Control - supernatural third person action-adventure from Remedy

[Morgoth]

Gameplay looks boring and the acting is outright

.

 

[Wunderbar]

the sound track sounds like a box got stuck in the level geometry somewhere

 

[HoboForEternity]

Gameplay looks boring and the acting is outright

.

it is because the ign player or playing like a pregnant cow. i can see it being very mobile and fun and max payne-y if a competent player plays it. i just watch like several minutes of footage in the middle, but it seems like the gyy just play it too safely and have aim like a deaf bat. it looks like it allows you to go blazing and rely on dodge / wide span of character movement instead of hiding behind cover like the guy did.

 

[Morgoth]

Oh C'mon face it the old Remedy is long dead. This is just another "inoffensive" shooter customized for the dumbasses and game journous. They couldn't even bother hiring a talented main actress with a shred of a personality!

 

[vortex]

Oh C'mon face it the old Remedy is long dead. This is just another "inoffensive" shooter customized for the dumbasses and game journous. They couldn't even bother hiring a talented main actress with a shred of a personality!

Character animations are really good. How many games have such high production quality these days?

Spoiler

My only worry is the A.I.
I hope these gameplay videos are in lowest difficulty settings because AI is too rigid and frozen.

 

[Wunderbar]

Character animations are really good.

Spoiler

that's a still image.

 

[vortex]

that's a still image.

Ok, here you go

 

[Egosphere]

that's a still image.

Ok, here you go

 

[sullynathan]

 

[Terenty]

Is there anything else to this game besides throwing random junk at braindead ai?

 

[Morgoth]

Is there anything else to this game besides throwing random junk at braindead ai?

Yes, cutscenes!

 

[Infinitron]

 

[gerey]

It's like watching a movie... oh, wait.

 

[DalekFlay]

Got this free from nVidia so Captain Popamole will have a report ready!

 

[Alienman]

New card?

 

[Cross]

I can already tell this game is going to be a disappointment. There doesn't seem to be any hip fire, which is dumb by itself, but it's even worse in a game like this, since it means the powers can't interact with the shooting. E.g. you can't telekinetically lift an enemy towards you while spraying him with bullets, or use him as a human shield while you shoot another enemy. You could do those things in Psi-Ops.

 

[Morgoth]

The whole notion that you fly around with a chick throwing shit around inside boring environments is dumb by itself.

I'd have really loved an Alan Wake sequel, but nooo...

 

[vortex]

This gonna be better than AW.
AW had most boring gameplay of all time.

 

[Morgoth]

But it had suspense and good writing. CONTROL has nothing of this.

 

[DalekFlay]

New card?

Yeah, I got a new higher-res monitor which kind of required me to get a new card. Got a really nice 2070 model when they plummeted in price after the Super releases.

 

[sullynathan]

The whole notion that you fly around with a chick throwing shit around inside boring environments is dumb by itself.

I'd have really loved an Alan Wake sequel, but nooo...

You pretty much did this in psy ops without flying and playing as a dude but it was fun

 

[toro]

Cohn is streaming this right now and it's shit.

For the last 20 minutes he is running inside a power central. There are no enemies but I assume that he will backtrack with enemies.

 

[toro]

Male streamers weren’t allowed to begin streaming ahead of launch until Sunday, August 25th, with a few top names in the streaming sector like DansGaming announcing that he was given permission to stream a day after the women had been given access to Control.

This is why I will not play it. Also it's pretty bland.

 

[Morgoth]

Imagine the vast outrage if the inverse was announed.

 

[Infinitron]

Getting solid reviews: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-08-23-control-review-mid-century-postmodernism

Control review: Mid-century postmodernism
Out-of-office experience.

Giddy action and astonishing art design combine in one of the great locations of modern video games.

It spoils nothing, I hope, to reduce a game as luxurious and uncanny as Control to just four words. Here goes, then: Hell is an office. Remedy's latest takes place inside the Oldest House, the austere, echoing and inhumanly vast headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Control. The FBC is an agency that deals with unusual horrors and is, as of your arrival, in the process of being overwhelmed by them.

