Control - The Definitive Review
Twin X-Files-ception meets Béton Brut in an elevator.
There was a critical point in playing Control, where I’d just finished a somewhat gruelling task in order to win a very important fact hidden in a cloud of dialogue and was then immediately given another task in order to presumably win yet another very important fact hidden in a cloud of dialogue where I completely lost it. Tasked with finding Dylan in some codenamed room or whatever, I found myself literally running in circles through Central Executive. I was seemingly unable to find the mission task but also utterly unmoved by my failure to do so. I wasn’t alarmed at my incompetence or annoyed with the game’s lack of helpful waypointing. I was, instead, simply bored. I just didn’t care, and it was at that point I realised I would never play Control ever again1. This isn’t to say that Control is a bad game, it’s more to do with how it’s far too much of a standardised great product to hold my interest.
The opening hours of Control are a masterful exercise in currying a kind of explicitly manufactured charisma via world lore and specifically resonant environmental cueing. The Oldest House, its deliberate architectural style, the X-Filian world fiction, the immediate access to fun magical powers are all so neatly balanced and guided that it’s easy to slip into the game’s unfolding challenge but also feel the slick inclines of carefully metricised player engagement techniques. The game is very well-made in most respects and yet in that sense of quality lies the decadence and ultimately hollow promise of the ‘correct way to do AAA’. My issue with Control is, funnily enough, its overt sense of being overly controlled. The game never really goes so wild that it surpasses any thresholds of quality or consistency, its world lore so obvious and curiously predictable that it never really surprises or delights. it’s all constrained within a market-defined cage of what feels acceptable for the most profitable demographic likely to play it to completion, so therefore likely to purchase more content. Perhaps my contempt came from that sense of it being just weird enough to still be somewhat conventionally edgy, despite having an extremely conservative and deeply unimaginative game structure and a narrative that’s not so much artificially stretched but more diced into molecular chunks interspersed with very neat, finely tuned 30-minute play sessions. The narrative fulcrum that caused my rejection was a painfully superficial and notoriously over-exploited cliché - the demand of necessity of action coming from some need to find/protect/liberate a family member. Relying on empathic impulse and humane bonds for narrative propulsion carries such a hollow ring when the game could not give a single fuck about the (potentially) thousands of possessed innocent humans you kill without the merest thought as to their plights, or their viciously stolen humanity. As the drama of this aspect ramped up, it felt as melodramatic and overwrought as it did some twenty years ago in Remedy’s two Max Payne titles. Even back then I was deeply offended by the imposition of tepidly bland neo-noir comic panels and deliriously poor dream sequences as cack-handed attempts to add some literary respectability to a game that had absolutely no requirement for such things2. A glaring flaw that I would argue exposes a lack of belief in the right for games to be credited for their environmental and interactive qualities alone. Perhaps I should have guessed this collision of gameplay desire with narrative roadblocking was inevitable. I avoided the Alan Wake titles precisely because it was so obvious this would happen, and hence I would eventually come to hate them with an animalistic rage within a few hours of play3.
Control’s two vaunted strengths are its environmental design and the world lore. Credit is certainly due to the lore being somewhat original in the videogame context, yet the originality comes more from its arrangement of reference than actual novelty and innovation. The same vague wisps of television and cinema drift through every aspect of the redacted documents and world props and all-so-kooky off-kilter pop cultural supernaturalism. Throughout Control, you can really smell the blend of X-Files government procedure formalism and conspiracist/parapsychological cultural tropes with Twin Peaks’ corrupted quotidian normality and playful kookiness. Being Scandinavian, there's more obvious sampling from Lars Von Trier's own take on Twin Peaks, his hospital-based absurdist horror-soap, The Kingdom. The facile surreality of having to navigate a deserted motel as a form of security lock has a mild charm on the first encounter, but then generates absolute contempt on the second when it’s obviously just a fucking chore. The lazy repetition lends it the air of some ersatz-upon-ersatz David Lynch homage, a kind of flimsy aspiration to the truly surreal. The real power of Lynch’s torch-carrying of the original surrealist challenge comes from its genuine danger. Original surrealists were smashing the thin veneer of bourgeois reality through wild transgressions. The bull’s eyeball really was slashed with the razor blade. Dennis Hopper really was playing himself as Frank Booth. The Oceanview motel of Control is a facsimile of this; a kind of cardboard standee replica of Twin Peaks’ lodge or Kubrick’s hotel, begging that you accept its ad-hoc imposition simply because it reminds you of those things, not because it can justify itself by its own virtues or its own challenge to our socially-accepted order, be that in any cohesive textural sense or an explicitly surreal one. In a sense, its non-reality is arbitrary because its existence is arbitrary. It’s just a kooky, cool piece of in-game lore designed to be kooky and cool, with the sole function of adding some completely empty and unfulfilling gameplay. It’s an imposition upon a game that can’t decide if it’s about segmenting its narrative through combat or exploration, ending up with a perfectly functional but utterly unexceptional hybrid of the two. And funnily enough, this is often the defining characteristic of the modern AAA success.
