Control might not represent the most average day for Jesse Faden. Finding the secretive government organisation that took your brother all those years ago could be cause for celebration. Finding a dead man, picking up his weird gun and finding that you’re now the paranormally appointed Director of that same organisation could be a point of concern. And that’s before you find out about all of those horrifying mind warping horrors they’ve been studying for decades now. So a rough day then.
Control is the latest title from Remedy Games. It could best be thought of as a spiritual follow up to their (much beloved) Alan Wake and to a lesser extent their (Less beloved) Quantum Break. The former game relied on survival horror tropes of resource management in a level based literary horror setting. Control is functionally a character action game, with light Metroidvania elements in a corporate cosmic horror setting.
Swapping King style American small town horror for something more akin to Welcome to Nightvale or SCP Collections provides a welcome change up. I really do like the whole story for the game. There are elements of cosmic horror, considerations of belief providing power for the paranormal and other related elements. It’s an experience best understood by exploring and discovering the story and narrative yourself so I won’t go into specific details here.
The entire game takes place inside the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Control. This is where the majority of the corporate in corporate cosmic horror comes from.
Endless boardrooms and meeting Chambers all filled with dark wood panelling, scarlet carpet and steel framed glass. The furniture all has a distinctly 80s office chic to it, with the strange properties of the bureau blocking all complex electronic communication. As such, the building is full of banks of punch card machinery, projectors and word processors.
This also gives a delightfully diagetic reason as to why there are dozens of tape decks and memos lying around as collectible objects round the map. This place was an active office, and a research facility. If they weren’t writing things down and recording the findings, it probably couldn’t even count as mad science.
Rest assured, this game features some superbly fun weird science. Darkly comic and unsettling, Control is full of little touches and world building that all combine to really sell the whole experience.
The creepy by way of the corporate is shown off best in how the game handles collectibles. Radio plays, live action training videos, memos and corporate docs and all of them are just unsettling enough, just wrong enough to seem off. Of particular note, an ongoing narrative around educating kids on paranormal activities ends up culminating in some of the most unsettling videos I’ve seen in a major game. The kind I could only barely watch once. The collectibles really help engross the player and drive them to explore further. Discovering secret areas becomes significantly more meaningful when it leads to a new note in an ongoing thread.
Discovering new areas in Control represents the majority of the Metroidvania style of exploration.
Enter hub area, explore and clear enemies, secure fast travel control point. From there, normally the player will end up using the very smooth and satisfying movement to explore for secrets and complete missions.
One particular touch that I just adored was the fact that each new area has a huge bold sans font name appear when you enter. It gives a real sense of gravitas to a new arrival.
There are different levels of the facility, accessed through elevators, then the whole floor can be fast travelled around. (Which is canonically how they work in the narrative too. Jesse is actually teleporting from point to point. I love this.)
There are a few minor issues with the exploration elements though, in spite of all the great world building.
The map is sometimes illegible. It’s representing a blue print of a 3d space and thus doesn’t always contain clear guidance on the level or direction you need to go to reach somewhere.
The second issue is partially tied to the rewards for exploring. With a few very positive exceptions tied to the collectibles, the majority of the rewards are upgrade mods. This ties into a broader issue with upgrade progression. Get mods for guns, get mods for yourself. These provide incremental percentage boosts to effects.
The problem is that if I’m exploring in a Metroidvania, it’s slightly disheartening to work out how to reach a place, be rewarded for your creativity, but that reward is only a 1% boost on what you have already. Or maybe it’s worse. It’s a really minor thing, but considering how polished and entertaining the rest of both the exploration and combat elements are, it just feels a little inconsequential.
The other half of the equation, the combat, definitely feels satisfying. One of the first combat sequences in Control sells the effect of the game, even before you start acquiring all your mysterious powers.
The gun Jesse picked up which started this whole thing is called the Service Weapon. It’s effectively a magic weapon fuelled by a subconscious myth/belief in heroic weapons, that can be anything you want. As this is a game set in America, it starts as a pistol.
It’s just you versus several low level enemies with rifles. Except that it’s set in the middle of a set of office boardrooms. So each exchange of gunfire results in reams of paper flying from shredded books or shimmering shards of glass flitting through the air. When the fight ends, chairs and tables are scattered and ruined shelves and glass litter the floor.
Move and fire. Cover is an option when needed but you won’t stick to any walls. You can run, duck get out of the way much easier.
Enemies being shot, even from beginner level fights, send off sprays of energy in a red mist. Scoring a hit feels tangible as they stagger backwards.
The other forms of the Service Weapon are equally well designed. I personally ended up sticking with the Pierce and Shatter modes mostly. Shatter is the shotgun version. A hefty recoil and a wide spread of shots balance the significant close range damage. Conversely, the Pierce was a sniper weapon. Strong enough to punch through walls with an orange burn mark and hit the opponent behind. Tempered by a (camera zoom assisted) wind up before firing and then a concussive launch.
