Pauline Ragny

Sorry to be the hater with the unpopular opinion on this one. It's fine. It's good even. Plenty of people like it. You don't have to read this. It's probably just gonna make you angry.

Control just doesn't do anything for me personally.

I like the setting. The story is intriguing. The characters are all charming. This might be the first Remedy game where their FMV skits actually do manage to put a smile on my face.
The SCP inspired documents are cute but I don't think they really understand the strength of the format. Look I'm not like an SCP expert or anything but the few I've found memorable don't actually have that much redacted text and are just very well written. They use the language of a dry bureaucratic report to evoke something incredibly unsettling. Black redacted bars are used only in very strategic places to enhance the mystery. In Control the SCP documents are like 70% redacted text so you can barely make out what they're trying to say.

The environments are very cool, evocative, imposing, disorienting and they make me wish the gameplay was literally anything else. It would have been ripe for some cool puzzle mechanics in the style of Antichamber or Portal. But it's remedy so the gameplay has to be shoot mens. I don't even dislike shooters! Some of my favourite games are shooters. But I dunno, they're making a fantastique world about bureaucracy, mad science, impossible geometry, cosmic horror, and the best they can come up with for you to do in that world is "shoot guys"? It feels inappropriate. I think it's a waste of a great setting. I guess if you're feeling fancy you can levitate some furniture or bits of walls and throw them at the guys instead. I don't know why we're all pretending that's a new and unique gimmick that hasn't been done by every vaguely sci-fi shooter since half life 2. This is also one of those games that refuses to ever let you explore in peace. You can't just clear out an area and then soak in the environment. The game will regularly spawn new guys for you to shoot, probably because of some shit belief at the top that if they don't do that the player might get "bored". Guess what. I AM bored. Even the shootiest game of all time, the 2016 revival of fuckin DOOM, would let you explore its environment in peace after you're done clearing all the demons because it understands the value of having quieter moments to contrast the loud action setpieces.

Anyway, I reached a giant plant boss at the bottom of a moss covered area and died a bunch of times to it. I'm fully willing to admit that this is 100% a skill issue on my part but I really don't care to keep trying. This boss sucks and I'm not having a good time.

Imagine if you went to an escape the room installation with a really cool theme, but once inside the way to proceed is to solve a sliding puzzle. Not even an interesting one with bits that interact with other fixtures in the room, it's just a regular sliding tile puzzle. And then once you're done, it opens up another identical sliding puzzle and so on. This is what Control feels like to me. A game with a really cool setting and theme undermined by bland and inappropriate gameplay. I know I'm in the minority on that one and I don't care. Sorry I'm like this.