 So we're finally out of the boring summer and into the hectic days of major games releasing. And one of those games is Control, from the same folks who brought you Max Payne, and Alan Wake, and this one. Remini as a studio has had a pretty obvious wheelhouse, interesting and unique narrative styles with disturbing stories in third person action games. But the cool thing is that Max Payne was renowned for its gameplay and action while Alan Wake is more remembered for its story and cinematic feel. Quantum Break was Remini's effort to finally meld their cinematic games with actual cinema, though it was kind of clumsy and ultimately annoying in practice. Today, let's take a look at Control, Remini's latest. It's some of their very best work, while it's also at times kind of infuriated. After the logo. I'm aware that I'm often super critical of the games I write about. And some of my complaints could be seen as nitpicks. But in general, I do try to give a game the benefit of the doubt. I want to like the games I play. The only thing I have no patience for is a total lack of ambition. Far Cry, despite still being a fun shooter because shooting things is fun, is ultimately a disappointment because there's no ambition anymore in the series. It's the same mediocre story and the same mediocre world every couple of years. I criticized Ashen, a game I kind of liked for attempting absolutely nothing different from a Souls game. Games that have unique looks or feel like they tried to bring me something new get the benefit of the doubt. Rage 2's combat and creature design felt fresh and exciting. The gameplay is like nothing else on the market, so even though it's got some truly mediocre map and mission design, I lauded it because as I was playing it, it didn't remind me of anything else. So while I might sound harsh on control at times, the game ultimately gets recommended because at the end of the day, there is simply nothing else like this on the market. Aside from other Remedy games and even there it's only the tone and sense of humor. I guess to really evaluate control, we'll need to get a brief history out of the way. A brief history. Finland, of course, is famous for several things. Being ridiculously cold, um, spawning utterly unpronounceable names, fighting off the entire Soviet Union in the early days of World War II, and the names is for real people, Google a list of famous Finns and check it out. But I think it's fair to say that Remedy Games is one of the three best things that Finland has ever produced, along with Yari Kuri and Team of Salami. In fact, if I had to rank Finland's greatest achievements, it would probably go Kuri, Salami, the heroic stand against the Soviet invasion, and then Remedy Games. Now that's no shame to Remedy, Yari Kuri was amazing. Anyway, Finland has had a long and interesting history as a unique people living in ridiculously inhospitable lands. In 1999, Finland set a record for coldest January day ever. It was negative 60 Fahrenheit. So of all the things Finland is known for, martial spirit, hockey, fisheries, video game design was not really one of them. In 1995, Remedy Games was started in one of the team members' basements. They initially released games with famed old school publisher Apogee Games, that's 3D Realms for you young ins who never got games on disc in a magazine. Their first release was Death Rally, which was apparently successful enough to keep them eating while they worked on a new title that would go down as a genre-defining work. Remedy began work on Max Payne with a small budget and a general sense that they wanted to make a third-person action game in the vein of Tomb Raider, but with a gritty noir story. They started work in 96, and in 1999, after generating some big buzz at E3 with their new particle effects and action gameplay, Max Payne released on PC. Here's the cool thing about Max Payne, which I think we can all agree was an amazing game for its time. Max Payne has all the elements of a typical Remedy game. It is brutally unforgiving in its gameplay, it makes absolutely zero concessions to the player. It is decidedly adult in themes. It's ironic and funny in its portrayal of uniquely American tropes, and it had a habit of forcibly ripping the mouse out of your hands to demand you focus on its story. But I gotta pass for that, because in its day, it was actually a pretty damn good story, though it hasn't aged particularly well. Either way, the basic Remedy design was there. The game is remembered for having its story told through comic book stillpages which seemed bold, but was as much a concession to cost as it was a deliberative creative decision. Max Payne, and this will be a familiar story going forward, ended up reviewing pretty well and selling less well than you might think it did. The game is probably remembered as a bigger hit than it actually was in terms of units shipped. Wikipedia tells me, and Wikipedia is always right, that the game sold about two and a half million copies, which is