This tangibility extends to all the weapons in the game, as well as the powers you’ll get.
The main one of these, before you acquire others like Shields and flying, is the Telekenetic slingshot. Aim at target, hold to gather object, fire. The camera pulls in tight on a close third person view of Jesse, gives strong feeling of tension being released as the object is fired off, with a burst of noise and a trail of dust in the air.
Results are just as important. A gas tank hit will fill the air with fire for a moment. A fire extinguisher showers the floor with white mist. If you pull a chunk of the floor out to launch, it shatters the area around the breach with the effort.
Both your weapon and powers work off a regenerating meter system. Spend bar to shoot or use powers, then hold moment to build back up.
Combat becomes a dance of crowd and meter management, in the best traditions of character action. Fire off your weapon to drop the weaker enemies fast before they swarm. Raise your shield of debris as several blasts come in at once. Swing around to target the floating foe, then launch a bench at them. All of this is easily possible and feels simple yet satisfying to accomplish.
This all pays off with the aftermath of a fight feeling incredible. Wreckage everywhere, allies catching their breath, enemy bodies strewn where you’ve thrown them.
Fights have an immediate impact on the player because they leave an immediate impact on the game world.
This does have the unfortunate side effect of making the game incredibly performance intensive. I was fairly comfortably sitting above the minimum pc requirements, but even with appropriate settings I was getting a touch of slowdown. Original PS4 and Xbox One models might struggle too. But these are things that can be optimised over time.
As for the Enemy design itself, it’s fine. Humanoids that glow red, mostly with guns. Not the most original, but there is a fair bit of variety amongst them.
Eventually launched explosives start appearing (which can obviously be thrown back), enemies wearing armour that has to be breached to get to the gooey center, floating proximity explosives and even enemies that start replicating aspects of your powers.
The AI is not so impressive on standard difficulty. It’s mostly being built around getting a view of you and then taking shots while they stand there. Regular enemies are not challenging unless they mount numbers. Even then, the majority of the times I died was when I was so caught up in the maelstrom of fighting. This was typically caused by telekenetically grabbing something explosive and launching it at a much too close opponent.
The exception to this was the boss fights in the game. All were relatively fairly checkpointed, so the sudden spikes in difficulty weren’t too much of an impediment.
Usually these bosses were supported by waves of additional enemies (in order to allow the player to regenerate health) and crowd control thus became the main tactic for these fights.
The health system might actually be my only gripe with the combat. Killing an enemy drops a few blue health elements which can be used to restore a little health. As a result; the player has to constantly track where they defeat foes, then get there to heal. Normally this means the health pickups are also surrounded by enemies so mid-fight healing isn’t easy. If you’re playing the game by hanging back, it also means you have to stop playing the way you want in order to heal. Again, a minor complaint, but one that was slightly frustrating among the rest of the polish.
Where there are no stumbles is in the sound design and effects. Remedy have a tradition of excellent work in the music and sound department, and Control is no exception. Diagetic use of music was one of the absolute best parts of Alan Wake and I’m thrilled by the fact they somehow bettered it here. On a smaller scale, this game deserves headphones. Ideally good ones with audio direction. The constant sussuration of layers of voices and spooky sounds is incredibly well put together.
Similarly the voice acting on all the characters is excellent. Courtney Hope, who served as the model and voice for the player character of Jesse Faden is a pitch perfect casting choice. Noir style internal narration means she has a constant internal monologue for the player to latch onto. As an outsider to all of this Bureau weirdness, she also gets some fantastic reactions to the other characters.
Jesse’s internal monologue wavers and shifts depending on what’s going on, and she frequently captures the dichotomy of a character who is both weary of dealing with all of this weirdness since her childhood, but also recognises that it’s still amazing to behold. The small moments of joy, confusion and wonder that break up the story make her a very relatable character.
There’s a small cast of characters in the bureau who function as questgivers. All of them are fascinatingly unique with fun takes on conventional character tropes.
Ahti, the slightly odd Finnish janitor, researcher Emily Pope who is far too eager to dig into the combat applications of all this cosmic horror (and is all the more entertaining a character for it) and other characters end up populating your hub area. In between missions they can be returned to for more information and new details on the story.
Without fail I kept returning to check on them. Partially to get more strands of story but also because they were given such excellent performances that it’s hard not to just like them. Even in spite of some tropey character decisions.
That kind of sums up the whole game. It’s not necessarily doing anything new, or too mind bending. If you’ve followed indie games that take a similar setting, or are a fan of SCP foundation or the like, this won’t be anything too over the top or ridiculous.
What Control does do wonderfully though is take all of those influences and package them neatly and effectively through it’s lavish world design and excellent combat systems.
It may not necessarily break any new barriers through drawing on its forbears in the genre, but it iterates on them in satisfying ways and creates a deeply enjoyable experience as a result.
Control is available now on the Epic Games Store for PC, Xbox One and Playstation 4.