Control: Something Something, Containment Breach

When Control first came out it flew completely under my radar and didn’t get much of my attention. Ironically, this is much in theme with the game, as the protagonist enters a building that seems normal but escapes notice by most of the populace, and is the headquarters for the Federal Bureau of Control, a clandestine organization that acts to protect the local populace and contain supernatural and otherwise paranormal events.

If this synopsis sounds sort of familiar, that’s because Control was inspired by the SCP Foundation, an online community wiki dedicated to writing strange high concept sci-fi, and Control is pulled from the same vein. The game plays with concepts such as our perceptions of reality, the astral plane, other dimensions, and entities that defy our conventional definitions of intelligent life. This high concept sci-fi is highly interesting and the concept of an organization that protects from the shadows isn’t entirely new, but this take is one of my personal favorites.

You play as Jesse Faden, who has found her way into the Federal Bureau of Control under mysterious circumstances, finding it mostly empty and hauntingly quiet. It’s then up to her to stop a containment breach that’s put the building on lockdown as well as facing ghosts from her past. It’s a pretty good story with well-written characters, and I found myself piecing some of the story points together beforehand in a bit of a predictable but otherwise excellent narrative.

The characters are voiced and show expression very well, the face capture from the actors doing very well to make the characters expressive and feel like real people, but there were instances of weird changes in facial expression in characters which broke the immersion a little, like how I noticed how Jesse’s lower jaw wasn’t properly aligned with her upper jaw a majority of the time, and it became un-seeable once I had taken note of it.

Otherwise, the cast of characters here is very personable and I found myself at least liking most of them, the specialist researcher Emily Pope and mysterious Finnish janitor Ahti being two of my favorites. This kind of science fiction requires not only the weird to work but also the normal people to ground the situation, to show how the human element deals with the overwhelming unknown and responds to it, and the supporting cast does a good job of showing a variety of normal people each dealing with it in their own way.

The gameplay itself is that of a third-person shooter, and each fight boils down to using the weird abilities that you acquire over the course of the game to deal with different unique enemies, each having their own weaknesses and strengths to work around. I didn’t find myself dying all that often but there was the very real possibility I could as I found out often that normal enemies could even put you in dangerous situations as your health bar is often reduced to nearly nothing in one moment of misfortune.

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This was cause for some moments of frustration on my part but I will also recognize that the game gives you several tools and abilities to help you deal it, as you equip different augments to your guns and to Jesse throughout the game to make your survival easier, but it does a good job of never making it trivial. I found that I still had to be on my toes at all times, as one bad interaction could quickly put me close to dying and that made every interaction with enemies exciting and not feeling like that much of a slog.

The game’s best aspect, however, is its story and the amount of natural world-building that is managed to be squeezed into every detail. Every collectible is an opportunity to tell a small story or include a small detail, and while they aren’t always vitally connected to the main plot, finding notes about staff complaining about more comical aspects of working in a supernatural agency like moving bathrooms always got me smiling.

There’s great attention to detail here that can be otherwise missed if you don’t bother to read between the lines, and it fits the tone they are trying to portray very well. Yes, this universe is dangerous and horrible things do happen to good people in it, but the silly aspects of teleporting rubber ducks and the small annoyances of anomalous multiplying sticky notes help bring the small bit of silliness the world needs to not make it feel overwhelming drab and depressing, and the team know this very well.

Another aspect I want to praise and encourage more is the team’s use of their original compositions. The game’s music is fine, and sound is good enough on its own but there were sequences where the music was applied in completely unique actions sequences that felt amazing to play, and while I wish there were just a few more of them, I understand overusing them would have downplayed their impact in the few parts where they blow your mind.

The Foundation DLC is a major add-on to the plot of the base game, an addition to the story that creates even more questions while it adds some answers, mostly about the nature of the setting of the game, the nature of the mysterious Board, and their relationship with the Bureau. It has breadcrumbs that ultimately leave the answers open-ended, which I think is fitting for a story like this, and sets up some interesting ideas of where the story can go in the future AWE DLC, which I’m very excited for. It’s a nice bit of content that I think is worth the purchase price, and I’m excited to see if the story threads established in it pay off in the next bit of content.

The most defining moment for me about Control is when you enter the supernatural maze, you put on the headphones for the cassette player and the game gives you shifting battlefield accompanied with an action-metal track that just takes it to the next level, taking every aspect of the level, enemy, and sound design and making one of the most memorable sequences in a game I have encountered in some time.

The other is when you discover a video from Dr.Darling, the main scientific researcher that has been explaining the science behind the concepts the game is throwing at you and makes him start dancing and doing a music video. It’s surreal, it’s wacky, and it’s silly, but the game revels in it to its benefit and uses the surreal nature of the sci-fi world it has created to not only explore aspects of horror but also to address how silly it can be, and it’s this balance where the game finds its major stride.

Control is a game that I would say defines the current landscape of the sci-fi genre, it takes the aspects of the unexplained and the strange, the existential dread and smallness of our human existence and pushes it on all cylinders while also maintaining the idea of truth being stranger than fiction and the silliness and surreality of these concepts. Sometimes the strangest things in life are staring us in the face and we simply don’t notice, but like in the game, sometimes you only need to peel back the poster to find something amazing underneath. Control is all that and more and I’m glad I was able to pull back the poster and find the amazing world underneath.

A code for the game was provided by the publisher for the purposes of this review.