Setup: Xbox One
Developer: Remedy Entertainment
Publisher: 505 Games
Release Date: 08/27/2019
Platforms: Microsoft Windows (Epic Game Store), Xbox One, PlayStation 4
FEAR THE MUNDANE
Folklore. Mythology. Urban legends. Conspiracy theories. Creepypasta. People are horrified and transfixed by the unknown and incomprehensible, and often we place that sense of inescapable dread at the feet of perfectly ordinary places and objects. Much of the best horror fiction is rooted in the idea that just behind the familiar world, the time and place we know and feel most comfortable in, there is another, darker world waiting to seep through.
For the most part, there is a well-defined line between fantasy and reality. But people are bad about maintaining that definition. What might start out as a relatively neutral “faked moon landing conspiracy” could turn into a full-blown whopper about the lizard people wearing human suits desperately trying to maintain their grip on humanity at large. For these folks, normal life IS the horror story, one they can’t escape from.
But what if they were… right? Not about the lizard people, necessarily, but about the… thickness of that line? It appears solid and dependable from a distance, but when you get closer you can start to see through it. What if our superstitions and urban folklore was, in fact, real? What if the stories kids told themselves around the campfire to scare each other could come true?
If all this was true, surely there’d be some kind of government agency devoted to studying these phenomena, and surely the public would know about it, right? Haha, yeah, I didn’t think so.
Anyway, I used to work in an office inside a massive, old and mostly unused printer manufacturing facility. You could see it for miles entering town from any direction. It was a stunningly white metal-and-concrete factory, and my company retrofitted its front offices, as well as an annex, for our work. Inside our office, things looked and felt mostly normal. If you saw a picture of the place, you wouldn’t be able to tell right away that our job was in anything like an old, mostly-unused factory building.
If you had to step away to the break room, you would walk down a long, dim corridor of metal, cinder-block and concrete. Fluorescent lights set to a timer and a motion sensor were positioned every few feet from each other; if a light went long enough without someone walking under it, it would turn off. At the right time of day (or night), this could result in a truly spooky hallway moment, where the only real light came from the break room itself.
Aside from the office, annex and break room, we didn’t have access to anywhere else in the building without special permission from our managers and the building manager. As it turns out, even in a mostly-unused factory building, it’s still not advisable to just run around the place without safety equipment.
One time, some colleagues and I got that permission.
We were transporting some unused office equipment to “storage.” The journey took us and our office supplies down a twisting maze of hallways and empty rooms. Some paths were blocked off by blast doors. Other paths seemed to lead nowhere. When we got to our destination, we happened upon a massive room filled with piles of chair arms and tables and other effluvia. In the dim orange light, I looked around, tried to see the other side of the room. It wasn’t immediately visible. I thought I heard growling. Might have been a pipe.
We left in a hurry.
I heard stories about the building from people who’d been there for a while before I started there. I’m almost positive none of them were true, but the whole building gave off a kind of… vibe. I’m not sure how to describe it other than that. The stories weren’t true, but you could almost believe them anyway.
I’m a big fan of the place where reality and (horrific) fantasy collide. There is something special happening in the liminal spaces, those dark hallways and empty streets in the dead of night. There is a certain look and feel I associate with this void moment, probably best defined by the one open gas station on the corner, a beacon in the pitch black, neon and halogen lights ablaze. Part of this has to do with working a night shift at a gas station for a while, of that I’m certain. But part of it stems from my love of weird fiction, of stories that might terrify us as much as they intrigue us.
It is in these liminal spaces where we get the urban legends, the folklore. The scary stories. And it is these liminal spaces that Finnish developer Remedy Entertainment, famous for games like Max Payne, Alan Wake and Quantum Break, perfectly encapsulates in Control. Everything, from the story to the soundscape to the absolute commitment to Brutalist design principles, is perfectly fine-tuned to elicit this very specific mood. And I for one am completely here for it.
It should probably be said that there will be a lot of spoilers in this review past this point. Continue if you dare. And if you don’t, take this as my full-throated endorsement of this game. Happy trails, no matter which path you take.