My favourite aspect of Control was in its fetishisation of the office, of the corporate environment. Despite the stated governmental root of The Oldest House, its brotherhood with the vast labyrinths of homogenised commercial offices sings with a familiarity born out of exposure to those environments through media and working life. Control managed to recapitulate and iterate the office over and over again in a kind of fractal spiral of traditional aesthetics, props and furniture. Its play with interconnecting the confined office spaces with social and transitory voids, caged with appeals to brutalist monolithic concrete, serves as a deliberately grey canvas for all the colours of combat to illuminate. There were several lobbies and central spaces that carried an air of the sublime, of the mountainous, and it’s certainly nice to stop and have a quick look around at the packaging of staircases into central columns and the clever tiering of glass, dividing walls and desks into tangible, traversable offices. It’s the language of the vast skyscraper’s internals that carried more magic than the game’s mechanics and lore. I had more hunger to be able to simply explore each floor above ground than I did in exploiting the combat system. I also loved the detail in the various laboratories in the research sector, which seemed authentic, despite being opaquely inscrutable for the most part. Yet I eventually tired of the homogeneity. I’m not sure if that’s deliberate - but I found the supposedly more invigorating dreamspaces of the astral planes far too generic and overtly artificial in a very self-referential, deliberately videogamey style. The tutorial segments for new skills were simply tutorial environments I’ve seen so many times before, with perhaps a sprinkling of Dishonored et al’s otherworldly planes as a kind of shorthand signifier of the non-corporeal place. The texturing and lighting is generally delightful, but the artifice so profoundly apparent it seemed actually odd that Jesse didn’t recognise it as such. In a way, Control could have been far more playful and interesting if Jesse became aware of the artifice around her and this tied directly into her increasing powers. Instead, the game’s narrative seems to insist that this mythic place and its obvious non-reality is, in fact, entirely consistent and believable to the characters within it. Having them break their own virtual fourth walls would be the kind of surrealist transgression I’d find entertaining, even if mishandled or cliched in execution. You can nearly smell the scent of Inception, expecting it to erupt with environmental convulsions at any point, yet this doesn’t happen until later on. And still it seems the characters just accept it as their reality.
The area of Control I disliked more than I expected was in its representations of the subterranean. Between ludicrously cavernous artificial spaces, so obviously ripped from the likes of Star Wars, Half Life and Portal 2, and the opulently grandiose maintenance tunnels, I found the entire architectural approach to be tiresomely over-familiar. Again, fabulous texturing and lighting doesn’t really absolve the environments of the sins of genericism and repetition. Much like the grand open spaces of the offices, the underground places made no sense at all geographically and while I’d like to believe this can be explained by the explicit non-reality of the building itself, I suspect it’s more the case that this is more an excuse to not have to bother and be free to create vast dark cylinder after vast dark cylinder, replete with walkways and perfunctory ducting and pipework. It’s such a shame to see this kind of spacial profligacy after the strict discipline of Prey’s environmental packaging, but mostly because once again, the game refuses to transgress its norms when it absolutely could do, to great effect. After all, The Oldest House is a magical space, so why repeat the tunnels-and-caverns formalism so dryly? Again, we can perhaps chalk this up to the fundamental conservatism of the AAA product. The calculated risks lie within the narrative, where they are easily estimable according to player demography, rather than taking structural risks with the playspaces when you absolutely have licence to do, completely within the world lore. I remember coming across the Ashtray Maze when it was first suggested and, after getting bored trying to ‘solve the puzzle’, Googled and found out it’s actually far more significant later in the story. But rather than tantalise, this simply depressed me. Post-deletion, I’ve read that it offers some of the best action in the entire game and is perhaps the most memorable set-piece of the whole thing. But in truth, given everything I’d done up that point, I doubt it would make up for the bullshit required to get there. Likewise, having seen so much of Control’s designs for office and maintenance architecture, I doubt there was much else to see that would have excited my personal love of exploration. Most of all, in a post-Backrooms world, the lack of liminal dissociation feels like a missed opportunity when having a first playthrough in 2024. The game seems so inspired by the SCP Foundation communal lore that the more modern vogue of liminal spaces would make a fantastic fit with Control’s general vibe. I suppose there is the occasional sense of it in the sheer repetition of environmental cues. It’s unfair to criticise Control for not learning from a meme from the year the game was released, but it highlights the gulf between the corporately-approved AAA sense of the creepy environment and the rich potency of a user-created folk-cultural phenomenon.