Let's start with that frame, because the location's an enduring delight and the main source of Control's considerable appeal. Even before things get properly strange, The Oldest House is a marvel, a Masonic temple of the mid-century modern. The whole place is equal parts Barbican Centre and plate glass University. Hallways echo. Floors are glossy and perform gorgeous puddle-effects with the simple click-clack of a heel. Concrete looks like concrete and wood looks like wood. Atriums are so roomy they feel distinctly troubling, like negative-space Mayan temples. You always feel stuck deep, deep underground, in the Oldest House, cut off and dizzy from the sheer weight of implied darkness that is massed overhead.

References matter in any office job, of course, and Control has the best. It has taken a leaf or two from House of Leaves. It has spent time in the basement with Escher and Schiele. And it has lots of Kubrick on the CV. The lighting and volumes are plucked from Dr Strangelove, with blinding overhead illumination giving nearby geometric forms a sharp-edged blackness, while distant areas dither into smokey shadow. The carpeting is fresh from the Overlook. Even 2001 gets a nod, and let us say no more of that here. (Remedy has always been one for the nods and the in-jokes, but Control suggests a finer balance than normal in this regard. We are a long way from Alan Wake, in other words, which begins with something like, "Stephen King once wrote...", and so an arrogant novelist has given his first line away to another novelist, which always felt rather unlikely.)

The world is big and you are small, and wonderfully there's no BioShock golden arrow or on-screen waypoint to tell you where to go as the missions send you from one department to the next. Instead, you have to read the environment, follow signs, and find your own way. It's first day of the job territory, and you slept through the orientation.

It helps here that, underneath the Cthulian horror spilling forth and pooling, Control's darkest shame is extreme neatness. This is secretly a very tidy game, with a central hub linked to the rest of the complex by a single elevator. And it helps that as you progress you open up control points that allow you to heal and restock and upgrade and fast-travel between nodes. But still, it's genuinely wonderful whenever you take a wrong turn on your way somewhere and feel a very real-world panic set in. I'm a little bit lost, aren't I? Everywhere is well signposted - the signs themselves add a great deal of character to the place: Luck & Probability Labs, Ritual Division - but it's still nice for a game to leave getting where you want to go up to you.
(Yes, this does mean there's a bit of backtracking involved, incidentally, and occasionally a difficulty spike will leave you some distance from a respawn point. This is annoying! But I wonder if it's also just a consequence of what Control is trying to do: give you a world that is daunting, that feels strange but also real and governed by its own inscrutable rules, and in which you have to pay attention to where you are. So much of what the game is conjuring would be weakened, I reckon, if the team made it a little more spatially forgiving. Control exerts control.)

The Oldest House is a knife-edge construction, in other words. Its scope is the scope of myth, but its detailing speaks to the homely old 9-5 toil of an earlier generation, walls of punch cards and rows of desks, elevators, as the poet said, to drop us from our day. It's spooky even before it starts to change. But the more you push forward, the more the world begins to shift and recalibrate itself around you.

It's beautifully done. Down in the basement the office plants have escaped from their polite concrete sarcophagi and have started to reclaim the walls and ceiling, making a swamp of the floor. Employees dangle in mid-air, arms limp and heads bowed. Further south a furnace room is home to a gaping mouth of flame that is so bright, so overwhelmingly yellow, that it was a relief to get out of there. My skin seemed to tingle. It is Moloch's realm: wordlessly I understood this. Elsewhere, a bottleneck of baddies will stain the air a Marnie red and, once they're cleared, the walls will Rubik's Cube themselves about a bit, opening out the space, one world reclaiming another, rejecting another. This is a kind of concrete that has tides, it seems. It advances and retreats, and it is a reliable pleasure to watch it move.

