Control is ostensibly an open-world game, but gives you little reason to revisit places you’ve been. The pacing is excellent, aside from a few half-hearted side missions.Īnd if I have any complaints, it’s that I wish there was more to do outside the main story. Through the end, you’re still accessing new areas and uncovering deeper and darker secrets about the Bureau’s operations. Core story information is generally conveyed in ways the player can’t miss, through conversations and cutscenes, and I didn’t feel like I was going out of my way to find collectibles-but then again, they’re so well-executed I would’ve hunted them down regardless.Īnyway, exploring The Oldest House sustains the vast majority of the game. It’s not a perfect solution, but it feels far less distracting than it has in past Remedy games.

They’re research that could conceivably be left out, or in the case of Darling’s presentations, film reels that play on in-game projectors and TVs in appropriate locations. They’re not scattered around in weird places, nor do they tend to take the form of ultra-convenient documents that happened to get left out. Control’s collectibles feel more justified though. I said as much when reviewing Quantum Break, and it’d be wrong not to reiterate the same here. IDG / Hayden DingmanĪre collectibles a crutch? Yeah, sure. Altered Items, Objects of Power, Altered World Events, The Board, the Service Weapon- Control’s world is weird, but Darling’s presentations ground it, make the supernatural feel deceptively normal. These are Remedy’s best live-action videos to-date, each a faux-educational video about some aspect of the Bureau’s research. My favorite though are recordings of the enigmatic (and charismatic) Doctor Casper Darling. There was a weird mold-ridden basement, site of an experiment seemingly gone catastrophic. There was Audio Lab #2, the existence of which implied an Audio Lab #1 if only I looked hard enough. There was the Ashtray Maze, a labyrinth that reshaped itself as I wandered through it, inevitably leading back to the beginning each time. We took a look at Control’s Research Level back at GDC, and I fell in love with the odd details. Jesse seems immune though, and is able to battle it back and explore The Oldest House in the process.Īnd for a long time The Oldest House is the star. The Bureau’s come under attack by an alien entity dubbed The Hiss, so named because it propagates person-to-person through some sort of barely-audible whine. She’s able to enter though, and sets about restoring order. Not only that, but the Bureau is currently in lockdown, which should’ve made The Oldest House doubly inaccessible. People aren’t supposed to know about The Oldest House, and anyone who doesn’t know about The Oldest House can’t find it. Here’s the catch: Jesse shouldn’t have been able to get into The Oldest House in the first place. You play as Jesse Faden, an ordinary civilian who one day wanders into The Oldest House, headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Control. Such density of writing, so many layers, and so few of them easy to explain. Writing remains Remedy’s strength though. You’re a force of nature, ripping chunks of concrete from the wall to shield yourself, then catapulting into the air and blasting your makeshift barricade out into the surrounding enemies, finishing off one with a quick headshot and another with a desk picked up and thrown from across the room. IDG / Hayden DingmanĬontrol is first-and-foremost a fantastic third-person action game, the likes of which Remedy hasn’t really made since Max Payne 2. Alan Wake for instance tells a fantastic story, but its stop-and-pop gunfights were a chore even at the time, and Quantum Break’s hybrid game-and-television format left both halves feeling somewhat compromised. Third-person action game? Lots of story-adjacent collectibles? Paranormal themes? Affinity for live-action video? Love letter to brutalist architecture? Control checks all the myriad boxes I’ve come to associate with Remedy over the years. This really is the ur-Remedy, the point where Max Payne, Alan Wake, and Quantum Break meet. It’s not that Control is stunningly experimental or anything of that sort, because it’s not. And I wish I could leave it at that, because Control is also borderline unreviewable-even more so than its release-day compatriot Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, which is really saying something.

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