Welcome to “Game Design by Dummies, for Dummies,” I’m your host, Trevor Hultner! On today’s episode, we’re going to talk about visual language and its use in games to convey certain information to players at certain times. I’m almost certainly going to be wrong here so use your comment-writing powers to let me have it below!
Visual media has an inherent problem when it comes to communicating ideas effectively. If I showed you an image of a ball next to a trash can, with no other context, the only thing you would be able to learn from it for sure would be “that ball’s next to a trash can.” You don’t know whose ball it is, how the ball got there, what the deal is with the trash can, or anything else.
If I handed you the image of a ball next to a trash can and launched into a 10-minute explanation of how the ball ended up next to the trash can, who it belonged to, why the trash can was there, et cetera, you would now solidly know the story, but the image itself would be superfluous.
Film can solve this problem using a combination of dialogue and consecutive imagery that not only gives you the same information I just spent 10 minutes giving you in that diatribe, it also gave it to you much more efficiently. Filmmakers have developed an entire century’s worth of work and study on “show, don’t tell” that I honestly feel kind of uncomfortable stepping on with this clumsy explanation. But for as difficult as it is to “show, don’t tell” in a movie, it seems like it’s doubly so in a video game. Whereas a scene in a movie might be carefully edited to show viewers something specific, that same scene in a video game has to deal with a pretty big issue: you’re directing the playable character. You have the freedom, unless the game locks you in place, to move around the level and almost completely disregard whatever it is you’re supposed to be looking at.
As a result, most video games take what is known as a “diegetic” approach: lots of player narration, dialogue trees, collectible story whingdompers, and so on. The player character is almost never able to break the fourth wall with this information, it’s just assumed they absorb it (and, as a result, you have absorbed it as well).
In addition to diegesis, we have something called “mimesis.” If diegesis is considered to be the act of telling a story, then mimesis is showing one. In any video game, there are moments where something unscripted happens to the player character and information is promptly conveyed to the player. It could be something as simple as an observed minor event or conversation between two unimportant NPCs. This doesn’t add anything to the main story or even the B- or C-plots, it simply gives the game some flavor as you move through it.
Sometimes, however, mimesis is necessary to help the player through a given situation.
Think back to Half-Life, or if you never played Half-Life, think back to Portal. In both games, you are given a very small amount of information to start with. An NPC Black Mesa scientist might tell you to go put on your HEV suit, but not where you’ll find it. You have to follow the right colored line to the right part of the facility to get the HEV suit. In Portal, you learn how to fire the portal gun, which surfaces are and aren’t “portalable” and how to use physics to your advantage almost exclusively by yourself, by trial and error.
There’s even a moment in Portal when you learn that you can use a Companion Cube to block certain panels from moving back into the wall — all because you had to get by one to see a series of scribbles on the wall, drawn by the mysterious rat man.
Whether it’s by objects in the environment or simple, consistent use of color to identify good items and events from bad ones, mimesis goes hand-in-hand with diegesis.
Control is a masterpiece in this regard. There is plenty to talk about regarding the actual narrative in Control, but this game puts mimesis to such great use that it’s kind of astonishing how easily you start to pick up the world’s rules without anyone explaining them to you. Red objects or people invariably mean they’re corrupted by the enemy Hiss hivemind. A room awash in a yellow light is one with a “light cord” that can transport you to a mysterious roadside motel. If you see purple mold covering the ground, you can’t traverse that area until you’ve completed the tasks one of the research scientists working on the mold gave you. White or blue generally represents the former Director or the Board of the Federal Bureau of Control, a strange pyramid located in (no joke) the Astral Plane.
You’re led down drab corridors by green signage pointing you in the right direction. Red lights above certain doors mean they’re locked — sometimes requiring a keycard, sometimes not. Green lights mean they’re unlocked and you can go through them any time after you opened them the first time. Set against a backdrop of the Oldest House and its oppressive, ultra-government Brutalist architecture, and everything in the game just… pops, even without an HDR mode, and even with the brightness turned down as low as physically possible. This game’s visual language is so strong that even I, a dummy, can explain it effectively. And isn’t that just neat? Thanks for stopping by, and catch us next time on “Game Design by Dummies, for Dummies!”