plenty of games and enough to deem it a modest hit. But the game didn't sell nearly as many units as one would expect of a title that is so fondly remembered by so many people. Still, for a very small team from Finland, selling a couple million copies of Max Payne meant that Remedy was an honest to good in the studio whose releases would now be noticed. Now, when a tiny studio from Finland sells a couple million copies of its first big release, it's obvious what the next step is. Find a bigger publisher, and make a sequel, and that's exactly what Remedy did. In 2001, while working in a pre-production for Payne 2, a big fish swooped in and bought the rights from 3D Realms, who were, to put it mildly, struggling to keep up with the changing face of the game's market. Take 2 immediately pledged up to 8 million bucks in incentive pay and announced that Remedy was working on the game. Now, they certainly didn't rush the game, they stuck to Max Payne 1's three-year dev cycle, and the game eventually released in the early 2000s. Max 2 improves several things over the first game. Remedy's engine had all sorts of neat new physics capabilities like destructible cover and the bullet-time slow-motion mechanic that would be nearly universally copied was improved. The story was still a well-done noir tale, and ended up being a more polished, higher-budget version of the first game. It released to Remedy's usual good-but-not-great-reviews scoring in the mid-80s, and its console ports were thought to be significantly better than the first games. However, Payne 2, like several Remedy games, despite its positive reviews, really didn't sell as well as expected. In fact, it so failed to meet Take 2's expectation that they were forced to adjust quarterly expected earnings to shareholders. Now, when a big corporation has to get on the phone and tell investors they're making less money than they thought, and therefore should delay purchasing that seventh yacht, bad things happen. Remedy had been working on Max Payne for like seven years, and while they'd found success and solidified themselves as a working studio, they hadn't had Max break out to ultra-mega success. Max Payne would go on a long vacation and not return again until he was in the hands of one of Take 2's other studios, one of their more successful studios. After the release of Max 2, Remedy took some time to recover from the brutal development schedule of the Payne games and started thinking about what would come next. Whatever did come next was going to be A, different, and B, require a new corporate overlord. Microsoft was in the middle of dominating the current generation console market by gobbling up an impressive array of Xbox 360 exclusives. It's kinda crazy to say now, isn't it, but it was not that long ago. Remedy's new title, called Alan Wake, had initially been shown off at E3 as a partnership with Microsoft that would release on both the PC and the 360, but somewhere along the way, Microsoft had apparently decided to make it an Xbox exclusive, which is a shame because a couple years later, the unbelievably superior PC version would eventually release. Exclusivity Crap aside, what Remedy had in Alan Wake was, and this is something that has been true of all of their big releases, something utterly unique. And uniquely Remedy. Alan Wake blends Remedy's commitment to cinematic presentation with top-notch worldbuilding. Unlike Max Payne, however, Alan Wake is not remembered all that fondly for its gameplay, which as far as I am concerned, is clunky at its best and grating at its worst. Still, Alan Wake's world was a fully realized cinematic universe. Its levels were beautiful and memorable and packed to the brim with amazingly wonderful details. So much so that many of the most interesting or funny things are often off the beaten path and require the player to actively seek them out. Wake would also begin something else that all Remedy games now have in common, a melding of live-action cinema within the game world. As Wake wanders around, whining and picking up coffee thermoses, he passes televisions that play a show called Night Springs. The show features live-action acting within the game world, and when combined with all of the cinematic illusions, combined to give the player a feeling of moving around a surreal cinematic representation. The town of Bright Falls feels heavily inspired by Twin Peaks. Night Springs is the Twilight Zone, and the main character reminds many players of Stephen King. Alan Wake, like Max Payne before, trades heavily in American tropes and cliches. But it's done so well, the player often can't decide if it is camp or homage. Payne is a grizzled New York City cop. Wake is a New York writer with writer's block. Playing both Payne and Wake constantly bombards a player with things that remind them of other things, but tweaked just enough and in such a way as to leave you feeling a bit off for all of its faults in the gameplay department. And there are many, as far as I'm concerned, like