Spoiler

It's a world of finishings as well as scale. Along with those signs pointing to departments like Para-kinesiology, there are rooms of antique lab equipment and there are sextants gleaming in display cases. There's acoustic tile, coal seams, old AV equipment like reel-to-reels and projectors, rooms of plastic stacking chairs politely gathered around a yellowing screen and an OHP. All of this adds up. The Oldest House creates a cumulative sense of the dangerous wonders of research, of the dark side of curiosity.

And this is all the more powerful for being delivered largely straight. There are funny moments in Control - and if you dig deep in the collectables you will discover some excellent fancies - but on the very top layer there are few tedious jokes about the jaunty paradoxes of corporate life booming from every speaker, and on the walls there are oil paintings depicting darkly studious former employees, a smug hierarchy, rather than lame riffs on motivational posters. You get a sense of a wayward and addled heritage rather than a bunch of threadbare stand-up routines telling you how lame it is to have to wear a tie every day. And anyway, you don't need that kind of stuff to make a game playful when you can kill someone with a photocopier or a lunch bench, or when you can send blizzards of paper raffling through the air just by looking at them. Control's obvious delight in - and stubborn defence of - its own fictions is completely intoxicating.

Speaking of killing people with photocopiers, the bulk of what you actually do in the Oldest House orbits around combat. And combat, I will be honest, took a while to click with me. There was a sense, in some early battles, that Control might simply have too much taste and poise to let itself go. The rooms seemed too big, the threats too small. It was like a diorama of fun rather than the real thing.

I shouldn't have worried. As you level up and get used to your abilities, and as the game's particular thrills seep into your marrow, Control's battles become truly hilarious.
And they're built from such simple pieces. Control has a handful of different enemy types and as the game progresses it often just throws them together in new configurations. There are basic weapon grunts, flocking in hallways, gathering in corners. But they are soon joined by ragged floaty guys who explode, floaty guys who lob things, ground-based guys who lob lots of things, icy weirdos who...

These things warp in with streaks of red light and expire in spectrum blurs that bring to mind the sickly rainbows of a migraine aura. At its best, Control chucks threats at you that have real style. I'm particularly fond of a large glassy sphere rimmed in colourful light that gives off health buffs as it zips around and always makes me feel I am shooting at old Gary Numan cover art. Elsewhere, though, the visual design of the baddies cannot match the Oldest House.

In terms of whittling these guys down, one of Control's central gimmicks is a single gun - the Service Weapon - that can become many guns over the course of the game, shifting and recombining in your hand to move between machine pistol, shotgun, charged sniper shot, rocket launcher. Besides unlocking new forms for the gun you can also collect and add mods - you can mod yourself too - which flare each build in specific directions. It's fun enough, and the crafting resources have brilliant names: Undefined Reading, Corrupted Sample.

Excellent sound design complements the Service Weapon's modular, voxely form, but in truth your best weapons are the kind of thing that you can find in an old Viking catalogue anyway. This is because the gun is designed to be paired with your growing suite of supernatural powers, the first and greatest of which is Launch. God, Launch is great. It's so simple, a squeeze of the bumper grabbing an object from the nearby environment before you heft it at whoever you fancy taking out. If there's no object available, Launch doesn't mind: It will simply pull something jagged out of the ground or the walls for you and you're still off to the races.

Launch is soon joined by a dash move, the ability to seize weakened enemies and have them fight alongside you, and a few other tricks that I don't want to spoil. All of these can be tweaked with their own skill trees, which generally offer incremental power boosts but chuck in the odd twist now and then. (Launch can be powered up so you can heft really big stuff, for example, or heft actual people.)

And, like the Service Weapon, which offers infinite ammo but needs a recharge period after each clip, powers are, well, powered by a separate stock of recharging energy. The aim of the game, in other words, is to manage and balance these dueling cooldowns, shooting only when you can't afford to chuck anything, and vice versa.

