Control review: My favorite game of 2019?
Today, I finished Control, the latest from Remedy Entertainment. By now, the games press has described Control as David Lynch's take on The X-Files, with a healthy dose of SCP and Half-Life sprinkled in for good measure. It's an accurate, if ultimately reductive description.
What I'd like to add is that Control feels like the culmination of Remedy's existence as a studio. It is as though the team's previous works, Max Payne, Max Payne 2, Alan Wake and even Quantum Break, were practice toward a greater purpose—scratching at the intangible itch of a truly great idea.
Control is that idea.
It is Remedy's best game, and it's not even close.
Jesse is fly in more ways than one.
Control stars Jesse Faden, a determined young woman seemingly on the run from and in search of something. Guided by fate, or perhaps some other equally inscrutable force, Jesse arrives in the middle of New York at the Federal Bureau of Control's headquarters, a nondescript office building known only as the Oldest House.
As it turns out, the FBC, like so many other clandestine bureaucracies, is charged with researching and containing paranormal subjects for safekeeping—a giant mallet that transmits leprosy, a mannequin that duplicates endlessly, a refrigerator that requires eye contact at all times... or else.
In surprising fashion, Jesse is made the bureau's director within minutes of stepping through the front door. Her first task? Dispelling the Hiss, an extra-dimensional entity that has overrun the Oldest House and rendered much of its rank and file to floating, whispering husks.
The Oldest House, half-fortress and half-prison, is at once both a labyrinthine maze of brutalist architecture and one of the most awe-inspiring game settings I've encountered. As a Place of Power (get used to the proper nouns), it bends and reshapes itself according to its own will (it can't even be discovered from the outside unless it WANTS to be seen). Despite its many twists, turns and abnormalities, navigating the Oldest House's sectors becomes second nature thanks to some of the best in-game signage in video games.
There are other proper nouns. Jesse receives occasional directives from the Board, a faceless entity (entities?) that appears to govern the inner workings of the FBC. For a floating upside-down pyramid or whatever, the Board is a hilarious and unsettling presence throughout Control's duration and a quite literal master of doublespeak. Here's one of my favorite quotes:
< We Apologize/Deny All Knowledge for the inconvenience. You must Espionage/Destroy when possible/inevitable. Do not get believe/get hyped about the Former's lies/ads. We provide/offer better Bonus Package/Health Plan. If you leave, you will be sorry/dead, and you will never work/exist in this Torn/Cosmic reality again. >
Wasn’t kidding. It’s just a big ol’ inverted pyramid.
The Board is one of literally dozens of aspects of Control's lore that propels the player forward through its world better than nearly any other game I've played. Its world-building is so convincing, in fact, that it has made the previously-taboo subject of audiotapes and strewn-about documents in game environments not only tolerable, but vital to one's enjoyment. The lore doses that are drip-fed through such excerpts detail a world as mundane as an office employee who was forced to work overtime because the Oldest House shifted unexpectedly during a bathroom break, leaving him hours away from his desk, or as exciting as FBC field agents battling paranormal forces in small-town America. And you'll know this is occurring all around you because you'll occasionally stumble into the same paranormal forces detailed in those documents yourself, if you're vigilant enough.
Another proper noun is the Service Weapon, Jesse's Swiss-army-knife solution for dispatching the Hiss. The Service Weapon, a constantly fluctuating Object of Power that only the director of the bureau can wield, serves up your standard third-person shooter fare—a pistol, a shotgun, a sniper rifle, etc., all with self-regenerating ammunition. Control's gunplay is engaging enough on its own. But in concert with a suite of incredibly cool powers that Jesse inherits, the combat absolutely sings.
Control is NOT a cover shooter, and every design choice Remedy has made reinforces that fact. Jesse's health does not recover if she hides behind cover, so there is little incentive to do so.
There is, in fact, a crouch button, and Jesse can peek out to aim the Service Weapon from behind countertops and other appropriately-waist-high structures. But once she fires a shot, she's no longer crouching... or safe. It feels like a very deliberate design decision.
Instead, enemies drop orbs of health as you damage and defeat them. So the only way for Jesse to stay healthy—because she is frail—is to keep moving.
Thankfully, Jesse has a number of options for battlefield manipulation, including the game's signature launch power that allows her to telekinetically throw chairs, desks, forklifts, etc. at her opponents. (Bonus points if you can seize an object from directly behind an enemy, smacking it in the back of the head as you pull it toward yourself, and then launch it into its stupid face for the kill.)
She can also dart around with an incredibly useful dash and, eventually, command gravity itself with one of the most empowering levitation abilities I've experienced in a game.
As Jesse's arsenal grows and the ebb and flow of combat defines itself, it becomes clearer that the Service Weapon is the backup means of offense while her otherworldly powers recharge.
Furniture within the Oldest House often favors function over form.
Those powers are often the impetus for exploration in Control. Side missions dole out abilities and lore in equal measure, and collectively they account for about half of the content found within the Oldest House. Though some of these side missions ultimately devolve into fairly routine objectives (go here, shoot that), the storytelling surrounding them are often unforgettable.
(Slight non-main-story spoilers follow for my single-favorite side quest in the game.)
Probably not an accident that Jesse looks like some sort of death-dealing Sith lord in this suit.
About halfway through the game, you'll overhear some guards talking about a creepy mirror locked up in the Containment sector. Once you track down the Mirror Testing Lab a little later, you'll find a nearby audio recording of a woman questioning an agent who has apparently returned from a parallel dimension inside the mirror. The audiotape sounds normal, until the agent speaks... in reverse. After solving a clever puzzle and gaining access to the mirror dimension yourself, you'll find that same audiotape, except this time the agent's voice is normal and the interviewer's is reversed. It's then that you'll learn he was desperately trying to warn her of some presence in this mirror. Cue epic boss fight with your evil doppelganger, esseJ. Defeat her and take her badass longcoat, the Asynchronous Suit (the coolest outfit in the game), as proof of your accomplishments.
(End of slight non-main-story spoilers.)
This 30-minute slice of Control is emblematic of everything the game succeeds at—delivering on an interesting narrative premise and wrapping it around an equally satisfying gameplay experience.
Except that to extract those two concepts as distinct halves of Control is a mistake—the narrative and gameplay are intrinsically linked, and continue to reinforce each other like some kind of Lynchian ouroboros.
Control is a visually striking game, for better or worse; base consoles often struggle to achieve a steady frame rate.
There are loads of things I can't/shouldn’t discuss, including the most enigmatic janitor in video games, the Easter eggs hinting at the larger Remedy-verse and the absolute stellar incorporation of live-action video.
The game does stumble with its modding system, which feels like an afterthought—or at the very least, a late addition in the development cycle. Mods can be crafted from materials found throughout the Oldest House, and they can be used to directly empower Jesse's weaponry or Jesse herself. The mods themselves are pretty standard (60 percent bonus headshot damage, 20 percent faster reload time, 40 percent more health, etc.), but the tedium of inventory space management often outweighs any sense of empowerment derived from mods.
Also, the checkpoint system is fairly unforgiving. Dying in a boss encounter often means repeating several minutes of gameplay leading up to it, which can become especially tiring in some of the more challenging (optional) late-game missions.
Lastly, though I had a buttery-smooth experience on my PC (1070 TI / Ryzen 5 2600X / 32 GB of DDR-4 RAM), the same can't be said for console players who don't own a PS4 Pro or an Xbox One X. Digital Foundry has reported some abysmal frame drops on the base Xbox One and PS4.
Ultimately, its successes eclipse its shortcomings. I don't know if Control is the best game I've played in 2019. But it is absolutely the game I have least wanted to end.