its garbage checkpoints, and we will get back to that by the way. Alan Wake is yet another completely original game from Remedy. It reviewed about the same as every other Remedy game, which is to say, well, but not spectacular. Mid-80s again. And again, the game sold well, very well this time. At the time, the game was a success, but not the massive hit that one would expect. Again, a game that is remembered more fondly than its sales would dictate. It did pass four million units moved, but that took nearly 10 years to achieve. Still, it sold well enough that Microsoft kept their partnership with Remedy and let them move forward with a standalone expansion called Alan Wake's American Nightmare, which reviewed okay, apparently sold okay, in which I had never played, so I've got nothing to add about it. Through all this, Remedy had always been moderately successful. Their games had all felt unique and were all both well-reviewed and reasonably profitable. And while the gameplay in each of them was different, and Wake especially was nothing like the manic Max Payne titles, the one constant in Remedy's work had been blending overt cinematic universes into a game. Max Payne's entire appeal was making a game that looked and felt like a John Woo film while you played it. Wake was like playing a horror movie and even included live action movie scenes presented as in-universe TV shows. Remedy could never be accused of being afraid to try something new. And with a partnership with Xbox, a brand new console on the horizon, and a desire to do something that no one else had even tried, they began work on an ambitious title that was gonna try and do something totally different. Combine an actual movie with an action game. Now it turns out there's a reason nobody had tried that. Making a movie is expensive and hard. Making a game is expensive and hard. Trying to simultaneously make both and combine them runs the risk of making both a bad movie and a bad game. Quantum Break is absurdly ambitious and features fairly amazing production values for the time. The reception for the game was mixed, but I can only say what I thought about it. Quantum Break was a decent game and a decently low average TV show. Literally setting down your controller until it times out in the middle of the game utterly breaks the flow. It tipped way too far towards cinema and left me feeling disappointed in the game I had gotten. I appreciate the ambition, but as I told my wife, if I wanna watch a TV show, I will watch a damn TV show. I want to play a game, so can I play the game and get the story without having to watch a 20 minute cutscene? Also, it was strangely too easy for a Remedy game. Quantum Break, according to Microsoft's press releases, was apparently successful due to both its absurd production values and the ridiculous marketing push that Microsoft had put behind it desperate to finally have a good exclusive in the current generation. Still, it's hard to believe it could have been as successful as Microsoft was hoping because Remedy's next game would, once again, have a new publisher. So that wasn't all that brief actually was it. Either way, before we get to control, what do we have? We've got a small studio that has steadily ramped up its production value, never released a game that wasn't ambitious and has driven for both interesting stories and challenging gameplay while pushing right up to and with Quantum Break over the line that separates gaming from cinema. And that brings us to control, which is, in most ways, easily Remedy's most impressive game yet. Control. So up until Quantum Break, Remedy had been on a slow and steady climb. Each game had reviewed relatively well and each one had outsold, if only modestly, the game had come before it. Quantum Break was Remedy's most ambitious, expensive, and highly marketed game yet. Microsoft was selling Quantum Break console bundles. The ads were everywhere. The game had the full backing in one of the world's wealthiest corporations. And though Microsoft insisted they were pleased with the sales, that seems kind of hard to believe when Remedy's new game isn't published by Microsoft. Or Take Two. Or any of the big publishers. Control was published by 505 Games, an Italian company that has published all of 11 titles. Now, 505 has carved out a niche by publishing a wide variety of games that the big publishers generally wouldn't. Payday 2, Sniper Elite 3, Terraria, Brothers, Abzu, things like that. One would think going from Microsoft to 505 would mean lower production values, but if there's one thing control brings to the table, it is some impressive production. The game must have been extremely expensive to make. Now, I do not have an RTX card, so I can't speak to the ray tracing, but Digital Foundry calls it ray tracing's killer app. But even on my GTX 1080 Ti and i7-8700K, control is a demanding game. It is a tour de force of a physics engine and the sheer amount of particle effects, destructible environments, movable objects, it's