CONTROL
As I levitate with almost complete
freedom around the Brutalist atrium of
the Central Research area – all clean
concrete walkways broken up by
formidable trees – I have a sense that this is finally
the game that Remedy always wanted to make, the
developer’s creative promised land.
Conversations around Remedy games
revolve as much around their constraints
and shortcomings as their brilliance and
ambition, but Control feels liberated,
untethered from past limitations.
A big part of that is the hub-based and
more systemic structure of the game.
Control has something of the immersive
sim, encouraging you to explore rooms
you might otherwise miss to pick up new
powers. You can watch over-saturated
videos of scientists talking about
dimensional fissures, and shuffle through
documents that fill you in on the disaster
that befell the place you’re exploring.
This place is the Oldest House, the
headquarters of the FBC – a government
division that investigates paranormal
activity. You are new boss Jesse Faden,
and it’s your first day on the job. The thing
is, instead of being shown to your
gold-plaqued desk and arranging a
‘getting-to-know-you’ conference call, you
arrive to find people floating eerily in the
building’s vertiginous expanses –
presumably dead – and black glitchy
vortexes of violent energy swirling and
crunching towards you.
It’s a unique vision of the ‘science gone
wrong’ trope so beloved by videogames.
In a way, the tone is post-Lovecraftian, set
in today’s age where beliefs in gods and
squid-faced deities have made way for the
cold power of physics, and a sense that
whatever’s beyond the tenuous veil of this
dimension is much less tangible and
anthropomorphic. But where the laws of
cosmic physics are normally terrifying
through their stark apathy to humanity, in
Control they’re something more
malevolent, as I discover in my hands-on.
The corrupting force throughout the
facility, known as The Hiss, manifests in all
kinds of strange forms. It possesses
people, for example, and sets them out to
kill you. I encountered regular gunning
grunts on the ground, but also more
powerful levitating enemies, telekinetically
hauling chairs, tables, chunks of concrete,
you-name-it, at me.
FLYING DEBRIS
In a ghoulish callback to Alan Wake, these
people ramble insane scientific nothings
to themselves (at least, nothing that my
non-sciency brain can translate). You get
the sense that their minds have been
stripped of the human component and left
only with formulae and theories
attempting to make sense of whatever
dark energy has taken over the building.
The good news is that you, Jesse, have
powers of your own. You can levitate high
into the air to meet your flying foes, then
engage in a duel of flinging whatever the
hell your telekinetic pull ability can reel in
towards you. Within moments, the
courtyard of Central Research is strewn
with debris as we entwine ourselves in a
gravity-free tussle of office objects.
But there’s more to Jesse than
impossibly red hair and levitation. By
aiming at the enemy and clicking the right
analog stick, we dash through the air,
slamming into them and disintegrating
them into a shower of sparks.
That airdash contributes to the
liberating weightlessness of controlling
Jesse. You can only levitate for a limited
amount of time, and can’t keep going up
forever, but you can airdash in any
direction level with or below you, which
means you can, for example, dash over
to a ledge and haul yourself up, or dash
into the ground to convert it into a
devastating ground pound.
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| Control |