That’s Control’s most prominent mechanical flaw, throwing office supplies at monsters is the most optimal way to kill nearly everything. Only the flying dudes can dodge an office chair.
And on the design side, the side missions and backtracking are all a bit much later on. It’s maybe 3-4 hours too long.
Still, a great game. Maybe an all-time great game.
I like how it is a metroidvania shooter+powers with dark souls elements which is absolutely nothing like any previous Remedy game.
The optimal way to play though is to probably ignore all optional missions / bosses until you are pretty strong / late game.
I picked this up on EGS when it was free and finally got around to trying it, remembering Tom’s great review of it a while ago. I’m not really a shooter person (closest thing I’ve played recently was Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, which is decidedly not a shooter, but is 3rd person reflex-based), but I’m having a great time. I’m really not very good; I died probably seven or eight times on that weird stabby eye-monster from the fridge, and probably four or five times on the (first) jukebox exhibition before I ran out of time (though it was obvious I wasn’t going to complete it in the time limit, should have just seen if there was a way to get out).
I gotta say, the fact that I lose 10% of “source” when I die is a real downer. I’ve never really been short of it (whenever I can’t afford a weapon upgrade, it’s because of one of the other materials), so I can’t say it’s been holding me back, but it just makes me feel bad. I get that it’s the game’s way of telling me to go somewhere else and buff up before taking on the boss again, but I’m just not wired like that. For me, the limited save points (“control points” I think they’re called) is enough of a death penalty to provide tension. Losing a resource is just a feel-bad.
That’s really my only complaint. (OK, the low-key chattering soundtrack that comes up periodically when wandering around is annoying; it was cool at first, in a horror movie kind of way, but now I could do without it. But that’s minor.) It’s so much fun! I should probably try shooters more often.
I love the X-Files setting and plot, too. The little vignettes you get with the documents lying around, all centered about kitschy 70s-era junk, are great.
Question for the room: I’ve just got to the part where you speak to Dylan for the first time. Roughly how much is left of the game? (As in, am I nearer the halfway point or the 1/4 point?) They keep throwing on more stuff to do, from straightforward side quests (the thing with the mold lady), to the repetitive side quests (secure the altered objects), to those annoying timed pop-up missions (I did maybe 10 of them, with about a 30% success rate, before deciding the rewards weren’t worth the distraction and extra loading screens), to now this jukebox nonsense. I’m afraid I’m going to have to just focus on the core plot to finish the game before I get tired of the main gameplay loop.
But really it’s such a great game. I’m only really good at running around with the sniper-mode weapon (and even then, I know it’s being generous with the aiming, giving me more hits than I really deserve) and then alternating to chucking office furniture around while it recharges, but damn if it isn’t great to do so.
Oh, and according to the Epic games launcher, I’m a couple minutes short of four days of play time. I suspect the true answer is around 20 hours; are they counting the time when I leave the game open and put the computer to sleep?
I’d say about 2/3 done? If you’re worried about burning out, your instinct to push through the main storyline is correct. There’s a ton of additional stuff in the Old House, but there’s no real hurry to get to any of it; it’ll all still be there once you’ve finished the storyline. Remedy built this as a pretty open-ended experience.
-Tom
More to the point, the game continues after the main quest has been completed, leaving you free to continue with any side quests, bosses, DLC, etc.
Although I think the Foundations DLC story wise should definitely be saved for last. (As you’ll want your character close to being maxed out) Also it’s the only piece of content that requires you to finish the main story in order to unlock it.
The Alan Wake DLC is really good too. You can access it from the middle of the game, but it is quite challenging so better played later on.
Yeah, I would save both DLCs until post main story. It actually makes sense don’t worry. The Alan Wake crossover ‘AWS’ DLC then the conclusion with Foundations DLC.
Foundations was actually released first but I think canonically it’s the true end of the game. FIN!
Thanks! In fact, I’d say I was closer to 3/4 or 4/5 done with the main plotline, but it’s hard to say and not really worth belaboring. ;)
I don’t have any DLC, just the base game, but I do think I’m close to burning out on the main gameplay. (After the main plot ending, I thought I’d try to finish off Tommasi in the first post-ending quest, and got my rear handed to me three times in a row and decided to give it a break.)
I think the Ashtray Maze is a strong candidate for best sequence in the game. Running through that with the rocket launcher gun and the janitor’s soundtrack was just awesome. (And not too difficult.)
I also thought the false ending just before the end was a neat trick; they pulled it off well and put in just the right amount before the reveal, IMHO.