almost impossible to believe. It's so intense that the rare object that can't be destroyed or moved stands out to you. Think about that, man, being more surprised that a physics object doesn't respond to the player rather than ones that do. It's the first game I've encountered that did not default to highest settings on my machine and required tweaking to get it running at 60 FPS in 1440p. Visually, the game is, for the most part, stunning with some of the best lighting and the best physics I've ever seen. It is a technical marvel. And this level of interactivity actually positively interacts with the gameplay as the amount of destruction and smoke really does change how you go about combat encounters. We're rapidly approaching a point in games where resolution and textures are so universally good that simply looking nice no longer sets a game apart unless it's uncommonly amazing, like Red Dead 2. But the effort that went into control's visual presentation pays off in important ways because the game absolutely relies upon the player becoming fully immersed in its world. Because that world and the mystery inherent in it is basically the story of the game. So let's talk about gameplay and UI and stuff last and start with what is undoubtedly control's greatest achievements. It's world, it's lore, it's story, it's map. The oldest house. I'll preface this section by saying up front the control's total narrative package is the most engaged and interested I've been in a game in a while. I have always made it clear that I am a gameplay guy. It's why I like Rage 2 better than Red Dead 2. It's why I think Doom 2016 is the generation's best game while my copy of Persona 5 remains only about half finished. But even though I'm a guy who prefers gameplay I'm also the type of guy who goes through games I enjoy very slowly. I read every data pad. I listen to every audio log. I explore every single hallway. I always read every entry in the codex of a game I like and as someone who does that I can confidently state that the text and audio logs in most games are total garbage that shouldn't even be there. See, bad or boring audio and text logs are like a thousand times worse than none because I cannot walk past a text log without reading it. I just cannot. It's why games like Fallout or The Witcher take me like 190 hours. I loot every box, walk every hallway and read every terminal all the way through. It's a compulsion. I do it even when it's trash. I spent a few hours in the last Far Cry game getting angry and angry every time I felt like a text log was wasting my time. I despise text and audio logs that feel like they're only there because games are supposed to have them. And sadly, that is generally par for the course now. It's the rare game that has truly excellent text logs. Destiny 2, despite its many narrative problems has spectacularly good writing in its text logs. But for example, Rage 2s were just dismally bad. Controls, text, and especially its audio and video logs are some of the best writing ever in a game. They flesh out the world in a way that is totally impossible to do during gameplay and they're entertaining enough on their own to be worthy. Added to this is the fact that I am very interested in philosophy, cosmology and the paranormal. Control takes place in a building, the oldest house, that serves as the headquarters for a shadowy government agency that acquires, studies and suppresses dangerous paranormal items. It's also a game that heavily relies upon a sense of both mystery and the absurd. I'm going to avoid spoiling anything about the story and only talking broad strokes about how the narrative mix here works so well. Because Control's story is literally about figuring out the unknown and it takes place within a government bureaucracy, the game is left with a lot of space to flesh out its narrative through text, audio and video logs. The vast majority of these logs that you encounter will be things that become relevant later in the gameplay or in a narrative sense. Making your way through Control's absurdly dense levels is like uncovering a mystery as you slowly piece together disparate narrative leads through environmental storytelling which is exceptional and all the reading and listening you'll do. The cutscene and video log presentation is decidedly avant-garde and arresting. From the garbled audio of the board's video communications to the former director's disembodied consciousness intruding onto the game world, all of these things add up to produce a powerful sense of an easiness and strangeness. Casper Darling, the head researcher's live action movie clips are some of the best cutscenes I've ever seen in a game, entertaining, interesting, exciting and a fantastic performance. But it's not just this presentation. The actual philosophical themes that are dealt with here are pulled from real life conundrums. The writers are clearly people who are interested in philosophy and the paranormal. If you're the kind of person who is