Control

Control

Another trick I played with was seizing
control of wounded enemies and getting
them to fight for me for a limited time. I did
this to the grunts, the hovering types, and
the big balls of healing energy too, which
would otherwise be buffing the enemy. It
makes each battle a game of control, as
you wrestle over physical objects to lob
around and enemies to possess.
I was overpowered in the hands-on,
which Thomas Puha, Remedy’s
communications director, assures me
won’t be the case in the final game; you
will need to unlock abilities and increase
your health to get to that point. Your
health doesn’t regenerate automatically
either, so you need to scour the building

for pickups or find creative ways (like
possessing the healing orbs) to heal up.
From the hub-based world to the light
puzzle elements that unlock new
pathways, Control nods to what I think of

as ‘designer genres’ like the Metroidvania,
Soulslike and immersive sim. It’s
abandoning the blinkered linearity of
Remedy’s past efforts, and going into
territory that feels like Alan Wake would’ve
gone to had these ideas been more
prevalent at the time.
Beyond the combat, I don’t get to do all
that much interacting with the world. It’s
more a case of exploring strange rooms,
each with their own surrealistic reality-
warping twists. There’s a music recording
studio (with no purpose for now), and a
hall of mirrors, a lavishly decorated area

– all crimsons and golds with an eye-
teasing pattern on the walls. Suddenly, the

walls in here shift and new corridors open
up, which you diligently follow, taking each
new turn as it manifests in front of you
until you loop back to the original room,
where a new pathway opens, leading to a
new power to use.
Puha takes control for a mini-boss fight
against an Astral Spike – that swirling
mass of glitchy energy I talked about

earlier. It fits into the ‘shapeless black

mass’ category alongside unloved
videogame enemies like Prey’s Typhon or
the Pus of Man in Dark Souls 3, but given
that I’m extremely fond of both of those
games, it works for me.
Instead of fighting it head-on however,
Puha lures it through a large containment

door, then loops back around to the main
room and shuts it inside.
These are pretty simple puzzle-based
interactions, and I’d like to see them go a
little deeper in the final game, but given
that the demo is aimed to showcase the
combat, I’m holding out hope that we’ll
see this area expanded on a bit more.
The Oldest House fluctuates between
a particularly tasteful form of cold and
corporate and impressively other. One
moment I’m in a bright atrium, designed
to intimidate and impress visitors, the next
I’m tentatively creeping down a dark stone
corridor, with angles and surfaces jutting
out of places where there’s really no need
for angles and surfaces to exist. In 20
minutes I saw more visual variety than in
entire other games.
Then the already interworldly reality of
the Oldest House dissipates and a misty
grey landscape of obelisks and strange
stepped pyramids unravels before me.
This is the Astral Plane.
Somewhere in here, Puha tells me, is
an inverted black pyramid that I suspect
has an awful lot to do with the mysterious
events back in what approximates in this
game to the real world.
 TWISTING REALITY

Even though the game is just five months
away, I felt like Control remains a mystery,
and I like that. There’s the story, of course,
which strikes me as even more intriguing
and cryptic now than it did before I played
the demo. And there’s even a crafting and
upgrade system that I barely had the
chance to touch.
There are still points that need ironing
out. The combat, for all its wonderful
low-gravity flow, still feels rather ethereal,
with the enemies looking and feeling
twiggy and unimpactful when you’re
duffing them up. I’m also not sure how
much longevity there is in throwing bits of
furniture and detritus around at enemies,
so it’ll be up to the upgradeable Service
Weapon – your shape-shifting firearm –
and whatever powers we haven’t seen yet
to ensure the action remains nice and
varied throughout the game.
But these are all fixable. Remedy has
the right ideas here, and I came away with
fresh questions about what the hell is
going on in this most abstract of
downtown skyscrapers.
Remedy, the master of reality-bending
intrigue is weaving its most intricate web
yet, and I’m definitely more than happy to
get caught up in it.