I’m typically a sucker for a game with a great story, and Remedy Entertainment is a company that never ceases to deliver when it comes to making great games with deep atmospheres and compelling stories. Alan Wake was a strong entry for the studio, while Quantum Break is possibly the best TV show I’ve ever seen. When I heard that Remedy was planning to do a Twin Peaks inspired thriller with Metroidvania elements, I couldn’t have possibly been more excited to get my hands on it. Did Control deliver or did I over-hype myself into being excited for disappointment?
Without going into too much detail, I’ll simply say that Control is a super weird game. Control kicks off-putting you behind the visage of Jesse Faden, a girl who’s randomly entered the Federal Bureau of Control looking for her little brother Dylan. Dylan has been taken captive for monitoring by the FBC after the strange events that happen in a town called Ordinary. Without any explanation, Jesse wanders around what appears to be a completely empty building until she stumbles upon a janitor named Athi. Athi doesn’t at all seem surprised that there’s a random stranger wandering around, he just assumes she’s there to be his assistant and so he tells her where to go. She stumbles into the Executive Area when she suddenly hears a gunshot, and she walks into the nearby office. Inside the office, she finds the Director of the FBC laying on the floor with his brains painted across the carpet. She hears a voice in her head and she picks up the nearby gun on the ground, and that’s when the game kicks off on a descent into madness.
Control’s story is well told, and there’s a ton of cool videos and vignettes to accompany the journey – but it’s not very well executed. There’s plenty of background info to find if you search for videos, audio recordings, and read the case file folders you’ll find scattered around the halls of The Oldest House. It turns out that the Bureau building itself seems to be a living entity that’s been corrupted by a supernatural force nicknamed “The Hiss” due to the hissing/screeching nature it makes as you approach areas guarded off by hiss barriers. Without giving any spoilers, I’ll simply say that I have played completely through Control’s story, and a significant amount of the side quests, and I still don’t know what the hell is actually going on, or what the hell actually even happened. The story left me with more questions than answers.
A convoluted story meant to make you think, engage your imagination, and leave room for you to talk with other fans about possible scenarios is always a good thing – but I think Control is gonna suffer from people who don’t get it and therefore didn’t like the experience as a whole. Sure, there will undoubtedly be people who absolutely love the way this story is told, but there’s a good chance that Control might just be too out there for a lot of people. If I had to guess, I’d say people who like this game for the story are probably going to be the same people who enjoy movies like Donnie Darko.
Story aside, Control is a pretty terrific shooter. The controls feel natural, and combat is a lot of fun. Jesse gets some cool telekinetic abilities, including the ability to yeet people at each other, but the lack of even a basic cover system makes the combat a tad more frustrating than it should be. Crouching down behind things is more often than not an exercise in futility and you’re still going to take damage because the environments are highly destructible. Perhaps the best thing Control has going for it is the amount of extremely intricate graphical effects. You can see a ton of detail in this game, even on the console versions. When you first walk into the Bureau and meet the Janitor, if you pan the camera up a bit, you can see mop streaks on the floor where the floor is wet and was recently mopped. Glass breaks more closely to the way it would in real life, but the really stellar part is the oil slick looking pearlescent spray that comes when shooting enemies as opposed to the typical gallons of blood we’ve come to expect. This is a really cool design choice and makes Control stand out in a big way aesthetically.
Unfortunately for as much as I love the flashy effects, the game suffers drastically for it. There were a ton of performance issues during my review (though some of this should be addressed with a day one patch). I ran into several areas where the FPS dropped way down, likely into single digits when there were explosions and a lot of things going on at the same time. There’s a boss fight that I thought was going to be completely unwinnable due to the boss throwing a flurry of missiles, so many missiles that the game couldn’t actively keep up with the actions and I would go from full health to dead in a split second with no explanation of why. After about an hour of trying, I was finally able to kill it, but I still have no idea how I actually managed to pull it off.
There are also several issues with game stability. If you pause the game, even for a second, the game struggles to recover from it – and I’ve heard that leaving the game on pause for extended periods of time results in not being able to recover and you’ve got to force close and restart to keep playing. Control only hard crashed twice for me, so that’s decently impressive considering the other slowdowns and hitches I ran into. From frozen in-game videos to subtitles that can’t keep up with the dialogue, there are definitely some issues that need to be addressed – like side quests where the targets fail to spawn meaning they are unable to be completed.
Ultimately, Control is a really cool experience even with all of the flaws. I really liked the atmosphere of the Bureau and Jesse’s voice actor Courtney Hope did a terrific job. The ending is a trip, and the gameplay is fun, even if it’s slightly repetitive. While I’m not sure it’s worth $60, it’s still definitely an experience that you should check out when you’re looking for something that’s considerably different than the average shooter.
Control was reviewed on the PlayStation 4 and was provided for review by 505 Games.