interested in that stuff, you will encounter all kinds of things that you've heard about, read about, or thought about. It's this kind of serious depth that takes a story that is, at its core, a demon zombie invasion and elevates it to something truly captivating and memorable. The acting, again, is amazing. Facial animations are generally so good that when the game actually has live action film playing within the world, neither looks out of place. The main character, Jesse Faden, is acted wonderfully with unbelievable facial capture that manages to convey even incredibly subtle features, a slight twitching of the lip or a quick wince. It is some of the best facial capture ever. It's the incredibly rare game that literally has the player actively searching for video and text logs. Hell, the most memorable part of the game is often the live action video that here, as opposed to quantum break, is absolutely seamlessly woven throughout the gameplay experience. You put down the controller and watch because you want to, not because you have to. You can walk away at any time. You just won't. This is Remedy's best job ever, at something that's hard to quantify but is critical to a good game. Hacing. Half-Life 2 feels perfect because the game never ever drags. It is a perfectly paced film. The kind of thing you end up playing for five hours without realizing. And control is paced nearly perfectly as well. Not totally so because of some strange design decisions but we will get to that. When you've got a great premise with real world relevance, great acting, great mocap, great mapping level design and the best text and audio logs perhaps ever, you're going to have a tour de force of video game storytelling. It's easy to have things like this feel like a separate part of the game like there's the game and then the story stuff. But the brilliance of the oldest house as both a play space and a narrative setting makes control one of the most ambitious and memorable narrative action games ever made. That stuff alone is worth the price of admission. Gameplay. Here is where things get slightly more complicated. Remedy made their bones with a game that is lauded for interesting, fast paced, difficult combat. Even if that combat could be annoyingly sloppy at times. Then Alan Wake has, again in my opinion, garbage combat and movement but with a great story. Control makes every effort to be Max Wake and it pulls it off in many places. But it is not 1999 anymore. There are a ridiculous amount of great third person action games these days and the design of modern games means that players aren't really cool with lots of frustration and confusion. So let's look at the combat and movement systems before we go on to the levels and maps. Even though Quantum Break was pretty mediocre overall, its gameplay was decent enough to keep me playing. Its powers were stylish and exciting to use. Its gunplay was okay enough to not be annoying. Control has a lot of Quantum Break in its veins as the combat relies heavily, like ridiculously heavily on the skills and powers you unlock. This takes some getting used to. If you put a gun in my hands, I will want to use the gun but one of the games with powerful attacks is the telekinesis thing. You can pick up literally nearly any objects, dead or dying enemies and even rip off a piece of the wall or floor, hover it in front of you and then force push it at enemies. This skill is ridiculously powerful. It has auto lock on aim and does massive damage. So much so that it's actually boring to use. It feels so easy to use that that I found myself wanting to use my guns to make it more interesting in that I, you know, have to actually aim my reticle. But the game slaps you in the face and says, no, your guns can fire for like six seconds before a five second reload activation. Your melee ability is pathetically inexcusably weak and all of your other powers are defensive or movement skills. Any remotely challenging enemy encounter and they can be quite challenging. Demands you use your force throw nearly constantly and only use your guns when your force throw was on cooldown. Now again, this might be okay if I actually had to aim the power, but you don't. You look even close to an enemy and the telekinesis power hard locks onto them. It is so powerful, it feels cheap to use. So you might ask, why would they even have this hard lock on? Well, it's because controls enemies are squirrely little fuckers, that's why. One of the most important parts of making a good shooter combat system is designing enemies that are fun to fight. And this is more involved than it might seem. Destiny 2 is as good a shooter as it's ever been made and a huge part of that is the enemies themselves. Shooting Destiny 2's enemies in the head is satisfying because it's a big enough target to consistently hit but also challenging because the AI is constantly seeking cover or dodging and never using hitscan weapons. On top of that is enemy animation. When you shoot an enemy in Destiny 2, it