Review: Control Serves Up Mind-Bending Thrills and Institutional Critique

The game is as much a thrilling paean to human curiosity as it is a warning of its numerous casualties.

Control
Photo: 505 Games

The Federal Bureau of Control is officially unofficial, the kind of place that’s sanctioned and funded yet kept top secret. It has the flags, portraits, and other mainstays of banal government office life spread beneath stark fluorescent lights, except the bureau is headquartered within the Oldest House, an interdimensional construct of shapeshifting brutalist architecture. Few outsiders visit the clandestine FBC, and it can’t rely on help from other organizations if, say, a malevolent force runs rampant by warping its layout, possessing its employees, and releasing all manner of threats previously penned within a metaphysical prison. Such is the state of affairs that confronts players in Remedy’s Control, a third-person shooter with one of the strangest, most fascinating settings in the history of the genre.

In FBC parlance, “paranatural” is when our typical perception of reality has been altered by some extradimensional entity or the collective human unconscious. The bureau’s agents are sent out by its scientists in order to contain such events and bring back evidence for further study. It’s an almost ludicrously broad umbrella able to encompass all manner of strange phenomena, and the developers at Remedy Entertainment use it to let their imaginations run truly wild within the FBC’s confines. There’s an anchor that ominously floats in a gray abyss, an imprisoned refrigerator that must be constantly observed to quell its anger, and the telekinetic arsenal of Jesse Faden (Courtney Hope), a newcomer to the bureau. She arrives on the scene only to find the place locked down and in the middle of an extradimensional invasion, overrun by a strange force in the air that she names after its telltale noise: the Hiss.

The former bureau director, Zachariah Trench (Max Payne’s James McCaffrey), is dead, and by claiming his shapeshifting paranatural service weapon, Jesse becomes the de facto head of the FBC, newly in charge of the survivors and the search for a solution to the calamity. The various portraits of Trench hanging on the wall immediately morph into ones of Jesse, and from there, the game mixes the rhythm of Remedy’s other shooters—where characters have both strange powers and a lot of guns—with Metroid-esque exploration elements. New abilities and new keycards let her travel deeper into the strangest corners of the bureau, all of which are infested by Hiss-possessed FBC agents or other rampaging paranatural phenomena, like a wayward flying television or multicolored mold that mutates anyone who ingests it.

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The boundless imagination of the bureau’s design is perhaps Remedy’s crowning achievement to date. Each of the FBC’s backdrops feels purposeful, all of them labeled and strewn with accompanying materials and documents that make as much sense as an interdimensional government agency possibly could. Rather than a bunch of laboratories filled with random test tubes and such, you find the remains of specific paranatural experiments; the department experimenting with the concept of luck, for one, is littered with horseshoes and four-leaf clovers and Japanese beckoning cat figurines to test their effect on a roulette table that, upon an unlucky spin, keeps making the fire extinguishers explode. One office has been sealed off to contain an epidemic of multiplying sticky notes, and a mysterious janitor keeps sending you after a disgusting behemoth he calls the Clog; other areas require Jesse to pull a light cord three times for transport to a mysterious empty motel that connects certain Bureau corridors.

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The whole place runs on decades-old technology, because anything that’s too new tends to break or even explode upon entering the Oldest House (one document that Jesse discovers theorizes that the accelerated pace of technology prevents newer materials from shoring up a spot in our collective memories). Videos are shown on old projectors, while conversations or recordings from a late-night radio show about the supernatural are heard from reel-to-reel players. The official documents that you find lying around—with some of their details, naturally, blacked out—are across-the-board captivating for the breadth of stories they tell, informing the history of different objects around the bureau as though you’re piecing together tangential story threads that took place long before Jesse’s arrival.

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The sheer detail of the game’s setting provides a stunning backdrop for its frenzied battles, because rather than seem like specifically designed gunfight locales, you fight off the Hiss in rooms and labs and offices with discernable functions. And in the ensuing violence, those functions are totally upended, lost in the explosions and telekinetic chaos wrought by the bureau’s myopic need to probe the forces of the unknown. Throughout Control, papers and desks are sent flying as battles leave the unmistakable marks of your passage, the lucky golden fish used in a probability experiment now ammunition against a Hiss gunner. The game encourages you to be constantly on the move; staying in one place for too long allows the Hiss to focus their fire or blow up your cover, and health can only be recovered by running over to enemies for the blue droplets that fall out of them upon death.

These fights don’t always go smoothly, not least of which because the framerate on a base PS4 tends to sag under the weight of all the explosions and flying debris. The health system, particularly when combined with some questionable checkpoints and long load times, can grow exasperating as the game piles on more variables for you to pay attention to, from airborne foes to invisible ones to whatever attack might knock out most of your health bar. But between such bouts of frustration, the battles are a deeply satisfying struggle of strategy plucked from chaos, as when you grab hold of some flying debris, levitate to circumvent enemy cover, and then telekinetically launch it at a cluster of exploding Hiss mutants.

And though Jesse’s journey might seem like a rote Chosen One arc, the game complicates matters purely through context. With so much detail in its writing and environmental design, Control provides a palpable sense of history, a feeling that the FBC functioned long before Jesse and might just as easily continue to do so without her presence. Here, it legitimately feels like Jesse has arrived at a place in the midst of something far larger than her, rather than, as in most video games, a space specifically tailored to her, her abilities, and her antagonists. Together with a faint metatextual awareness of tackling a sort of Chosen One scenario, Control becomes an alternately absurd, frightening, and hilarious critique of power and hubris, aided by the hard-boiled, paranoid ramblings of former director Trench on a paranatural hotline phone and the amateurish video presentations of the excitable Dr. Casper Darling (Alan Wake’s Matthew Porretta, who’s filmed in live-action segments).

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While the game is clearly enamored with the bizarre wonders scattered around the FBC, it questions the institutions’s attempts at control at every turn by leaning into government sterility. The whole place, especially when ravaged by so much death and destruction, is a ridiculous juxtaposition of bureaucratic banality and the seemingly unknowable; indeed, no one here seems to truly comprehend the paranatural phenomena, but they certainly understand that everybody ought to file things alphabetically and work in cubicles and hang a flag on the wall, even when their potential annihilation sits in a closet just a few rooms over. With its everything-but-the-kitchen-sink imagination, Control is as much a thrilling paean to human curiosity as it is a warning of its numerous casualties.

This game was reviewed using a review code provided by fortyseven communications.

Score: 
 Developer: Remedy Entertainment  Publisher: 505 Games  Platform: PlayStation 4  Release Date: August 27, 2019  ESRB: M  ESRB Descriptions: Blood, Strong Language, Violence  Buy: Game

Steven Scaife

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

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