Though a great time overall, Control feels unfinished at every other step you take in it. I loved the overall atmosphere, but the story feels truncated. Gameplay can be fun, but half the guns feel without purpose, with the loadouts offering minimal customizability. The metroidvania-esque structure could've been interesting, but going through the Oldest House feels more like playing a live-service dungeon crawler than traversing a freaky cosmic horror office building because of that very structure.

I was hoping that the expansions would offer some remedy to these problems, but they barely did anything. Foundation looked cool and some of those levels were the best in the whole game, but you still had to stop and read fucking field reports to get the full picture, or look at compressed video files you can't pause, speed up or slow down. The crystal-shaping new "power" seemed promising but it endeded up being a worse version of a Arm Canon upgrade: a key you use in one place and nowhere else.

AWE was great for a while, but if you never played the first Alan Wake game or, like me, don't remember shit from it, you will get literal zilch from the story. Heartman was an okay-ish sorta persistent asshole, but him dying like a bitch followed by a cutscene that might as well have ended with "Alan Wake 2 is now in development"...was not a great ending.

I would love for Control 2 to happen, but, in more ways than one, this game was a bit of a dissapointment.

Don't you just hate finishing an open world game's story and immediately losing interest in booting it up, accepting the fact that you won't be doing all the fun endgame grinding and side-quests you were looking forward to, because it feels weird playing any more with the story concluded?

Yeah, me too. Red Dead 2 was an extremely fun time, though. I wasn't tracking my playthrough or looking at number of hours played, but it took me a couple weeks to finish this one at a comfortable pace, which is really impressive concidering how detailed and content rich this world is. But at the end of the day, the writing is what kept me going, and my only hope now is that I someday return to this world and see Arthur have his TB-Induced come-to-Jesus moment, in what has to be the most realistic and relatable "man realising he has been a shithead his whole life" narrative I've ever experienced. It's certainly better than any GTA story I've ever seen (the game in general being everything I would ever want from a Rockstar open-worlder, honestly).

Also please make that RDR1 PC port already!