feels good on a visceral level. Doom 2016 uses this same formula to perfection, making it the only other shooter as good as Destiny 2 in years. Control has many, though not all, of the elements of spectacular enemy design. Enemy AI is quite good with them flanking, dodging and focusing fire. They take cover and their attacks are unique and understandable which forces the player to make fast and interesting decisions about target prioritization. Unfortunately, many of them have hitscan weapons which is a knock. But control fails in a couple of other places. It takes what could have been a great combat system and reduces it to mostly good and occasionally annoying. Enemies, all enemies are tanky. Their animations are average at best and the visual design of them is repetitive to the extreme. Control's story requires its enemies to be humans that have been altered by a malignant power and its third person view makes them quite small on your monitor. Control's levels that are so dense and amazing to explore often become tedious to fight in as your character constantly gets caught on the truly absurd amount of realistic geometry and clutter. Enemies can be difficult to find and they spawn constantly with fairly poor communications of the player which can greatly harm the pacing of the game. Added to this is the fundamental lack of balance which makes picking up a desk and throwing it at an enemy's face always the right answer. Aside from flying enemies who dodge that attack and are so squirrely and annoying that fighting them is often an absolutely dreadful and tedious battle chasing them around a pillar and slowly planking away at their shield with your pathetic guns. Because telekinesis is so powerful you will actively need to force yourself to use other methods to keep the combat from getting boring. Still it's not all bad. When everything is clicking and working together this can be a very exciting and satisfying combat system. Skills are really cool to use. Progression and mods while annoyingly RNG are fun to play with and it's dodging and movement system can feel really fluid. It was really only when I finally gave up on ever aiming down sight with my gun that the gunplay ever felt even adequate. But even there they feel so inferior to telekinesis that it's kind of a let down. One of the other disappointments is the fact that controls really interesting and unique bosses are optional content that requires you to dig deep to find them. While it's main story bosses are regular enemies with painful amounts of health and adds. I am relatively confident that many, many players will miss out on half of controls really cool and interesting designed bosses. Because Remedy has gone to insane levels to make accessing those fights as random or as difficult as they can. It's an odd choice. I think I found most of the optional bosses and they were quite memorable but the rest of them are only different from regular mobs because they had a boss health bar. Enemy design and especially campaign boss design needs to be improved if there's a sequel which I sincerely hope there is. The game does have a commendable variety of enemies but that visual design and similarity and tactics that it takes to fight them can make the combat drag every so often. It's probably Remedy's very best combat system to date but the world is a wash and amazing combat systems at the moment. Remnant, Destiny, Doom, Soulsborne It's not fair to expect every game's combat to be nearly perfect but if you're gonna be doing it for 15 hours it needs to stay fresh all the way through your story and it just simply does not here. It's a shame. Traversing the map. I have already mentioned that the oldest house is one of the best realized game worlds from a narrative standpoint that I've ever seen but how does it meld with the gameplay? Well, control is a strange bird. Part light Metroidvania, part Resident Evil 2 police station, part Dark Souls level. It tries its hands at all of these things but stumbles as often as it succeeds. Control's map is surprisingly big and the game makes a real effort to feel open-ended to the player. You're given very basic instructions on where to go and you make your way there using perhaps the very fucking worst game map in video game history. I swear to God, even after over 20 hours and completing almost everything in this game I still do not actually understand how this in-game map works. You can't pause to look at it, you can't zoom in, you can't adjust levels and the game does a miserable job at differentiating floors on its map. I still don't know the difference between the gray areas and the black. I think black means on a higher floor but I don't know. It is highly, highly frustrating to a person like me. Control is making a conscious effort to take us back to a different era of gaming. The era where you'd have to explore the levels to find where you're going. The era before the waypoint. Now that's admirable in one sense but in another far more accurate sense it