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It is easy for video games to be surreal. By their very nature, games allow for abstraction, abrupt changes and strange arrangements. Video games have always been weird. But to be surreal in a significant way, in a surprising way, that seems really strange? This is unusual.
Control, The new Remedy Entertainment title is one of the few games to succeed. Even the most mundane moments of Control are impregnated with an energy from another world, a feeling that everything could happen at the next turning point. The spaces in which you find themselves, starting as ordinary office buildings, are constantly changing, and the characters and obstacles you encounter are drawn from a dense network of urban myths and ephemera of pop culture. Control is the dream of a paranoid become reality.
You play as Jesse, a woman looking for a secret. This secret, as well as her own paranormal intuition, lead her to the oldest house, a strange building resting on a network of supernatural and strange energies that became home to the Federal Bureau of Control, a government agency charged with the world of strange things. to flee on the edges. You will soon find a weapon, the service weapon, which is less a weapon than the idea of a manufactured pistol (or maybe less of a pistol than a heroic weapon given in a modern form). Finding this object somehow makes you the director of the FBC. Or more like the janitor, perhaps, since your main task is quickly getting to fix something that has gone terribly wrong with the older house and maybe even the reality.
The task of playing Control It's not so strange. You fight using the service weapon from the point of view of the third person, mixing other special abilities that you get by finding objects of power – totemic metaphor objects – and tying their strength to yourself. There is a lightweight upgrade system, and the exploration proceeds as in, for example, Metroid or the first Dark souls– a slow opening of the areas to explore, with turning back, unlocking by door, rewards and hidden challenges.
But these familiar notes serve as a guide for the player to get involved in ControlThe weird spaces. Remedy Entertainment has managed to create a perfect blend of atmospheric ingredients – inspired lighting choices, subtle blend of mundane and unreal, use of moving video interludes to drive gamers away from the game world – that normality is never taken for granted. In the world of Control, an office building gives way to a labyrinth of underground caves housing a giant reactor operating on something that is clearly not power. Corridors can last forever or be cut abruptly. Doors appear and disappear when you change the space. In the oldest home, smartphones are banned for fear of conveying contagious ideas or spontaneously becoming new objects of terrifying power. This entire business is bursting with luscious unreality.
In addition, the game even manages to question its own scaffolding. Very soon, Jess starts talking to a kind of presence that follows her, who shares her point of view and part of her mind. From the point of view of the player, this presence seems to be, well, you. This is the kind of narrative trick that would fall into most games, but here it is a kind of weird effect. This has the effect of challenging the normal structures of big budget games. For example, does "presence" control Jess as I control her? Where do these objective markers come from? And who writes all those government-style reports that seem to recap events too recent to have been analyzed and written? I have not beaten yet ControlSo I can not tell you if it answers those questions or not, but it's so intriguing to ask that I do not mind that. Unanswered questions add flavor to the world, as well as mysticism. I do not quite understand this place, but I do not understand the real world either. It's good not to have all the solutions right off the bat.
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