Quick Look: Control

Not to get into spoilers or anything, but she actually (via inner dialog)comments on this at one point, noting that it's odd she is in this place seeing these things happen and isn't phased at all.

For reference to anyone curious about PC performance:

I have a GTX 1070, an old i7 2600K, and 16GB of RAM, and I'm running the game at 60FPS on the Medium settings with v-sync on. It's gorgeous. The only hitches I've encountered are when it is trying to render a lot of physics-based destruction when it hasn't in a while. It doesn't slow down, it just pauses for a split-second. It's noticeable, but it doesn't affect gameplay.

I agree with Alex on this looking like a pretty B-game. This definitly reminds me of the third person shooters i'd play on PS2 & PS3. Luckily those are some of my favorite games! The graphics & physics effects seem to elevate it, just like Binary Domain was elevated by it's characters. Bear in mind, calling something a B-game doesn't mean it's bad. It's just that this game does track quite closely to how you would go through games like Force Unleashed & Psi Ops back in the day. On top of that, seeing bodies clip through tables, hair freak out in lifts, characters facing away from a TV while you're watching it and extreme closeups of faces where the lips don't seem to track the words all that accurately, it's hard not to think about games like Until Dawn, Tomb Raider & Uncharted where that stuff does look good. Perhaps that's mostly solved in the PC version though,i haven't seen it there yet.

I'm not entirely sold on Remedy's new fondness for ' a mess of physics & chaos' as an aesthetic compared to the very stylish settings they explored in Max Payne & Alan Wake, but i do enjoy having a bunch of abilities and using the environment & physics to make enemies explode in a bunch of pretty colors. If the story is decent to boot, that sounds like a very enjoyable game to me. We don't see many games like this anymore and that's a shame.

God this game's style is so good. I think a great indicator of the sense of humor the game has is that in the videos with the scientist guy, you often see those two other scientists in the background, and at some point you can find a memo from one of them saying "Why does he keep making us be in his videos? He doesn't even let us DO anything in them, we always have to stand in the background and not say anything. Oh well, at least it's an easy day in the office, I guess."

And for what it's worth, the Mind Cloud thing took me a little bit to figure out too. Also, I was getting killed way more often in the firefights.

Oh my fucking lord that load screen looks disgusting. I never want to visit that meat dimension.

Yeah, that part took me a minute to figure out, but like only because I didn't immediately see the power cube things.

Kind of embarassing.

"The Swedish janitor" good to know they're as clueless as the main character on that front :p

It's hard to explain how excited I was for CONTROL; like the kind of excited where you avoid media to not sour going in blind. Super duper glad I did so, because for all I expected it to be, CONTROL is so much more universe/world building than I expected, and in a horror-y way I didn't see coming at ALL- and is very very clever in both environmental storytelling and it's bizarre sense of humor, without straying into 'stranger things' territory with dark comedy. I know I was expecting a B-game but what a hell of a B game CONTROL is (though I am not convinced it fits in the B game category really, so far I'm having a AAA time with it).

I'm perpetually fascinated by the creativity/variety in pickups and bios on the people/stuff in the game because it feels worth the time and reminds me of the first time I played Dead Space if that makes any sense. I really like it, though of course like anything I can see why it's probably not for everyone.

Also, play this on a PC for the love of glob, it's gorgeous. The visuals take home some ind of prize, like the trippiest parts of ECHO meets Max Payne within Half-Life-Paranormal visuals verse.

Ahti gets my character of the year, he's awesome.

This may come off as crass but I have no idea why Ben or Alex had a tough time with the light cord puzzle, it is trial and error (the game literally tells you this), and that trap the anomaly room made sense to me in 20 seconds flat. I'm not really sure the game needed to provide more information for either of these puzzles, they both feel naturally solvable even if the logic involved varies.

I'm gonna chalk up Alex rocking the shotgun from across the hall, fumbling on relatively straightforward puzzles and not reading any of the journal entries he's picked up, as a side effect of having to converse naturally and co-host a quick look, which I know is so much harder to do than it looks.

Had to stop watching because purely based on visual design alone I love what this game is doing and I'm going to have to check it out. I'm a sucker for that sort of weird futuristic unexplained interdimensional vaguely spiritual shit.

Playing on Xbox One X, it plays just fine and looks great. The only performance issues I have are a couple seconds of stutter coming out of pausing, for some reason. Outside of that, it looks and feels great.

Without bitching too directly about Alex’s handling of the the red door and containment puzzles, the game does set those up in the previous sector, Maintenance. I’d think most players would immediately ID and understand the slight variations on a theme. The game isn’t nearly as difficult or frustrating as the video makes it seem.

@noblenerf: Yeah, I’d call this more Fire Walk with Me/Twin Peaks Season 3 meets X-Files than 13 Ghosts meets X-Files.

I’m kinda waiting for Remedy to connect the worlds of Alan Wake, Control, and Control in some weird way. It feels like Control might give them the ammo they need to link the worlds in an interesting way. I’d kinda like to see it just for the audacity of a Remedy-verse.

@knoxt: I skipped the Control talk because I skipped all media on this game. I had no idea what to expect, aside from more Remedy. No main character, no plot, no gameplay, nothing.

Anyhow, it seems odd to struggle with the light switch. I think there’s literally a sign next to the first or second light switch that says “Rule of Three.”

About that...

Hearing Alex call this a B game hurts my heart.

Having finished the game (i'm talking like 100% finished)... lol. If there is a proper sequel I will be very bummed out. What I wantneedis a 2+ years-in-the-future anthology series in the vein of X-Files, where you lead investigations into paranatural events across the country. Maybe every 3rd or 4th is mainline story-relevant.

@rainvillain: @development: I’m not done yet, but I’ve seen enough to have had some giddy fucking moments reading certain collectables.

@development: Soooo might want to look at the promo art for the AWE DLC

Oh I meant the "lol" as "it's glaringly obvious; in fact, it's stated outright." It's funny there's articles out there talking about "fan theories connected Alan Wake to Control..." It's literally in the game.

Hey I just platinumed this a week ago. Playing on a PS4 PRO here are some quick thoughts:

• Ran mostly great on a PS4 PRO. Only had noticeable stutter when the world loaded in in-between warping to zones via fast travel.
• Overall feels great to play. Throwing crap with force powers and juking through gun fire to shotgun blast hiss enemies works well.
• The game starts off easy but will ramp up with a nice difficulty (note no selectable difficulty) as you adventure. If you're moderately skilled you probably will never die to enemies but will die once or twice to certain bosses to learn their gimmicks (especially the later, optional ones).
• Incredibly interesting atmosphere and setting. It's "SCP: The Game" and wears it proudly as you find people terrified of objects like rubber duckies and refrigerators.

Gameplay really takes a backseat to the cool setting, but overall it's a really neat single player experience (as you saw in this video like the cool Ashtray Maze). Glad I got to enjoy this before the end of the year.