sucks. I am too old and spoiled now to go back there. I used to think the introduction of quest markers ruined world of Warcraft but now if a waypoint confuses me for like five seconds I start cursing and I have a feeling I am not alone in this. Game designers trained us like this and to have it ripped away gets annoying. Areas on the map are impossible to find and using in-game signs is crucial but even with them a significant part of your play time, I mean a significant part of your play time will be wandering back and forth over and over and over trying to figure out why you can't get to the part of the map you want to. FYI it is usually an elevator or a hallway underneath you that for some reason is not on the map. Added to this is the way control spawns in enemies. To keep things fresh as you wander and backtrack control randomly spawns enemies around you. Now this is normally a good thing but when you've spent 15 minutes going up and down the same hallway looking for a way to the next room having 25 tanky enemies that can instakill you spawn in can get very annoying very quickly. This is where the pacing fails and it's in this way that one of control's greatest triumphs also becomes one of its greatest problems. Wandering controls levels, reading and watching its lore and really looking at its amazing art design is a joy but spending so much time getting lost while also dealing with ever respawning enemies can be a total chore. A not insignificant percentage of my time was spent looking at the map as I walked back and forth or tried to find where an elevator was or tried to figure out how to get into a hallway. There is a difference between exploration and getting lost. Exploration is what you do in fallout or Skyrim. It's wandering an interesting location seeing what pops up and finding cool things. In exploration there's no goal in mind but in a game like control you're always moving towards a goal so it actually is getting lost which is an entirely different experience. Instead of being fun like exploration getting lost is stressful. A good Metroidvania does have you spending time trying to find things. Hollow Knight is a masterpiece and its traversal is a great mix of puzzle and exploration but control makes simply getting to the next area a frustrating puzzle of times. The levels are so complex and the map's so totally fucking useless that even at the end of the game after dozens and dozens of hours I still had no idea how to get back to places I'd already been like five times. That's a problem and was easily one of my biggest complaints with this game. The other was tedium as punishment. Remedy's games aside from Quantum Break have generally been fairly challenging. Max Payne made the player feel like Neo in the Matrix but one careless second meant death and significant lost progress. Alan Wake liked to trap you in checkpoints with no ammo requiring a player to restart an entire chapter which could be like 45 minutes of heavy narration. Certainly in the year 2019 with all the modern changes to the gaming industry Remedy would find a nice balance of difficulty and moderation. Well, yes and no. Control can be quite challenging at times but the game gives you enough tools and an auto-aim delete button to tackle most situations outside of boss fights or set pieces and the combat when it gets really hard is actually pretty damn fun. But control also somehow thinks it's dark souls and decided to break up its gameplay with no saving and annoyingly spaced bonfires as checkpoints. Oftentimes these bonfires I mean control points will be very far into a level. So something like, oh, this can happen. You get a mission. It asks you to get to a new area. You fight continually spawning enemies as you comb the same five hallways for 25 minutes until you finally find that actually it's an elevator that doesn't seem like it should connect to the new area well it actually does. So you take the elevator up. You make your way through the new area for like 20 minutes fighting enemies only to fall off the map or get caught on the desk and not seeing an enemy spawn. You'll take damage at which point your screen will turn and stay bright red making it very hard to see. You don't have regenerating health here and enemies in control can kill you in moments. They do huge damage if you stop moving. So getting caught on a water cooler for like three seconds can mean your death. And if you do fall off the map or get stuck on a desk and get killed back to the last bonfire you touched and another 40 minutes getting back to where you were. And even if it's only five minutes, it is frustrating. Now, I love, love the Soulsborn games. They are my favorite games of all time. I love hard games. I love the bonfire system and all Souls type games from Hollow Knight to Salt and Sanctuary from Remnant to Bloodborne. But there's a difference between the combat in those games and the combat in control. Almost all Souls type games have methodical combat. Even aggressive Bloodborne or