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The first sentence of the Introduction to Control is a regular proclamation. Remedy Entertainment has always balanced its everyday landscapes and remarkably human characters on a thin and unusual border, usually artificial and often submerged in supernatural environments. However, the control is a little more daring.
Certainly, everything starts like his predecessors – Jesse Faden goes to the mysterious headquarters of the Federal Office of Control to find answers to childhood trauma. She meets a strange guard, Ahti, who thinks she wants to work, so she sends him to the inside of the building. However, after mysterious circumstances, the director of the office dies, his magic weapon connects to Jesse and we realize that the building was closed after a hostile resonance with Sissing hiss and so it is usually very strange. Remember the Pax Payne to the point that the protagonist was pushed with powerful hallucinogens, stuck in a nightmare that forms the world and began to sneak into a video game? Well, Control's mood is like that.
I was sitting in the middle of a nervous and animated studio in the final stages of development, playing around 8 hours with Control. This is without a doubt one of the most beautiful, the most unique and weird games of Remedy. I was aware in advance. What I did not expect, was how cruel and satisfying it was, and what kind of experimental fun he had for nonlinear storytelling. And in addition, the most sophisticated action game of Remedy to date – which is not a poor performance considering the history of the company.
The action has always been one of Remedy's strengths, but Control has made the biggest difference since his first games. This is all the more obvious as Jesse moves, his animations and actions come to life at the touch of a button. This is a kind of reaction to the previous game of the developer, Quantum Break, in which the animation was more important than the input, and it did not hold as much as Remedy wished. In the case of Control, however, the cube has turned. You must feel this because it is not easy to explain, but imagine how players of a modern sports game can react immediately and the animations are continuous and sometimes even split, all that for our protagonist to react every little movement. Unlike Red Dead Redemption 2, for example, who looks like a puppy-like character, folds up and down – Control is more like the old one.
Not only the funds have changed, but also the mechanisms of action. While retaining the qualities of Quantum Break – mixing shot with offensive and defensive superpowers – Control tries to push us to an aggressive style of play. The service pistol – the aforementioned magic pistol can take five different forms – is really effective because its firing farthest tend to miss the target. The intelligence of the opponents was programmed to try to encircle us all the time, even the weakest have lost much of our life line at one go. And if you lose your life, it can not be repaired by recovering medical kits or pain. Only defeated opponents can survive. We must literally fight for our survival. In many ways, Control looks more like Doom 2016 than Quantum Break.
In its best moments, Control's fighting system looks like a fast tactical game. The service weapon contains an infinite amount of ammo and can hurt larger enemies, but its refilling takes time and is only possible when it is not used. In addition, Jesse's offensive capabilities (ground discussions, moving objects in telemetry, etc.) are determined by a separate energy band, the most damaging for protected and armored opponents. The essence of Control is to keep these two aspects of the combat system in constant balance so that Remedy's most diverse opponents can be spotted in the right order and we simply avoid attacks that happen to us. Meanwhile, the game features a challenging shooter for which there are few examples.
Since so much energy has been lost in the basic mechanics of the combat system, it is almost surprising that there are many silent explorers in Control. The old house – the screwed-up and brutal (literally) skyscraper in which Jesse was stuck inside – was built on a metroidvania plan. In a few hours, you can open all your levels and you will eventually want to cover them. Among the areas of the old house are the everyday brainwashers, sometimes interchangeable. At the research level, for example, we find strangely amusing test labs and a glittering hotel corridor, where the walls change as they go. In terms of maintenance, you find wet tunnels (covered with a pile of disgusting material simply called plug-in), but there is also a complete career lit by a body that simply can not exist.
On the floors, we find scattered files that have been reported in the previous works of the Bureau (some of which are based on real events, simply twisted on X), as well as audio and video recordings of their experiences, with Casper Darling (himself Alan Wake). that is to say Matthew Porretta plays) explains his latest discoveries. Only a small part of our discoveries directly affects Jesse; They speak instead of the long and strange history of the Office or its scary center – the effect of the disclosure of Dark Souls and apparently irrelevant dialogues can be felt in the game. I've met meticulously elaborate details about the "parautilitarists" of the Bureau, I read highly encrypted and humorous accounts of the experiences that were going on, and I even started to put in my head some pieces of an invisible puzzle of history.
To tell the truth, I may have spent too much time considering that my time was limited, but the more I learned, the more curious I became. It's a world I've never met before – and it's becoming less and less common. But if you want to know the darker recesses and secrets of the old house, you must have the appropriate level of security clearances or skills required. Permissions can only be obtained by going with Jesse on the route designated by Control's main story. According to the strict rules of the Bureau, Jesse became the director of the organization by escalating the service weapon (he could even interpret this as a very serious reinterpretation of Dark Cops or Harry Potter, which they consider positive), and this position has many responsibilities. act. Hissing has also turned back people and places in the House, and staff members need Jesse's help to repair the damage. The problems can be solved by exploration, violence or surprisingly complex puzzles.