To Control's credit this never feels like clinical meter-wrangling. Rather, it encourages you to be creative, to take risks, to think improbable thoughts. The same is true of the health system, which forces you to regain health only by collecting the little pieces of blue light dropped by your enemies as you shoot them. Almost dead? The best tactic may be to charge straight into the worst of it. It all gives Control a welcome vitality, a forward momentum tinged with panic. It is not too stylish for desperation and carnage after all.

When it all comes together, Control's hallways and board rooms echo with wretched joy. There is something about the chaos of throwing big things about combined with the precision of the powers' targeting system that elevates the action. There is a special halo in nailing someone with a humidor through a distant railing, watching the bars go skewiff and the body crumble. Pillars shed their concrete under gunfire filling the environment with dust and grit. This game is the famous thick-air scene from the Matrix. It takes pains in depicting the way that things fall apart.
And in the crush of it all, Control has great fun with the impedimenta of office life. It is so energising to deck a machine-gunner with a well-placed white board, or use the spidery wheel-sprout of an office chair as a spinning glaive. Form follows function, too: the retro technology that the Oldest House runs on is perfect for style and atmosphere and also perfect to simply chuck around. The look of Control - a swipe-file mixture of what's cool in interior decorating at the moment, all of which suggests that Remedy's developers are probably doing up their own homes with Ercol and whatnot as they work - plays on the carefully disorienting time-warp detailing of movies like It Follows, where people have mobile phones in their pockets but use rotary phones back at the house, and it also makes the most of the fact that the good old era of heavy tech meant that there was an awful lot of stuff to hurt people with. Nobody's wounded by a flatscreen PC monitor, but something with a bit of Bakelite to it is going to do damage that everyone's going to remember.

Everything is an opportunity, in other words. It gets to you. Towards the end of the game, I chased one straggler halfway across a map just so that I could hit them with an armchair I particularly liked. Minutes later I survived an encounter simply because the physics are so bright eyed and malicious that you can nail people with an object as you pull it towards you in the first place: you can kill with concrete even before you've taken proper aim. There is something of Skate 3 to Control at these moments.

And when it all gets quiet again, you're left with a strange realisation. There's a little trickery in the narrative some of the time, but Control refuses to descend into all-out mechanical weirdness for the most part. It never forgets the pleasure of being a shooter above all other things, and with a few exceptions it's more eager to hit you with full-on with architectural beauty than warp your brain with the kind of spatial shenanigans you get in something like Portal.

In other words, while it invokes the dark things that lie beneath, Control's actually a peerless argument for the beauty of the surface. It revels in the peculiarly warm gloss of polished concrete, the simple and undeniable thrill of combat backed up with enthusiastic physics and animation, and the visual buzz of UI that has a stark, minimalist beauty to it. Without any shade of a slight, I would call Control a sort of coffee-table book in terms of its sheer visual flair - but for how dazzling it looks in motion as you wrench individual blocks from a stacked trolley, sending them thudding through the air, as you fling rockets back at the people who fired them at you, amber sparks glinting as they pass in and out of focus and then die away for good.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/08/26/control-review/

Wot I Think: Control

Control wasn’t what I was expecting. The developers of this third-person psy-shooter have been nattering about “weird fiction” and belabouring the game’s literary inspirations. After telekinetically yeeting myself through it, however, I’ve found little insightful storytelling, just a trad conspiracy/mystery story, and lots of colourful excuses as to how someone can suddenly develop superpowers. But when it feels this satisfying to lift an office chair with your brain and hoof it at a row of monster guards, I don’t care that it’s within the videogame equivalent of Warehouse 13. Control is also surprisingly funny. Those looking for a Lynchian labyrinth of hidden meaning might find it here if they squint, but what I found was a solid comedy pastiche of the X-Files, right down to a mysterious smoking man. I wouldn’t want it to be anything else.

