i've seen a little bit of it played around me before now, enough to know that...
- ...it is very SCP-esque in its core conceit, with some truly neat surrealist cutscenes/strange story presentation that i vibe with
- ...it sure does have a third-person shooter tacked onto it with the oft-maligned "loadout" equipment model, with stuff that gives marginal percentage differences to your combat abilities
this post is rambly so my thoughts are under the cut
i'm nearly 22 hours in, 35/67 Steam achievements unlocked and still not done yet so here are my updated impressions under the cut. i have very complicated feelings on this game.
Pros
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the atmosphere during its more quiet exploration-focused moments is very tense and unsettling. hearing the chanting of the Hiss almost constantly or other environmental sounds in further areas sells it. one particular moment was ||one of the times i visited the oceanview motel, where i had to solve a small easy puzzle but the entire time i kept hearing screaming in the background, along with seeing a door that had a bloodstain on the floor in front of it. that is never able to be explored and remains unexplained.|| fucking chills
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the sheer volume of lore that populates areas even upon a revisit can occasionally be overwhelming but i fucking love how detailed it is. there's a real love and care put into crafting the world of Control and so much of how it operates feels so eerily similar to how government bureaucracy feels from the inside. the mundane horrors of office life combined with the existential horrors of the unknown and unknowable mesh well here
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the combat does feel fun if you ignore the gunplay. launching shit feels fun, but if you have to use guns you can whittle down enemy health, ||subjugate them, and watch them mow each other down||, and more. but i absolutely maxed out both launching upgrade trees and my energy upgrade tree first for a reason
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the story is actually pretty intriguing and doing a good job of gripping me even during the side stories
Cons
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the gunplay feels even more stapled on than ever at this point. like, i'm getting gun form changes and upgrades and whatnot but never does the gunplay feel more than "fine".
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this is because the gunplay framing kills the atmosphere more often than not. large-scale firefights with only occasional designs that breach the realm of horror creature design don't do much for me in a game that does well to create an isolating, desolate tone. the random encounters certainly don't help this feeling.
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the boss fights are bad. there's no other way to describe them. between areas set up to look like puzzle fights only to be arenas and vice-versa, bosses that just expect you to mow them down in a minute or fucking perish, etc.? i can't help but feel like it's partially a skill issue on my part, partially bad design, and partially like i keep seeing traces of survival horror boss design that then get fumbled in execution.
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why is there so much to do at all times??? between Board Countermeasures, random Alert quests, sidequests, more exploreable hidden quests/areas, upgrades, mods, etc... it can feel a little bloated even if i like the lore
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the entire upgrade economy. sure, the loadout model of equipment upgrades with esoteric percentage increases is a common thing to complain about in AAA design but it feels even more tacked on here. combine that with the very limited inventory space and the drop rate of mods that you'll find yourself recycling into more Source. the impact on combat until you get to at least Level III-IV (but most assuredly Level V) mods feels negligible at best. it adds to the bloated feeling of the game in a way that feels like needless busywork
TL;DR: I'm still playing Control and I'm definitely gonna finish it (esp. if I'm already nearly 22 hours into it), and there's a lot to like here. But what I like keeps directly clashing with the gameplay loop, feeling like it wants to be both atmospheric cosmic horror as well as a shootbang power fantasy. We'll see how I feel at the end of it, but god I wish this game were...better.
Control is not a bad game and what I like about it I fucking love. But it's constantly at war with itself in a way that impacts my enjoyment and makes me feel like I need to add caveats onto my critique of.