Remnant isn't a hectic hack and slash. It is a slow dance. If you die and go back to the bonfire, you've almost never lost more than 15 minutes and figuring out exactly how to tackle the same group of enemies in the same spot, that's how you progress. If two Lothric Knights kill you on the stairs, it means that you need to learn, fight your way back and figure out how to kill or avoid those two Lothric Knights. Souls games brutally punish being careless and reward methodical careful play. Control is a fast paced action game that requires experimentation and fluidity. You need to be constantly dashing and moving and attacking. This style of combat means that one little mistake or again, getting caught on a piece of geometry can kill you. The only thing to learn is to hope you don't get caught on the water cooler again. And a punishment for these fast deaths that can often result from any number of accidents or weird coincidences is the story and lore comes screeching to a halt. As you replay the exact same section you've already done six times looking for the elevator in the first place. Even though it sometimes seems like it, Dark Souls isn't punishing you with inconvenience. Hollow Knight isn't punishing you with inconvenience. Those games are saying that dying there means you aren't ready to progress yet. You need to get better and overcome that challenge before you're ready to overcome the next. Mastering a Souls game means making it through to the next bonfire or the boss with all of your healing items. The game is teaching you with failure, not punishing you with failure. Now, control has no healing outside of a Doom 2016 like health thing dropping from enemies. Its combat is challenging and needs to be learned but can also feel arbitrary. And the game's very best aspects are its story, lore, and level design. Punishing the player by not having checkpoints and forcing them back to play the same section is bad design in a game like this. Dark Souls is almost all about the combat. The combat is what we're there for. Control shines when you're engaging with its story and its world. The combat is there just to keep it fun. It's not the main draw, so punishing failure in a game's ancillary systems by weakening the impact of its best systems is fighting itself in a way that ultimately hurts the total package, in my opinion. Now, there are times when control's combat rises to a Souls-like experience. The boss fights require you to die a couple of times until you figure out where ads will spawn and how best to handle them. And almost all the bosses are right past checkpoints, but its minute-to-minute combat isn't strong enough to replay the same fight three times. This attempt at being challenging in old school works in games that lean heavily on their gameplay. In a game like this where its quiet moments are most of its best moments, trying to use a punishing checkpoint system seems like a relic from another age. This checkpoint system absolutely made the game less enjoyable for me. I'd have enjoyed the game much, much more if death meant I'd had to repeat the room I died in and not the 14-minute trek back to the room I died in. When combined with the constant feeling of being lost and the difficulty of traversing the map, it means there's far more frustration than a game with a story and worlds as incredible as control needs. Control's themes, art, lore, and narrative are so good. Its combat and traversal only need to avoid getting in the way. And in balance, it does succeed with combat that's more fun than any other Remedy game. But its insistence on bad checkpoints and confusing navigation mean it was more annoying than it needed to be. Remedy's best. So when you add all this up, what do you have? Well, you've got a memorable game, one that is unlike anything else you've ever played. And that is certainly worth its asking price. Its story, characters, world, lore, visuals, physics, all that stuff is a triumph. And even its combat can be fun most of the time. But the careless balancing, the lack of great visual design in the enemies, the terribly confusing map, the lack of checkpoints, all that keep this from being a masterpiece. The elements are here for one of the best games ever made and it is closer than Remedy has ever gotten to making a true all-time great. But it's got too many, admittedly, small flaws to bring it all together. You should play control. It's exciting and creepy and fun. It's engrossing, it will pull you in. It's just a shame that every time it pulls you in with one arm, it's slapping your face with the other. I hope Remedy looks at this game and realizes that small little quality of life and design issues are sometimes a difference between a good game and a classic. Control is close to being a classic. Instead, it's merely very, very good. And very good is worth 60 bucks. I'll remember control, but I will also remember that it could have been even better. All right, this was a long one. Thanks for coming. See you next time. Bye.