You are Jesse Faden, a woman who has seemingly walked off the New York City streets, and into a brutalist government building that no other city-dweller can see, despite it towering over the skyline. It’s the Federal Bureau of Control, and it is in the midst of a lockdown. A disastrous entity (which you name “the Hiss”) has appeared and is infecting the staff, turning them into shooty monsters with heads that explode into blurry mist when you bullet them up.



You achieve this with a special gun. Alice L has already gone through a lot of the detailsabout this Rubik’s Cube of a firearm. Basically, though, it’s a gun with many modes. It changes shape at your behest from pistol to shotgun to grenade launcher to snipey rail gun to rat-tat-tat-tat machine gun. There are upgrades, made with materials you find in boxes, or which are dropped by enemies. You find attachments for the gun the same way. Some make the machine gun fire faster, others control the spread of the shotty’s pellets, and so on.

What about when the gun runs out of bullets? Well, that’s when you start using your superpowers. You discover your inner telepath quite early, and pick up new abilities as you explore the shifting corridors of the Bureau’s building. Soon, fights take on a pattern of shooting at the Hissy boys until your gun runs out of ammo, then flinging bits of concrete at your foes while it reloads. Later, you’ll be doing quick, blinky dodges, or lifting rubble up to use as a shield, or simply hovering in mid-air and brainwashing the nearest Hisspot so he fights for you.

Spoiler

This rhythm of pop-pop-fling-fling feels good for most of the game, but it also rarely changes. There is a playfulness to the fighting when each new ability shows up, but I found myself tiring of the same repeated, 60-second formula by the end of it all. The game makes efforts to mix up this formula by adding more baddies – shieldy shootmen, flying flingers, explodey wobblecorpses – or setting fights in rooms with gaping insta-death pits, but it rarely felt like an adequate change of pace.

Indeed, fights in tighter quarters often feel cramped, and chuckable objects or small bits of geometry sometimes get in your way as you strafe about, leading to a sort of mid-fight stickiness. That’s an infrequent problem, but one that contributes to the increasingly frustrating nature of gun battles as the game goes on.



Control’s sense of repetitiveness is down to a few small features. To refill your health bar, for example, you have to hoover up blue droplets that fall from enemies, which makes the instinct of falling back when you’re hurt counter-productive. You need to kill lots of Hissants, then whoosh out into the open and slurp up the health as you fight. A lot of last-ditch zooms to get health end in death and an annoying jaunt back through the level, because when you die, you respawn back at the last control point (checkpoints you can also fast travel between). This makes repeated deaths an exercise in navigating the most recently traversed couple of corridors over and over, and sometimes repeating skirmishes you’ve already won.



I mention these problems up-front, but know that most of the battles are enjoyable fling-fests. Control is a very serviceable shooter. It feels good in the fingerbits, you know? And there are a lot of wobbly visual effects that make your powers feel like smooth Hollywood super-nonsense. Lift a bench off the ground, and the paper and debris around it will float beside you too. Psychically punch a toilet cubicle and it will shatter into pleasing splinters, the cistern crumbling beneath your mental rage. One psy-brawl takes place in a model town where all the waist-high houses are made of plywood. As the last Hisshead dies and the fight music fades away, the whole place is left as a mess of sawdust and smashed miniature bungalows.



The game’s dud moments come infrequently, but they do come. Some optional quests end in annoying puzzle bosses, including one temper tantrum of a boss who creates instant death pitfalls in the ground, in a fight where you spend most of the time aiming upwards at a big weak point, unable to glance at what’s beneath your feet. I stopped bothering with side quests after another bothersome paranormal boss involving floaty platforming and a bunch of exploding floaty-bads. I think I just don’t rate the slow-moving levitate ability that highly.



There are some other small irritations. The lighting does that mega-darken thing when you step into a shadowy area, mimicking the shitness of human vision and making it momentarily hard to see. That’s a modern visual effect I’d be happy to telepathically hurl off a concrete skyscraper. And like I say, the fighting gets a bit frustrating. One scene has you traipsing around a constantly shifting hotel, fighting to rock music. But the tight quarters and lack of cover in a lot of these rooms demands quicker reflexes than most of the rest of the game. Your thumbs and brain might be quicker than old lumberfuck here [points to own face, slowly] so your fight mileage may vary. But to me it felt like an unwelcome spike in difficulty, like the optional boss fights of before.

