Control is a third-person story-heavy metroidvania action game that draws obvious inspiration from the stories of the SCP Foundation – which itself took inspiration from various secretive government agencies containing the paranormal, like the MIB.
As a fan of SCPs, I was excited to see other groups play around with this idea, as it is one that is very ripe for exploration.
Here, the main “feature” is that a lot of the “Altered Items” are, rather than being fantastic things, instead extremely mundane. The central premise is that something is granting seemingly ordinary objects extraordinary power (possibly the collective belief of humanity in these icons), and they do various fantastical things as a result.
The mixture of the mundane and the fantastic works quite well; when you see a rubber duck in a cage behind a thick sheet of glass, you know that it is dangerous, despite its innocuous nature.
The central agency here is the Federal Bureau of Control, an agency of the US federal government devoted to containing and controlling paranormal events. Unlike the SCP Foundation, this is a group that is, at its heart, good; they are trying to help people and protect people and don’t see people as being disposable. They do their best to keep people safe and maintain their personnel in the face of adversity, but at the same time, the job is very risky – even up to the level of the Director, with a capital D.
You play as Jesse Faden, a young woman who is looking for her brother, who was taken by the Bureau of Control years earlier. As the game unfolds, you learn that she and her brother were involved in some sort of Altered World Event, where a seemingly innocent item created major problems, and in the process of the event, the pair of them gained extraordinary powers.
Jesse’s main ability is to bind herself to Objects of Power – a particular type of Altered Item that grant paranatural abilities to those who build some sort of connection to them. These abilities range from hovering in the air to telekinetically throwing objects to making a shield of stone around yourself.
And it’s a good thing she has these abilities, because she walks into the Bureau of Control while it is in a crisis. The bureau is located in the Oldest House, an imposing building that hides itself from the eyes of normal men, and whose insides are constantly shifting and changing, and it is under lockdown – some sort of horrible otherworldly thing, called the Hiss, has entered it, and taken a bunch of agents under its control.
Jesse, blind to all of this, walks straight into the Director’s office – ordinarily impossible due to security, but instead all too easy because of the devastation wrought by the Hiss – and finds him dead on his desk, his weapon – the Service Weapon, an object of power that looks like a gun that identifies you as the Director of the Bureau – right next to him. Naturally, she binds herself to it, and in the process realizes that this is far, far bigger than her search for the brother – and that the Bureau needs her.
This is a really neat premise for the game, and as you go through the game, you gradually uncover the history of the Bureau. In truth, the Bureau’s background is really the main thing that makes this game work – reading about all the events and altered items, then dealing with the various issues they’re causing, works really well. These are often rather funny, but in a rather dark sort of way, and the contrast of the mundane-seeming items and the mundanity of government work is contrasted with the ridiculousness of the items they’re trying to contain and the danger that they represent.
Over the course of the game, you explore the Oldest House, find out what is *really* going on, and try to stop the Hiss while dealing with random other side-crises caused by other events inside the building.
Pretty much everything about this is fun, but sadly, the rest of the game doesn’t quite hold up to it.
The combat is only okay. For being as fantastical as it is in some ways, virtually everything you fight is some variation on “dude with gun” or “dude with telekinetic powers who chucks stuff at you”, along with a couple melee enemies. There’s really not that much variety in terms of what you’re facing, and as a result, you will spend the whole game doing more or less the same thing – combat feels remarkably similar at the end of the game as it does at the beginning in terms of the foes you’re facing, with only your own powers changing things up. And unfortunately, most of what you do in combat is either using the Service Weapon to shoot people (which is really secretly multiple different guns you can switch between, but in the end, is basically pistol, shotgun, rocket launcher, SMG, and sniper rifle, with a late-game remote mine launcher showing up as well) or throwing items at people with your telekinesis, which is by far your best attack.
The game’s dearth of bosses also hurts it – there’s really only three bosses that aren’t some variant of “dude with gun” (though one “dude with gun” boss does have a nice array of powers), and so, despite the seemingly fantastic setting, there’s really not that much fantastic about the combat. In a game that is 20+ hours long, that is far too little variety.
The game also suffers from its Metroidvania aspects. The problem with Metroidvanias is that they encourage backtracking, but backtracking through the Bureau isn’t much fun – the main fun of the game is discovering new things, and these little side areas are mostly pretty boring and often consist of what amounts to a treasure chest and one little document. Because the game’s map is rather poor, backtracking to find secrets is a pain, and it can be hard to find things you had to skip over the first time without arduously searching the entire place *again*. It just doesn’t end up flowing well with the game, and significantly disrupts its pacing. It is cool being in new areas that require your new powers, but honestly, only a couple powers even really open up all that stuff – a lot of it ends up boiling down to getting better keys.
The sidequests, too, are a mixed bag; some of them are nothing but filler, while others are some of the best content in the game, including several of the more interesting bosses.
Finally, the game’s ending is quite lackluster. There is no final boss, and because the game wants you to find the various secrets after the game is over, and doesn’t want you running around an empty building, the Hiss aren’t “completely” gone, the building is still under lockdown while the “last few” are tracked down and eliminated. The whole thing sort of ends with a whimper rather than a bang, with a number of dangling plot points – and while that’s actually not a bad thing (the entire point is that there’s a ton of unknowns, and that we are only small specks of control in a chaotic cosmos) it still feels unsatisfying.
The DLC areas don’t fix these issues. One of them is Alan Wake themed, and while it actually does try to introduce some new gameplay (light/shadow themed stuff), it’s not really that much different than the main game on the whole – though it did, at least, feature a new boss fight that was also different from “man with gun”. Unfortunately, it messes up the pacing of the game terribly if you do it as soon as you can unlock it, as you get access right before the end of the game. If you explore this new area, it means you take a huge excursion from the main plot that takes multiple hours to resolve before getting back to the exciting ending.
The other DLC area wisely is a post-game area that wraps up a few hanging plot threads, but introduces even more questions, possibly unnecessarily. It wasn’t bad, but again, it felt like more of the base game, and it didn’t really need to exist – and while it, too, had a final boss, it was very much in the “man with gun” category.
All in all, Control is a game that I was very enthusiastic to play, and felt great about playing for about 3/4ths of it. But the increasingly weak pace due to the Metroidvania issues, combined with the lackluster ending and some random busywork sidequests, made it feel like a balloon deflating at the end. I would still recommend it, especially to SCP fans, but it’s only good, not great.
4.0