tl;dr I wish I liked this game more than I did.

There’s no getting around it: Control is one of the most inspired settings in video game history. The Oldest House is not just a brutalist hellmaze, but a transdimensional hotbed for new and exciting conflicts + future titles.

The SCP similarities are shameless (in a good way). The House of Leaves similarities? I’ve already talked about House of Leaves before (and I’ll likely have more to say about it when I’m talking about Alan Wake, believe it or not) but they’re mostly skin-deep. Jacob Geller has some great videos about it.

Control is captivating, at first. It forgoes a lot of the traditional Remedy set dressing / diegetic prologue-ing and instead gives you a gun, and now you’re also the new director. Congratulations!

The first hour of this game is succinct, sowing intrigue, introducing key characters, acquainting Jesse with the service weapon, the Hiss; it’s grade-A Remedy pacing. Then, it starts to open up, and it slows waaayyy down.

Drinking game: take a shot every time a Bureau Alert appears; if you finish the mission successfully, take a drink of water – if you fail the mission (or die before you can reach it), take another shot.

Bureau Alerts are optional missions but they occur so frequently and repeat so often, they started to get on my nerves. You can safely ignore all of these (they didn’t even give me ability points, so I’m not really sure what their purpose would be outside of resource farming / achievements).

Side missions range from Pretty Good to Whatever. A lot of it is just busywork (“Go here, find this,”) and almost every boss encounter was kinda bad. If it wasn’t a souped-up enemy, it was either Big Ball or Big Worm (you gotta fight this guy in a Fridge and a Flamingo). Big Ball is an anchor, actually. Credit where it’s due, I can’t say I’ve killed an anchor by throwing clocks at it until I played this game. That’s gotta count for something.

One persistent complaint across every Remedy Game I’ve noticed is lack of enemy variety. I wouldn’t say Control alleviates this problem any. I think maybe my expectations were too high. I was expecting the human enemies to diminish in numbers as the game continued, allowing for various enemy factions / types to emerge later on (the Foundation DLC does this, kinda… they’re still all humanoid enemies though). Instead, it’s mainly humanoid soldiers for 3/4ths of the enemy roster – that remaining quarter is Small Balls (Hiss Clusters), Physic Objects Glitching Out (Astral Spikes), Exploding Guys, Floating Throwing Guys, Rock Shield Throwing Guys, and my least favorite guys, Invisible Jumpscare Guys That Can’t Be Attacked Until They Attack You But If You Don’t Dodge Their Attack They Deal 95% Of Your Health.

Combat was good – but it never elevated the experience for me. Just like Quantum Break, fodder enemies were too weak and bigger enemies were too spongy; unlike Quantum Break, all of Jesse’s abilities are tied to a singular power source – meaning there’s no waiting on ability cooldowns, just one main energy recharge. Likewise, your Service Weapon – despite having multiple “modes” to choose from – operates on a cooldown as well, meaning if you spend all your ammo in one place, you can’t just switch to another mode and keep blasting.

I’ll be straight with you: I didn’t like this! I understand it’s all intentional design to incentivize switching between Jesse’s powers and her weapons, but let’s be honest – the only thing it incentivizes is using the launch ability between weapon cooldowns. There’s nothing else you can do in a firefight besides shoot, or launch, or defend, or collect health. It makes for very samey combat throughout, albeit you eventually learn to fly later on, as well (this changes combat less than you’d think).

I wish the combat felt more dynamic. Let me switch between all my weapon modes at once! Make the individual weapon mode cooldowns longer to compensate or something, I don’t know.

Inventory micromanagement was a chore. Low inventory space and boring upgrades. +10% to Reload Speed after Evade? +15% Ground Slam Damage after Reload? Go fuck yourself. Just give me +10 Damage or +10 Defense and call it a day. I don’t want to keep recycling redundant weapon/player perks just because the game hands them out like candy.

If you focus solely on the main story and ignore all the extraneous busywork nonsense, I think you’ll find that Control is actually really good most of the time. However, because this is my first playthrough, and because I’m compelled to loot and read and do everything I can blind – I found most of the downtime was a lot more uninteresting than I’m used to.

The lore is interesting, the setting is awesome, the gameplay is good – but it never harmonizes. Its good ideas are sandwiched between truly baffling gameplay conceits and creative decisions that left me feeling underwhelmed. Combat that should've been fluid and fun ended up feeling rote and unsatisfying. Concepts that should be thought-provoking were glossed over, diluted and incorporated into or alongside more digestible third-person shooter verbiage.

It ends unceremoniously, without so much as a final boss to send it off.

The ashtray maze fucking rules though.