It seems amiss to not mention Control’s gameplay, but I found it generally unremarkable. It’s, just, fine. Boringly so. It did promote memories of Psi Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy and Second Sight, both of which coincidentally share very similar environments to Control, as if there’s some unspoken tribute in Control’s melange that celebrates the golden age of PlayStation 2 third-person psychic action titles. I can appreciate how well-balanced Control’s combat is, how it offers a nice little selection of weapons and abilities to prosecute violence, how you can incrementally upgrade stuff. All fine, but all ultimately quite unremarkable. If I had to coin a phrase, I’d say it’s basic good. The violence is decently satisfying, though I did fiddle with the options to bend it more in my favour. But hey, one too many chaotic office battles saw me predicting many hours being added to my gameplay than I really wanted to spend, so thank fuck Remedy let me effectively cheat. Perhaps that took some of the flavour out of the combat, but at least I didn’t dread backtracking because of arbitrary baddie arrivals - another artifice that just happens, presumably to ‘keep the player on their toes’. Personally I like the sense that after intensely tearing apart the scenery to kill a shitload of spawning enemies, cleansing the control point cleanses the entire area of enemies forever, but I guess the game consultants and developers thought having a sense of security and reward for winning an encounter wasn’t as important as forcing violence on the player because they dared to stop pushing forward.
In closing, Control absolutely extols the virtues of the AAA videogame and beautifully illustrates why I find so many of them so incredibly unengaging. Its mutually-approved security in reconfiguring the pre-existing into the safely capable means that Control doesn’t do anything wrong mechanically or environmentally, but suffers from a kind of conceptual inadequacy. Because it is not that much more than a collection of references to other games and other media to tell a very simple story, it actually has hardly anything to really say, or any real hope to offer. The game’s core value proposition comes from its story, which naturally I couldn’t give a shit about. Such is the privation of the ludosupremacist, but this reveals a truth about the modern high-budget videogame that’s easy to ignore; If you don’t buy the story, you don’t generally get value for the time you spend being forced to endure it. Hey, if you dug the story then that’s great, it’s no reflection on you, but did it really make all the fucking around worthwhile? For my money, Control’s story is too plagued with false stops to enable gameplay, stupid impositions, predictable twists and roadblocks to be worth seeing through to the end. You might as well read the synopsis on Wikipedia. It feels too artificially honed into correctness in some ways, and too flatly derivative in others. One example shines for me: in the vast dark cylinder that houses all the magic-mundane objects, there’s the deadly fridge. We’re meant to be invested in the psycho-horror of a worker who must keep his gaze fixed on the fridge at all times, as we cannot help them until we defeat a boss. After that, however much in-game time it takes you - hours, days, etc - the worker is still staring at the fridge, right up until when the story lets you enter the room where the fridge is. Only you have to go through an airlock of sorts via an ante-chamber. Guess what happens to the staring worker as soon as you step into that side room. Yes! He dies! Then you fuck with the fridge and don’t die. It’s this kind of throwaway death, so cheap, so unnecessary, so tiresome, that really grates. In the end it was probably the piling on of tiny, ambient annoyances like this that ended my interest in Control, much like the growing sense of contemptible familiarity that I’d done it all before, either within the game or outside it, but I can’t say I hated it. It wasn’t anywhere near interesting enough for that.
[21]
As soon as I quit to the Xbox dash, I immediately purchased Phantom Liberty and, hilariously, was forced to delete Control in order to download the DLC.
Let's face it, the Max Payne lore is embarrassingly bad for a game that only ever needed to be honest about its desire to be the Matrix. They must have shat themselves when Equilibrium came out. As for the hard-boiled crime noir that supposedly enriches the Max Payne experience, it's hardly Brubaker and Phillips, is it?
Coincidentally, this is also the reason why I've never properly played The Last Of Us. When the discourse is all about the narrative, I worry there won't be enough gameplay to make me stick with it, or the gameplay will be so regimentally segmented to serve the narrative that it'll just piss me off. And also zombies. Because I'd had enough of fucking zombies after Dead Rising killed the entire trope for me. Nothing was ever going to top that.