call, you arrive to find people floating eerily in the building’s vertiginous expanses—presumably dead—and black glitchy vortexes of violent energy swirling and crunching towards you.

It’s a unique vision of the ‘Science Gone Wrong’ trope so beloved by games. In a way, the tone is post-Lovecraftian, set in today’s age where beliefs in Gods and squid-faced deities have made way for the cold power of physics, and a sense that whatever’s beyond the tenuous veil of this dimension is much less tangible and anthropomorphic.

But where the laws of cosmic physics are normally terrifying through their stark apathy to humanity, in Control they’re something more malevolent, as I discover in my hands-on. The corrupting force throughout the facility, known as ‘The Hiss’, manifests in all kinds of strange forms. It possesses people, for example, and sets them out to kill you. I encountered regular gunning grunts on the ground, but also more powerful levitating enemies, telekinetically hauling chairs, tables, chunks of concrete, you-name-it, at me.

In a ghoulish callback to Alan Wake, these people ramble insane scientific nothings to themselves (at least, nothing that my non-sciency brain can translate). You get the sense that their minds have been stripped of the human component and left only with formulae and theories attempting to make sense of whatever dark energy has taken over the building.

The good news is that you, Jesse, have powers of your own. You can levitate high into the air to meet your flying foes, then engage in a duel of flinging whatever the hell your telekinetic pull ability can reel in towards you. Within moments, the courtyard of Central Research is strewn with debris as we entwine ourselves in a gravity-free tussle of office objects.

But there’s more to Jesse than levitation. By aiming at the enemy and clicking the right analog stick, we dash through the air, slamming into him and disintegrating him into a shower of sparks.

That airdash contributes to the liberating weightlessness of controlling Jesse. You can only levitate for a limited amount of time, and can’t keep going up forever, but you can airdash in any direction level with or below you, which means you can, for example, dash over to a ledge and haul yourself up, or dash into the ground to convert it into a devastating ground pound.

Another trick I played with was seizing control of wounded enemies and getting them to fight for me for a limited time. I did this to the grunts, the hovering types, and the big balls of healing energy too, which would otherwise be buffing the enemy. It makes each battle a game of control, as you wrestle over physical objects to lob around and enemies to possess.

I was overpowered in the hands-on, which Remedy's Thomas Puha assures me won’t be the case in the final game; you will need to unlock abilities and increase your health to get to that point. Your health doesn’t regenerate automatically either, so you need to scour the building for pickups or find creative ways (like possessing the healing orbs) to patch yourself up.

From the hub-based world to the light puzzle elements that unlock new pathways, Control nods to what I think of as ‘designer genres’ like the Metroidvania, Soulslike and immersive sim. It’s abandoning the blinkered linearity of Remedy’s past efforts, and going into territory that feels like Alan Wake would’ve gone to had these ideas been more prevalent at the time.

Beyond the combat, I don’t get to do all that much interacting with the world. It’s more a case of exploring strange rooms, each with their own surrealistic reality-warping twists. There’s a music recording studio (with no discernible purpose for now), and a ‘Hall of Mirrors, a lavishly decorated area that's all crimsons and golds with an eye-teasing pattern on the walls. Suddenly, the walls in here shift and new corridors open up, which you diligently follow, taking each new turn as it manifests in front of you until you loop back to the original room, where a new pathway opens, leading to a new power for you to use.

Another fork leads me down to an area that’s overrun by a golden glowing mold and filled with enemies who seem to be almost falling to pieces—pathetic and hollowed by whatever the exact corruption is in this particular area. In this area, and several others, there are square indents on walls that require you to grab a cube (telekinetically, of course) and insert it to unlock a door or get a nearby elevator working.

Puha takes control for a mini-boss fight against an Astral Spike—that swirling mass of glitchy energy I talked about earlier. It fits into the ‘shapeless black mass’ category alongside unloved video-game enemies like Prey’s Typhon or the Pus of Man in Dark Souls 3, but given that I’m extremely fond of both of those games, it works for me. Instead of fighting it head-on however, Puha lures it through a large containment door, then loops back around to the main room and shuts it inside.

These are pretty simple puzzle-based interactions, and I’d like to see them go a little deeper in the final game, but given that the demo aimed to mainly showcase the combat, I’m holding out hope that we’ll see this area expanded on a bit more. That said, it’s clear that Remedy is staying true to its specialties and veering more towards the cinematic than the fiddly and intricate.

The Oldest House fluctuates between a particularly tasteful form of ‘cold and corporate’ and impressively other. One moment I’m in a bright atrium, designed to intimidate and impress visitors, the next I’m tentatively creeping down a dark stone corridor, with angles and surfaces jutting out of places where there’s really no need for angles and surfaces to exist. In 20 minutes I saw more visual variety than in entire other games.