Of course, I’ve spoken a lot about the shooty-bangs and flingy-florps, but very little about the chat-o-tale. That’s partly a desire to keep spoilers from you, but also because the story, once you scratch away the “weird” stuff, is actually fairly rote. Scientists scienced too hard, experiments have gone wrong, the government is covering stuff up. Standard. But as mentioned above, I was pleasantly surprised at how much humour is buried in the game, mostly in the paraphernalia you pick up along the way. There are funny notes with big redacted patches of text, and research videos featuring the Bureau’s head scientist, Dr Darling, surrounded by old knobular machines and big 60s computer banks. These are often worth a chuckle, and have the same corporation-comedy tone as the doctors from oddball Netflix show Maniac.



There is also a darkly comic and unnerving in-game TV show called The Threshold Kids, featuring two puppets with a more eerie presence than Bosco himself. I loved stumbling across these two creepiquins on the office’s TV sets, and their first video left me nervously air-laughing like a gasping hyena.



And there’s more! It’s funny when your new research assistant Emily starts talking with glee about knives made of interdimensional rock (“Think of the combat applications! Stabbing! Slicing! Gouging!”) It’s funny to read back-and-forth memos between two Bureau agents complaining about the weird-ass assignments they have to do, like cataloguing a dead dog for records, or inspecting the contents of a thousand tiny boxes (there is a human tooth in every box). Throughout the story, Jesse has a direct line of communication to an otherworldly pyramid of untold intradimensional knowledge, a being of infinite geometry and mystery and intelligence. It tells you how to craft guns.

This sense of humour saves the game from being a shrugging, dry successor to Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy. It’s another reminder that self-awareness is often necessary if you are making something inherently ridiculous. The serious side of Control’s tale is mostly told through inner monologue, collectible FMV videos, and dream-flavoured cutscenes. The problem with using dream logic and vague sequences of flashing faces, however, is that just like a dream, it soon becomes unrooted and meaningless. You’ll probably forget Control’s story by the time you brush your teeth the next day. But you’ll remember the Threshold Kids and Dr Darling.



Overall, I had a good time, especially when introducing the Hissyfit boys to giant desks at speed. But by the time I reached the end, through the game’s twists and somersaults, I was also sort of glad it was finished. I’ll not be cleaning up the sidequests or indulging in extra Hiss-mopping tasks, because it feels like I’ve seen basically all there is to see in this concrete office. Or at least, enough to get the idea.

What I will praise highly is how Control indulges its own ludicrous nature every step of the way. I can’t overstate the fact that it’s a funny game – funny enough that the humour keeps you going from fight to fight, searching not for the source of your mysterious enemy, or for the answer to all the sub-mysteries surrounding Jesse, but for the next episode of the Threshold Kids.

https://www.pcgamer.com/control-review/

CONTROL REVIEW
Remedy returns with its strangest shooter yet.

"You need to deal with that shit."

The omnipotent Finnish janitor of the Federal Bureau of Control really wants to go on vacation, but can't until I've vanquished his old nemesis, The Clog. In what we'll call the 'bottom' of The Oldest House, an impossible building in the middle of New York that's infinitely larger on the inside than the outside, The Clog takes up residence near the coolant pumps, a swirling mass of brown slop that moans like a T-rex roaring bubbles into a glass of milk.

I shoot the wriggling maggot-like tendrils peeking out of the body and the hulking shit monster dissolves and disappears down the drain to the tune of a toilet flushing. It's never explained, but I like it that way. Clock in, kill a poop monster, clock out, no questions asked. Keeps the mystery alive.