(Addendum: I wanted to make sure that colorblind players could enjoy a similar experience. Unfortunately, there is not a colorblind mode. With as much attention to detail paid to the game’s visual language as Remedy clearly put in, I’m kind of surprised. Hopefully, they will add such a mode through a future update.)
CONTAIN THE UNKNOWN
When it comes to Control’s narrative, it’s honestly easier to name the literary genres the game is inspired by than it is to list off every author and filmmaker the game references. Your mainstays like John Carpenter and Stephen King are here, of course, but Control doesn’t just pay homage to them — it tries to encompass an entire literary and filmic tradition, not to mention an entire trove of internet creepypasta, the entire SCP Foundation’s body of work, and weird horror podcasts like Welcome to Night Vale and No Sleep.
And you know what? It pretty much succeeds. Not every single time. But way more than it has any right in doing. There are hokey moments, and some of the protagonist’s running inner monologue is a little goofy, but I think Control strikes a stunningly good balance between exposition, visual narrative, and a healthy body of lore.
You can divide Control’s story up into three parts: a woman, Jesse Faden, searching for her long-lost brother, Dylan; a beleaguered government agency trying and failing to rein in a potential apocalyptic catastrophe; and the slow painting of a world in which the weird is real and reality as a concept is more of a suggestion than a hard rule. These stories run concurrently and often intertwine. You gain as much narrative in talking to certain NPCs as you do in exploring and picking up numerous documents scattered throughout the frankly massive Oldest House.
Speaking of talking to NPCs, one pretty neat aspect of the game that I haven’t worked on as much is the special timed side-missions that certain NPCs will give you. An alarm klaxon will sound and a mission objective will pop up, and you have a certain amount of time to complete the mission before it goes away. These missions seem to reward you with smaller bonuses and perks than main missions, but they’re easy to do for the most part.
Now let’s talk about spoilers for a second. I know I already put up a warning about them, but I really want to stress that until this point, I’ve remained relatively spoiler-free and that has to end soon. The more I talk about this game, the more I feel like I’m dulling the sense of wonder you’re going to feel as you boot the game up and play it for yourself for the first time.
I went into Control almost completely blind, aside from some praises for the game I heard on the Vice Waypoint Podcast. If I know I’m going to review a game, I generally try to go in blind. I want my experiences with a game to be as “mine” as they can possibly get. But by nature of my telling you about the game, I’m chipping away at your ability to also do that. Even if you’re okay with spoilers.
Are you, like, cool with that?
Video games have to distinguish themselves from other media by giving the audience some agency. Horror games have been known in the last few years for taking a chunk of that agency away from players instead. Games like Amnesia, Outlast and Layers of Fear don’t let the player characters use weapons; instead, players have to scramble to find places to hide that their pursuers can’t reach.
In Control, you not only have a gun that you can customize and modify—the Service Weapon—you also have a set of unlockable and upgradable abilities, like telekinesis, mind control and levitation. You can also modify Jesse with up to three different modifiers, increasing things like how much health she can regenerate upon resource pickup, or the amount of force her shield can sustain before crumbling. With this much power at your fingertips, what could you possibly be afraid of?
Listen, I’ve already sung the praises of the set design, color choices and overall environment of this game. Control is spooky, and unlike certain games about immortal space warriors from the future, it actually acts upon its pages and pages of lore. But if I’m being honest, the most terrifying part of the whole game isn’t those moments where the music and the visuals sync up just right to create the perfect terrifying mood; it’s when a bunch of exploding Hiss swarm you faster than your telekinesis can recharge or your bullets can come back.
Despite the powers and arsenal she has at her disposal, Jesse is not a superhero. She isn’t immortal, there is no automatic healing factor or healing items, and death can come very easily if you’re not careful. It’s in these moments that I actually find the first problem I have with this game: the loading screens.
