Been playing Control on my steam deck. This game fucks. Amazing atmosphere of dread and anxiety without ever getting too scary for me. I’m dumped all of my ability points into telekinesis, because it’s satisfying. Nothing beats it yet except those flying turds.
Idk what’s going on, i barely understand the story, there’s a lot of mystery and very little explanation and I’m just along for the ride, really.
I can’t stop thinking about the atmosphere of dread and disquiet. The game presents the normalcy of corporate and governmental building design, sometimes evoking university campuses or convention centers, but all mashed together in strange and surprising ways with the back rooms, the industrial, the basements, the loading docks, all out in the open. The spaces themselves are disquieting. The sound design and the voice acting and the enemies are creepy, yes, but The Oldest House is fundamentally the focus and source of so much of the game’s delicious tension.
I haven’t felt this way since maybe Portal, and before that was probably Half-Life 1. Both games centered on moving through spaces that weren’t quite intended for you, with HL1 leaning into “lateral moves are forward progress” as a way to make sense of Gordon’s success. Portal 1 slowly ramped up from “intended spaces” to “breaking through to the hidden passages”, which made it effective.
(Half-Life 2 was too focused on traversing the world, envisioning a decaying city or a ruined landscape in a post-cataclysmic society, and Portal 2 abandoned a lot of the “cracks are poking through, there’s something wrong here” joy to dive directly into “wacky hijinks in a 40s-50s mad science theme park”. I don’t like portal 2.)
There’s a bunch more to be said here, probably better said by many others, but I’m not a good enough writer to pull it out, so I’ll leave it here.
This game fucks and the architectural decisions play a massive role in why.
Ok bad writer, I went from zero awareness to wanting to try this game immediately in the space of two posts.