Control is an acrobatic third-person shooter set in an amorphous concrete dimension infested by the sanitized office culture of a 1960s-era government bureaucracy. Aside from a poo beast, you'll discover new powers and revisit areas of The Oldest House to find upgrades, secrets, and side missions, all while throwing bullets and random objects at bad guys in Remedy's best combat system yet.

Remedy's taking a harder thwack at weird fiction than ever before, too. Despite a few weak characters and plot threads, the team succeeds. In Control, every conspiracy theory, ghost encounter, and alien abduction happened, just not quite for the reasons you'd expect. It's a collection of stories about seeing through the banality of everyday life, a story about language, mass media, and statecraft delivered with a dry sense of humor and no tether to reason. I still don't understand it. I don't need to. Bless this mess.

Spoiler

Semantics
Jesse Faden shows up to the The Oldest House with mysterious motives, and through bizarre circumstances that also make no sense (at first), she's suddenly thrust into the role of Director of the FBC. An Object of Power, a gun called The Service Weapon, chooses her, granting her the ability to wield the weapon and traverse The Oldest House without worry that The Hiss, another unexplainable entity that's invaded the FBC and has been turning its employees into glowing red monsters, will infect her mind. Control's a doozy.

I spent most of the first hours reeling with confusion, writing down acronyms and pausing to let moments sink in before moving on. Control's narrative is outright inaccessible at first, but that's exactly what Remedy is going for. I still don't know what The Hiss are, why The Service Weapon chose Jesse, why everyone's cool with taking orders from a transdimensional 'Board' that speaks in mumbles emanating from an inverted triangle and whose speech translates into multiple, parallel sentences at once. It/They are/is confusing/unknowable and that's OK/acceptable/true.

Inanimate objects are imbued with godlike powers, the product of Altered World Events or strange phenomena that make up modern American folklore. The FBC visits these places and collects these objects for study in The Oldest House, the panopticon and petri dish they call home.

A floppy disk hurls debris and office supplies at my head. A fridge levels buildings unless someone looks at it 24/7. I accidentally let a rubber duck loose that harasses me, barking like a demonic dog from the corner of every room I enter. Control is littered with mundane objects made fascinating and sinister, treating Jungian ideas of the collective subconscious and a touch of Baudrillard's hyperreality as the foundation for its paranormal logic. Folklore and language are the literal authors of truth. Finally, mainstream sci-fi that isn't spaceships and militarism and hot green men (love you, Thane).

Jesse's story is similarly cryptic and weird, but compromised by a vapid personality and weak connections to the supporting cast. She's harboring her own mystery, one closely tied to a family life she even keeps secret from the player for some time, but her sheepish concealments keep her at a distance, while her commentary too often mirrors my own. What the hell is happening, did that stapler talk to me, ad infinitum.

We're both baffled by the logic and hidden truths of the FBC and Oldest House, but those moments aren't used to give Jesse a moment to reveal who she is. Her personality never quite coalesces, though the manifold mysteries of the FBC told through confidential documents, audio logs, and FMVs do well to buoy the lack of character.

A lightswitch in a Butte, Montana bungalow teleports the user to an oceanside hotel somewhere in time and space, a sort of dimensional transit station. Altered Item case files tell stories about a picnic basket that attracts woodland creatures or a surfboard that gives anyone touching it an excess of confidence. Then there's a creepy puppet TV show the bleach-brained FBC put together to introduce kids to their research, replete with lingering gazes at the camera and sinister voicework. It's horrible! I love it.

The Oldest House is a fascinating setting, but Jesse's family story about shared trauma and the effects of living in a media driven world doesn't say much beyond how disorienting it is.

Control is best when it uses these heady concepts about language and reality as the basis for a set of wild stories. But it ends—after a wild head trip of a sequence, of course—a little too abruptly, like it had just tee'd up those big ideas but forgot to swing. The arc doesn't feel complete or entirely fulfilling, as much fun as the ride is, though it's clearly setting up for a sequel, spinoff, or DLC somewhere in the Remedy-verse. Bring it on.