However, the last battle was strangely anticlimactic…? They send level 30 enemies at you but boost your power in some way, so I’m still one-shotting them with the rockets. It was strangely easy, and I was really expecting a boss battle fo some kind. I was honestly surprised that it wasn’t a stronger ending, given the rest of the game. But I guess it’s a tough game to end, given the plot and setting and all the setup they’ve put in.
Anyway I expect this has all been discussed upthread, I just kind of skimmed it. Thanks to Tom for the review (however long ago that was) for bringing this to my attention and to Epic for giving it away for free.
Oh, and one more thing, the use of FMV I thought was really interesting. I loved all the Dr. Darling videos! I don’t even know if it’s right to call it FMV but I don’t know what else it would be. I’ve been going through the Digital Antiquarian and he’s got a whole thing about FMV in early-mid 90’s games and how it was basically a shared delusion by the entire games industry and a waste of everyone’s time and money. But here I think it works! Probably helps that there are also audio and text “Collectibles” as well so the video doesn’t stand out as much. But it still was slightly strange to see real-life photos and videos in a game with not-photorealistic graphics–but only slightly jarring.
(Though the Threshold Kids ones can go die in a fire. So goddam creepy–like creepy enough that it was immersion breaking for me, as in, “Why would anyone ever make this??”)
Right? Matthew Porretta is great, isn’t he? I love Darling’s arc and how it all comes to a head in that “She’s Dynamite” video. I also really liked the former director’s posthumous commentaries for their world-building and for that guy’s awesome voice. But you’re right to call out the juxtaposition of animated character models ingame with the actual live-action footage of actors in the videos.
Which gets to one of the main distinctions for me. You can push your animated models almost all the way out of the uncanny valley, but you’re never going to get actual performances out of them. You can’t do with animated models what Darling’s two lab assistants are doing in the live-action videos, creating a little backstory with their awkward interactions with each other. That takes actual people. That takes the sort of facial cues and expressiveness you simply can’t animate.
I felt the same way for my first playthrough. It just felt like someone’s intentionally weird art project jammed into the game regardless of whether it fit. But I spent my second playthrough poring over all the logs and collectibles, and somewhere in there, they explain that Threshold Kids was a proof-of-concept for how to sell children on the idea of the FBC and the supernatural objects it’s studying. So, sure, it still feels like someone’s intentionally weird art project, but its role in Control is to show you how utterly out of touch the FBC is with regular people. This is what they think kids want to see.
-Tom
Absolutely, he 100% stole the show. The music video was phenomenal. (Though I did wonder how he got those changes of clothes and did the video editing when he was supposedly having a mental breakdown while holed up in some HRA-laden safehouse or something.)
Also great, yeah. Though after I realized the graphics for this part were on loop I kinda got annoyed at them (the graphics, I mean, the narration was still great).
Oh yeah, thank you for reminding me of them. Great point.
So I was also kind of wondering about the whole “Starring Courtney Hope” thing. Like, I get that she’s the voice actor, but then the character model is also a recreation of her. It was really weird. Did they do some kind of mo-cap? Was she “acting” some of the cutscene stuff, like where she’s talking to Pope or the other secondary characters? Maybe this is a common thing in non-strategy video games that I just have missed out on.
I thought it was hinted that they had a kid somewhere in the building that they were making it for. (And that it turned out to be P6/Dylan.) But either way, it still seemed too over the top to even make the point that this is how out of touch they are (to me, at least).
Oh, and do they ever explain what the NSC power source is? Eventually I read one of the docs that said it was a creature of some kind they had trapped and were extracting power from (actually one of the more predictable “twists” in the setting) but I never saw more than that.
The power source is Director Northmoor, Trench’s predecessor.
Oh, huh. Where did they say that? Now I almost wish I hadn’t asked.
Also Anti, the Janitor, is the Finnish sea god of water. The master of doors and hallways that connect all places of power. From the Oldest House to the Ocean’s View Hotel (and probably beyond).
That was a pretty cool reveal, too. I recall the power core was teased as housing some sort of Lovecraftian Elder God, but you eventually find out it’s the previous director of the FBC.
I think the reveal is that NSC-02 stands for Northmoor Sarcophagus Containment. If I recall correctly, he balked about going into the first one and destroyed it. This is their second attempt to contain him to power the Old House. So far, so good, except for that pesky Hiss outbreak.
-Tom
Yeah nice find, I don’t recall that when I played the game.
Is that from the DLC? I don’t ever remember that.
It’s in the Jukebox expeditions, which I didn’t play much of.
