I’ve just finished playing through the rather excellent game, Control, by Remedy Entertainment. When I first saw the initial publicity for the game, I wasn’t that bothered, but as the release date grew closer and I saw this trailer, I became much more interested:
Without giving away too much of the story, the game contains elements of all sorts of strange events, conspiracy theories and Government cover-ups. In fact the whole game is set within the headquarters of the fictional(?) Federal Bureau of Control, a top-secret Government organisation responsible for the the containment, study, and control of paranatural phenomena. The so-called ‘Oldest House’ is in Manhattan but can only be found if you’re looking for it and, amongst other things, houses a collection of everyday objects with strange powers - a wonderful nod to one of my favourite tv shows that nobody’s ever heard of, The Lost Room.
It was the fact that the whole game was set inside a single building that bothered me the most - I tend to like games with a strong visual identity and that let me explore strange, new, worlds, meet alien races (and kill them in most cases :) But I shouldn’t have worried, the FBC HQ is not like other buildings…
Although we start off in what looks like a pretty conventional, if slightly retro, looking office, things soon start to get weird and we realise that the normal laws of physics don’t apply here.
There’s a risk that everything could look a bit samey, but the designers have done a fantastic job of differentiating the areas using colours and lighting.
As well as housing the usual assortment of offices, cafeteria, post room etc. that you’d expect to find in any office building, there’s a power plant, a furnace (although nobody knows who installed it or what it heats) and even a quarry!
The more you explore, the more of the back story is revealed as you find research reports, inter-departmental emails (some of which are pretty amusing) and videoclips.
And by the time you reach the end of the game, you’ll have visited some very strange and uniquely memorable locations.
I really enjoyed playing Control a lot more than I thought I was going to. It was a feast for the eyes, great fun to play - especially as your character gets more powerful as the game progresses - but, more importantly it had it’s own sense of self. It’s nothing like any other game I’d played and it revels in its own weirdness - and that’s a good thing in my book!
I’ll leave you with a quote from the game:
“We live in a room, and there’s a poster on the wall. We stare at it and we think that’s the whole world. The room... and the poster. The picture’s something nice - a landscape, a famous person. Like in that movie... what is it called? The prison movie. The room’s a cell, and the picture, it’s different for each of us. It can be beautiful or terrible, but we’re all transfixed. But it’s all a lie. Something to distract us from the truth. They’re lying to us. We’re lying to ourselves. The room’s not the world, the world... is much bigger, and much stranger. There’s a hole hidden behind that poster that leads to the real world. We all feel safe in that room. But sometimes... sometimes something crawls out from behind the poster, and the ones that see it happen freak out, and try to forget what they saw.”