That would be saying too much to Spoils about Jesse's adventure, but I can tell you so much that Hissing is an obstacle to overcome rather than a goal – he came here for something else. But this remains a major hurdle – the game's first main enemy gives you the basic tone as it can reset your life in less than a minute and immediately teaches you to play aggressively and using all the available abilities. At the same time, however, it is important that the main road does not present the most serious challenges nor the greatest capabilities for us.
In addition to chasing the head and timed events like Destiny (Control is like Bungie's game, the multiplayer mode is not included), the House has dozens of missions, some of which are organized by major powers much more difficult than whistling. disturbed by people who must be dismantled during the main story. They also offer the most serious rewards of the game. Most of Jesse's abilities, from Superman's super fast touch to super float, can only be achieved by performing side quests. These are not marked by the map and can be omitted gently if our research is not thorough. Remedy does not just want you to discover the world they created, but insist on it.
There is also a similar playing philosophy on the part of the studio, that there is no level of difficulty in Control, the deployable forces can greatly facilitate the fighting. But the most important areas can be reached without skills. Thus, those who aspire to the most serious challenge can simply ignore the rewards and leave Jesse as a hero of reference.
The difficulty is the only thing that makes me afraid to play for the moment. Although most of the control has been difficult but fair, and thanks to the nonlinear structure, we can return to the secondary queries, but the location of the rescue points can be frustrating for the players. In case of death, we return to the last activated checkpoint – we only have to think about Dark Sousl and his campfires – which means we will have an unfortunate move before coming back on the place of our death, then we can return to the ground. However, while Souls games are based on tiny clashes based entirely on our abilities, control is inherently more chaotic and cluttered. In my experience, many deaths are due to the great confusion in which it is difficult to concentrate. I can easily imagine that it will frustrate players who just want to see more world built by Remedy.
And what a world it is! The old house has been beautifully built – I imagine it's both a dream and a nightmare for a career planner – but it's even more beautiful when it comes to ruining. When gunfire and telemetry forces exert their influence, the tables collapse, the equipment disintegrates and the sheets of paper break. If Jesse does not find any object (or body) that can be fired with his special abilities, he can simply pick up debris from the building that is spreading concrete dust on the environment. The particle effects are simply fantastic, almost every movement being accompanied by a "slight glow". Even the opponents themselves enrich the show, all murders are marked by a brilliant breath of oil that spreads across the screen as you cross it.
It would be embarrbading to philosophize about what is "the best game in the world", but I do not think of many things that would look better than Control. The clean, sometimes very scary lines of the old house often bathe in a red light (which usually marks an area that can be hissed back), sometimes sterile, a white fluorescence used in the labs, gives a subtle light, but it also happens that deep darkness pleases in which only the small light of the mouthpieces helps to determine the outlines of the opponents or the direction of the emergency exit. Of course, most of them will be provided in a PC version that supports ray tracing, but the version of PS4 Pro that we tested was sufficient to be lost.
But the greatest beauty of Control lies in its surprises. Previous Remedy games were designed in genres that gave you a frame that you knew more or less about what to expect: Max Payne Noirja was a dark night in New York, a horror of Alan Wake looking like Twin Peaks , a scary campaign. However, Old House is literally no matter what (or occasionally just about anything), which means you will often not be prepared at all for the next scene. The control is based on the New Weird literary genre that relies on the unpredictable, indescribable. In practice, this means that you will find yourself in retro-futuristic offices, go down into chasms covered with foreign trutymos and even go to a motel captured in another dimension. These surprises come back into the tiny details of Control: as you enter a building on many walls, the director's image, Trench, is suspended (created by the iconic face of Remedy, James 'Max Payne'. McCaffrey himself), but as soon as you inherit the title, you're there already. portraits are in place everywhere.
This surprise-based attitude has impressed me the most in the game, and I can not wait to see Control. I had to leave the story in the middle of the main plot (I missed a significant part of the side-by-side quests), even in front of a huge hunting dog. The character was far from the maximum of his abilities, but I had already gathered the basic forces and weapons at that time. Normally, I would be a little nervous (how exciting is an action game when I can not show new alternatives to combat?), But the more I worry about it, the more I am feel worried. The fight is the most convincing element of the game, a safety rope that helps move the Control into a beautiful and grotesque world.
The slice I saw from the game was more enjoyable than the other titles during all their play time, and whatever I've tried, I'm not even able to determine exactly where it can go. For me, this means that Remedy has finally been able to put a game on the table that the story that he wants to tell is just as excited as the action that he can offer. How is it going to be stranger than usual? I'm getting up.
This is a translation of the article by Joe Skrebels.
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