If you die, you’re taken back to the last Control Point you touched. To get there, you have to wait for a loading screen. You can also fast travel to other parts of the building, but unless you’re fast traveling to another Control Point in your currently-loaded section of the building? Loading screen. If you go to the Astral Plane, you get a loading screen. If you decide to use the section elevator, loading screen. There are a lot of loading screens and it takes, on average, a couple minutes to go from one area to the next, per loading screen. Maybe the load times are better on PC, but I could do without as many of them in general.
When you’re not busy dying to a mob of enemies and reloading to the Control Point half a mile away several minutes later, Control feels very good to play. Your powers are, well, powerful, but they’re not OP. Your Service Weapon feels nice to shoot. Everything feels pretty well-balanced. But mastery of this game kind of does impact the story a little bit, at least at the beginning. You’ll finish clearing out a room, you’ll take a deep breath, and a little voice in your head will ask, “wait — how did a person who just walked into the Oldest House off the street just do all of that?”
As it turns out, there is a reason. Jesse, like her brother, is known as a “Prime Candidate,” a person who is especially well-attuned to the paranormal forces inside the Oldest House and who can “bind” certain “Objects of Power” to her. When the previous Director, Zachariah Trench, dies by apparent suicide, Jesse is able to pick up and wield the Service Weapon because she can “control” it. In so doing, she becomes the new Director.
Over time, the concern over how Jesse is able to accomplish everything diminishes, and is replaced by new ones: why isn’t the Bureau looking more closely into how to eliminate the Hiss and save the people trapped by it? Should I be using my mind control powers to turn Hiss zombies against each other? Why on earth is the Bureau keeping some of the stuff it finds? These questions have fewer answers. But as a player, there’s no better way to keep me engaged than dangle a few ethical mysteries in front of me.
SECURE THE MACABRE
The writers for Game of Thrones rightly got a lot of crap for how they wrote the end of that show. After several seasons of geopolitical fantasy intrigue, making one of their principal characters go nuts and trying to shoe in a metacommentary about how Good™ stories are felt kind of… stupid.
That doesn’t mean that metacommentaries about stories in general are stupid. Control is almost entirely focused on stories. The Bureau of Control finds especially powerful stories and tries to understand and contain them. Throughout the game, you find evidence of these attempts and their aftermath. There’s an entire section of the Bureau dedicated to holding some of the items from these stories safely.
As a story about stories, Control works especially well, to the extent that I excused a lot of the more tropey aspects of the game and its dialogue. For once, the strange rooms and endless hallways you usually find in games like this can be explained! It makes sense for everyone you meet to be extra exposition-heavy — you’re literally the brand-new Director of the Bureau and you don’t know anything. Things that wouldn’t work in a comparable game, like all the lore coming to you in the form of documents, multimedia and visions from the “Hotline,” work well here, because the setting facilitates it.
While Remedy certainly got all of its narrative plates spinning successfully, on the technical side things are a bit unstable. To put it lightly, there are major performance issues on console. The game’s frame rate will suddenly drop in the middle of fighting a boss, and in my playthrough it would drop every time I loaded into a level. Remedy says they’re working on a long-term fix, and the game is still plenty enjoyable despite that, but it’s a definitely noticeable problem, and I hope their fix works.
So, what’s the “so what?” about Control? Do you need to play it? Will it change your life if you do? Does it “revolutionize” storytelling in the medium?
I mean, no? But here’s the thing. Control is sticking to a genre format that is otherwise dying. Anymore, narratives are simply tacked onto MMO-lite “live services” games and left to rot. When a game offers up a good (mostly-)linear narrative and focuses on it, we should celebrate that. Reward this kind of content so that it keeps getting made. It may not change your life or innovate the formula, but it’s a masterwork of the craft.
if you enjoy the X-Files, Twin Peaks, the Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer, or the Half-Life franchise, you will absolutely enjoy this. Thanks for reading, and best of luck in the Oldest House.
You’re gonna need it.
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