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Control is a big-budget SCP Foundation game made by the same folks as Alan Wake, which you may have heard of because of its extensive use of raytracing. While it’s practically everything you would expect out of an SCP Foundation game and more, it does have some fairly significant niggles which prevent it from reaching the greatest heights.
It’s actually quite amusing to play through Control as a long-time fan of the SCP foundation. Control is perhaps as close as it is possible to get to a realistic version of the SCP universe, just as Lobotomy Corporation encapsulates the struggle to discover and keep things contained.
Control is a fairly enjoyable game supported by fun mechanics and a compelling plot. You are Jesse Faden, the new director of the Federal Bureau of Control – though you don’t know it yet. Earlier in your life, you were possessed by an entity from another reality. You come to the Oldest House in New York City, which is only discoverable by people who are looking for it. Unfortunately, most of the staff are dead or hiding due to an escaped entity you term the Hiss which takes over people’s minds and turns them into zombies. The previous director is dead on his office floor, and the mysterious Board encourages you to take up his service weapon to become the new director.
The sound design, abilities, and worldbuilding/design are impeccable. Each area feels like a brutalist masterpiece, with well-explained reasons for why things are the way they are. Your gun feels great to use, and the abilities you gradually unlock come naturally as you progress through the different areas.
Sadly, it’s not all rosy. There are three baffling design decisions which frustrated my playtime and prevent me from out-and-out singing the praises of this game. First, the upgrades you find for your weapons are a strange, randomized item drop system with rarity. As you fight enemies and open containers hidden across the map, you find a random assortment of equipable upgrades. In a single-player metroidvania-style campaign, I simply don’t understand why this system exists. This is made worse since you have a limited number of slots to store your upgrades, so you occasionally find yourself sorting through a giant list to get rid of your +10% upgrade after you find a +11% one. You can’t even rely solely on rarity, since there is significant overlap between the tiers. Alongside this are a variety of currencies and upgrade points, some of which are quite useful and some of which seem to exist for no reason whatsoever. It’s as if they took an MMO or open-world mechanic from Ubisoft and jammed it into this tightly written single-player experience (also amusing: you upgrade at the fast travel points – I didn’t realize this for several hours because there was no reason to use the fast travel points due to the map design, so I ended up with an enormous number of upgrade materials as I kept wondering when I would get to spend them all).
This brings me to the second issue: you die extremely quickly. Despite this, the penalty for death is simply losing 10% of one of the useless currencies and having to run all the way back to where you were from a checkpoint. In other words, the penalty for dying is not getting to keep playing the game until you run down the right mazelike corridor again. If the combat was actually challenging and the enemies respawned, this might not be the worst – but more often than not when I died it was in a second or two to a high-damage enemy spawning nearby (hint: if roughly a third of your enemies either run at the player and explode or shoot homing rockets/grenades, your combat system might be less “strategic” and more “annoying”) or from falling to my death while trying to explore, rather than from any actual difficulty arising from the combat systems. Then I’d find myself running down empty corridors (since the enemies you kill typically stay dead even if you die before reaching a checkpoint) for minutes just to get back to actually playing the game.
The final issue is one which I think indicates that the designers didn’t actually trust themselves to keep the attention of players. There are a variety of collectibles in the game which give you bits of lore. This ranges from pieces of paper to audio recordings to video segments. When you find an audio or video recording, it’s typically placed in the world so you can listen or watch it. Movie projectors showing you one of the main scientists or a reel recorder you can play – that sort of thing. In other words, it’s the perfect way to let you experience bits of story without taking you out of the game and making you sort through your inventory: a great immersive touch. Except it’s not – because inexplicably the audio and video recordings you see in-game are abbreviated versions of the ones that get put into your inventory. Seriously: they had a system to seamlessly tell you about the world, and then they made it so you either have to watch the whole thing twice or ignore the version playing in-game because you aren’t getting the whole story.
There are some other small issues I have with the game, like how several of the characters talk…very…slowly…with…many…pauses…in…cutscenes, NPCs apparently think you are an absolute idiot because they will start telling you the solutions to puzzles in less time than it takes to enter any solution, they just won’t give you the keys to the building despite you being well-established as the director, or how pickups won’t always magnet to you if you run away from the container. These are all more polish issues than anything fundamentally wrong, though, so they’re mostly ignorable.
In the end, Control can be a bit too much like a AAA Ubisoft game in places, but it’s still an incredibly enjoyable (and beautiful) setting. Tier One.