Then, the already interworldly reality of the Oldest House dissipates, and a misty grey landscape of obelisks and strange stepped pyramids unravels before me. This is the Astral Plane. Somewhere in here, Puha tells me, is an inverted black pyramid that I suspect has an awful lot to do with the mysterious events back in what approximates in this game to ‘the real world’.

Even though the game is just five months away, I felt like Control remains a mystery, and I like that. There’s the story, of course, which seems even more intriguing and cryptic now than before I played the preview build, and there’s a crafting and upgrade system that I barely had the chance to touch.

There are still points that need ironing out. The combat, for all its wonderful low-gravity flow, still feels rather ethereal, with the enemies looking and feeling twiggy and unimpactful when you’re duffing them up. I’m also not sure how much longevity there is in throwing bits of furniture and detritus around at enemies, so it’ll be up to the upgradeable Service Weapon—your shape-shifting firearm—and whatever powers we haven’t seen yet to ensure the action remains nice and varied throughout.

But these are all fixable. Remedy have the right ideas here, and I came away with fresh questions about what the hell is going on in this most abstract of downtown skyscrapers.

Remedy, the masters of reality-bending intrigue are weaving their most intricate web yet, and I’m more than happy to get caught up in it.

 

[vortex]

 

[Morgoth]

Idiots trying to explain gameplay.

Dear devs, we could do without them. Just give us the direct feed footage instead!

 

[Infinitron]

 

[illuknisaa]

"She experienced a strange event with her brother"

I'm pretty sure that is a hentai plot.

 

[Morgoth]

Inb4 Alien abduction plot.

 

[Morgoth]

27 min of gameplay w/o commentary:

 

[Master]

Throwing stuff seems like it will get tiresome really fast. I wonder if you can play it with just using the gun.

 

[sullynathan]

Throwing stuff seems like it will get tiresome really fast. I wonder if you can play it with just using the gun.

Pretty obvious

 

[Morgoth]

Nice tone, but "the usual" gameplay. I'll pass. Or perhaps it will one day release on Xbox Game Pass saatana.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...our-of-playing-it-control-seems-extraordinary

After an hour playing it, Control seems extraordinary

I think maybe the number one rule about anything made by David Lynch is that you should never write about anything made by David Lynch. I'm going to break that rule - just quickly I promise - to say there was a moment that felt straight out of the Lynchian playbook in the Control demo I played at E3, and it was wonderful.

Dropped into things a few hours into the game, one of the first tasks I had in my slice of Control was to find a janitor. I tracked him down and found him in a little back room (there is a wonderful simplicity to tracking things down in Control - in fact it's much of what the game is - but more on that in a moment).

To get here I fought through people and monsters, red reality-distorting fields of light in a windowless, brutalist government building, ripping up walls and floors and office desk chairs as I went. Chaos, by way of Ikea. And after that I opened a door and he just stood there. A janitor, with a mop and a bucket.

There's a quick cutscene and - forgive me for describing camera movements but please just hang in there - the camera glides in on him slowly, from just below eye-line, an imperious hero shot of a dishevelled, 60-something-year-old man in a boiler suit. We start talking and it lookslike a bog standard video game cutscene - agonisingly bland, over-the-shoulder angles and all - only I don't think it is. The janitor speaks with a thick Scandinavian accent, slowly. Almost too slowly. He says something I don't completely understand and we cut back to an ultra close-up of Jesse's face (you play as Jesse Faden, the new Director at this Bureau-gone-wrong) and all you can see is her eyes. She's not saying anything.

"Maybe it's just some extra video game cutscene jank", I'm thinking - you know the kind of awkward-pausing, blank-eyed delivery stuff I'm talking about - but it's not. After an uncomfortable amount of time watching Jesse's face twitch I hear a little whisper of her internal thought ("it's not jank! This is a thing"). Then back to the janitor. Back and forth. It's not the accent that's making him hard to understand; he's genuinely not making any sense. I think he thinks Jesse is his... assistant? He's giving us a side quest? To clean up some rubbish by a furnace? More awkward pauses and cuts and twitching stares (goodness me the facial animation is good, by the way), and the janitor still just leaning on his mop as Jesse goes through various, voiceless ways of expressing "seriously what the fuck?", like she's frozen in time in front of this bizarre little man. All this to a background hum of - you guessed it Lynch fans! - something oddly reverberating. The Janitor From Another Place, in his supply cupboard Black Lodge.

This encounter was more than enough to convince me to sack off the main quest for a bit, and follow the tangent. I went hunting for the room he talked about so I could burn some rubbish - and so we get to the actual getting-around of Control.

Control has a map - although I was encouraged to avoid using it by someone from Remedy, curiously. It's very standard Metroidvania fare, all different-sized rooms connected by tunnels and pathways to bigger or smaller ones, different routes unlocked or totally missed by accident, different ways of reaching a destination just nudged onto you, by some flickering red light or spooky gurn from around a bend. Navigating is just a case of looking at the location name of where you want to go in the top left corner, which is usually something beautifully bureaucratic like "Central Processing Management", and going there. If you've discovered it already somehow, it'll be named somewhere on the map, and you've just got to get to it. If it's not, you've got to wander around the fog-of-warred spots until you do.