Yes, there are guns
OK, so why is a coral reef growing out of the wall in the maintenance sector, and why does Jesse think it smells delicious? I don't know if I'm meant to reach the high ledge where I see the ocean floor growing quite yet, but I try anyway.

I round the corner and clamber up some rocks where I chain Jesse's dash ability through the air and back around the corner, where I manage to hit the wall below the ledge at just the right point. She grabs it and pulls herself up. I find enemies too powerful for my low-grade abilities and guns, so I dip out. But now I have a new mystery to solve and a good reason to shoot some Hiss for upgrade points and currency to make new astral constructs (guns).

Control's shooting may be the last thing anyone will talk about after the credits roll—like I said, there's a rubber duck that harasses you—but it's Remedy's best yet.

Enemies drop health where they die and Jesse is so fragile that I have to constantly push the enemy position to stay alive, Doom 2016 style. It's propped up by smart interplay between the weapon system and extremely satisfying telekinetic abilities.

The Service Weapon morphs between two forms of your choosing, each representing a fairly standard videogame gun archetype: pistol, shotgun, SMG, sniper, and grenade launcher. Ammo isn't a thing though, as 'magazines' are represented by energy. Empty the weapon and it'll recharge after a few seconds, a nice bit of encouragement to reposition or, better, use a telekinetic ability, which have their own recharging energy bar.

It's energy bar ping-pong: shoot, use an ability, shoot, use an ability. In detail: I headshot a soldier with Shatter, leap into the air, dash up to the second floor, throw an industrial copier at the shielded guy at the back of the room, wing a few pistol shots at someone dashing between cover, summon the rubble and objects around me as a shield to take on the incoming rocket, drop the shield and grab the next rocket with telekinesis and fling into the next unlucky Hiss soldier. This one's strapped to a chair and floating around in the sky, a fellow telekinesis user. With their health low, I use mind control to turn them to my side. Telekinetic buds, tossing file cabinets around. Good times.

With a complete arsenal of abilities, I'm able to bounce around the big, multi-tiered arenas like Superman with a handgun permit. But before I found the dash and shield abilities, and before I finished enough missions to upgrade my health and energy reserves, I was too often pinned to a corner and easily overwhelmed. It doesn't take terribly long to get up to snuff, but early combat encounters are frustrating compared to what follows.

When you're fully powered-up, Remedy's love of flying objects comes to the fore. The Oldest House's tidy environments are like water. Every dash sends papers flying, coffee cups crashing. Jesse can toss any object in the environment with her brain, turning banal office spaces and retro futurist underground labs into disaster areas. Levitating pulls errant objects into Jesse's orbit, like lazy little moons: staplers, rubble, pencils, printers, corpses. Max Payne would be proud.

Control is a top-tier mess-making simulator. Jesse's telekinesis joins Half-Life 2's juiced gravity gun in the videogame physics toy hall of fame.

But, like the story, the momentum peters out right when things come together. Chasing every skill upgrade through endgame sidequests (the credits aren't the end-end) too often climax in boss fights that are conceptually interesting but aren't fun to fight.

The upgrades are too simple to feel worth chasing anyway, largely linear improvements to health, energy reserves, damage from thrown objects, how many enemies you can mind control at once, and so on. Given how playful the combat already is, I would've loved to see some comparably playful deviations in the skill tree. As it stands, it's just killing stuff to do what you already do more efficiently. Feels great, but doesn't change much.

My second full lap of The Oldest House is still unearthing new discoveries, entire wings I missed at first, more Altered Items playing clever tricks, hidden bosses, secret areas, and, best of all, [REDACTED]. Control's combat is slow to start and its overarching story doesn't go far enough, but it's a gorgeous font of wonders and poop monsters and wild physics unlike anything I've played in recent memory.

THE VERDICT
88

CONTROL
Control's thin protagonist and abrupt ending are propped up by an abundance of mystery, wonder, and glorious room-destroying combat.