Finnish developer Remedy is finally at home with Control's nightmare power fantasy

I should take a moment to state that I absolutely hope Control performs well and I hope it meets the expectations of the developer/publisher. I hope @Lunarstorm is right and sales pick up through word of mouth and critical reception. This game looks like my kind of weirdness in sci-fi so I definitely plan to play it and it’s nice to hear the glowing reception here at QT3 across podcast, forum, and Tom’s review!.

By mentioning sales position earlier I didn’t intend to denigrate the game in any manner. I was just surprised myself when checking.

I enjoyed Alan Wake and the DLC , it is not great but rather really weird and sorta made me want to keep playing.

Heck yeah, Alan Wake is pretty great. It’s like playing a B movie.

So wait, Control is a horror game? Drat, I’ll never play it then.

Keep in mind that Tom is a horror fan, and he calls a lot of stuff horror that I don’t personally think of as horror until I read his piece. I’m not saying that’s the case here, since I haven’t played Control, but just something to keep in mind.

By the way Tom, really great piece of writing. I often just want to skim reviews just so that I can avoid spoilers, but your writing just glues me to the page until I finish reading the whole thing. So I’m also thankful that you managed to get through writing such a long review with no real spoilers.

Considering that the game didn’t chart on consoles, the Epic exclusivity is probably a good thing, since exclusive deals with Epic are rumored to involve revenue guarantees of some sort.

It means that EGS is potentially a safety net for Remedy if the game might otherwise have been a sales disappointment. Which is awesome IMO!

It has horror elements, but nothing that should trigger a horror game aversion. It’s very much a third person action game, with occasional puzzles. You’re shooting and mind-powering things, not hiding from them.

I’m a little surprised by Tom’s lack of appreciation of Finnish cinema, though if deadpan humour doesn’t do it for you, then I guess Aki Kaurismaki certainly wouldn’t. Personally, I adore Leningrad Cowboys Go America and quite like Hamlet Goes Business and I Hired A Contract Killer. More recently, The Other Side Of Hope was good.

Technically, you can now do it (DXR) on a 1080, it just doesn’t have dedicated hardware for it and is accordingly (even more) slow.

Even without the 23rd place thing, the lack of posts in the non-review Control thread isn’t a good sign. I know QT3 isn’t exactly representative of the broader gaming audience, but even so, I’ve never seen a thread so small for a game I thought would be big.

I think there may be some tension between Remedy and MS at the moment. Sure I read a rumour that Sony is looking to buy Remedy, and Control at least was a “soft exclusive” with PS exclusive content. When I bought it on the MS store on release day, I had to search for it - it wasn’t even in the New Releases list. I expect this is also why MS appeared to slow-walk the certification of the patch, which was released immediately to PS and PC last week, but only turned up on Xbox last night.

Conspiracy theories more likely than a slight delay in certification?

Where did you read about that rumor?

Hardly a conspiracy theory. But MS don’t seem to be interested in promoting Control at all.

Think this is the article I read on the Sony/Remedy rumour.

I watched Brandon Cackowski-Schnell play it a bit, and I thought it was creepy as hell, and that I would never be able to play that game. So I’m out on this one (and it sounds like Brian probably is too).

In this case, although I was only a spectator, it totally fit my definition of horror, unlike any of the hundreds of “monster of the week with blood sauce on it” released daily on Steam.

I dunno, I have yet to come across anything genuinely creepy (perhaps because the writing is so tongue in cheek). There’s eerie stuff, I suppose, but the closest to outright creepy so far has been Dylan and as Tom notes the character is so lame that it’s not affecting at all.

Seconded in all of this in the review. Honestly, I was nervous about buying this, because it looked like a mildly interesting third-person shooter with magic stuff.

And it kind of is? Except it’s in a world so thoroughly realized that the urge to explore the place itself overwhelms any considerations of plot, and the controls are so buttery smooth and instinctive that I can play for an hour or two, take a break for a few days and pick up right where I left off.

I saw they just announced three DLC packs for this, the last of which heavily hints at an Alan Wake tie-in. I’m in.

Yuuuuuuuuppppp

For what it’s worth, this isn’t like other horror games in that it’s not about jump scares or gore. In fact, as near as I can recall there is zero of either. It’s a pretty remarkable horror game/movie that doesn’t have a single jump scare.

-Tom

There is ONE (kind of) jump scare - when you take the elevator down to the ground floor of the Transit Corridor - as it arrives there’s a Hiss explodeyman in the lift as the doors open. I mean, you’re only startled for the second it takes to throw a filing cabinet at his face, but still.

It’s pretty similar to the opening scenes of The Matrix for horror content: the mix of stifling mundanity with vague uneasiness and random surrealism.

Lifted from the EGS thread, since we were talking about sales here.

Epic apparently paid roughly $10 million USD for Control exclusivity. Control’s budget was $20 to $30 million.

Thanks Tom for the review. Control was the outcome after we took a serious look at what we should do next. Great to see people enjoying the game.

I had no idea modern “triple A” games were so costly.

Seems the guys at Remedy are really smart, not only about designing their game. Even if exclusivity things can be annoying, I’m glad they cut their loss that way if it didn’t do as well as expected.