I have no idea why that stood out to me so much. It seems so stupidly simple, but in Control it feels absolutely deliberate (in fact everything feels deliberate, which I wish I could say more often). I am in bureaucratic-name-place X and I need to get over there, to bureaucratic-name-place Y, and I do so by taking the second left, through a squiggly thing, into a big rectangle. It's just using a map! That's all this is! I'm sure it's something clever, to do with making me actively think about where I'm going, as I'm going, probably. To keep me present and conscious as it throws visual weirdness and aural imbalance at me as I go. But explaining it as such, putting a tangible border around something as inscrutable as a feeling, like the one you get from claustrophically drifting around Control's magnificent, suffocating architecture, feels wrong. Whyever it works, it just does.

Putting these blocks onto generators was the main puzzle-type in the demo. There's room to do more with it but I'm hoping there's some more variety to come.

Along the way there is combat. It's fantastic. Control controls impeccably, my simple early-game options of shooting, shooting a different version of my gun, or picking up things - any things - and chucking them at enemies feels sublime. It is totally intuitive, almost mystically so; the chunk of drywall, or concrete floor, or filing cabinet that gets picked up always the exact one that I wanted, just by way of body language and intent. You can pick up and lob about three things in quick succession before your picking-up-and-chucking gauge depletes. It recharges after a second or two on its own, so it's just a natural cooldown timer, in a sense, and your gun actually works the same way: a nicely minimalist little row of dots around your reticule are bullets, and when you run out you just need to wait a moment (it's a magic gun, obviously, and the gunfeel is magic too).

It's all in service of a kind of rhythm: you lob a PC monitor at one grunt, pop a few headshots into one of the charging, destruct-on-death monsters nearby, punt a brick at another, cycle back to your gun and maybe switch it to the kind of shotgun version, if you're feeling fancy; repeat. There's a skill tree to unlock more, as well as mods found - or built from resources - scattered about in containers in little side rooms and hidden nooks, and basic options to upgrade health or thing-throwing damage or number of things you can fling, and the like. It felt like the systems were deep, sure, but also immaculately streamlined. All that's there is what's needed.

Everything in Control, right down to mechanics like this, is so brilliantly in line. There's a vision. Nothing is wasted.

After certain spots of combat, you can claim a control point. I'm not actually sure what these do, or the narrative reason for them, but the points could be interacted with afterwards and seem to serve as places you can fast travel from, or rest a moment at, to tinker with and upgrade some unlocked skills. They feel like welcome respite, even if you're hardly in constant conflict. The environment of Control is so incredibly stifling it's like the little endorphine rush of unlocking something is necessary in order to breathe.

Back to Janitor-from-another-place's quest: I found the furnace. It lines the entire back wall of a fairly vast, warehouse-y room, and it's just a bit too large, and a bit too loud, I think? In fact so are a lot of things in Control. It's all oddly out of balance. From time to time, I found, you'll sink into passively doing your thing and then just catch yourself - "that is an abnormally large furnace, actually" - and realise it's all just a bit off. Why is there a jumbo furnace, roaring like I'm looking at the Sun? Looking straight into reactor four at Chernobyl? Into hell? Why, after a lot of time spent fighting my way here and subsequently looking around, is the task to just lob some scattered barrels of toxic slime into it? Clearly, Control likes a little environmental puzzle, and seems to want you to stop and scratch your head - but even when you're not actively solving things it's like there's a puzzle still rumbling, underneath. A sense that this world, unlike the worlds of so many contemporaries, is not already solved.

Anyway, I solved that and nothing happened - of course it didn't. I went back to the main quest. More excellent combat, more brain-teasing stuff-chucking environmental puzzles, more of the macabre that I won't ruin, or really be able to explain if I tried. Soon enough I ended up in some other, inexplicable non-place when I was told I had to wrap things up. And that's Control - and now I'm left feeling there's no way for me to write it all down without it sounding ridiculous. I am aware of how ridiculous it reads back even now - and this, along with just the general insufferability of reading someone as they try, is exactly why you don't write about David Lynch. It is an aura. An offness, that you have to feel in order to know. I don't know how to describe it or how to do it justice but Control has it coming out the wazoo, oddness oozing out every time it looks like edging towards big-budget action-game normalcy. After just an hour, I am pretty sure this game is special. In fact, after just an hour I'm pretty sure it's more than that: it's a leap forward, in sheer creativity and vision, from any other game like it, and after just an hour I'm in awe.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Wunderbar]

I'd prefer it to be a survival horror, rather than another "Remedy cuscene simulator with cool abilities".

 

[Master]

Too bad about this "upgrading" bullshit. I wonder if you can finish the game without it

 

[Infinitron]

 

[vortex]

 

[Morgoth]

The main char sounds like a porn star. They probably couldn't afford to hire a real actress.