Soooo I basically spent the holidays binge playing these old-ish Remedy games I got on sale in the Steam/Epic games stores because I was down with something that was making me cough up stuff the colour of wrong, and while I desperately wanted to go out and party I also didn't want to be Patient Zero. So all I have to show for my misery before I go back to work next next week are these reviews. Going in the order I played the games in, I'll do Control first and then the Alan Wake games (I'm in the middle of Alan Wake 2 right now), also Spoilers:
Control
I've been on an SCP Foundation kick for a bit now, devouring any media even slightly adjacent to it- the concept of a bureaucratized organisation responsible for containing the unknowable, that is slowly becoming (or maybe it always was?) corrupted by those same eldritch forces it seeks to contain; I feel like no other metaphor quite captures the strange times we live in, as a sort of logical postmodern evolution of Lovecraft style Cosmic Horror. At the heart of this style of horror is the fear of the unknown, but how do you maintain that fear in an interconnected, secular, scientific world where the unknown quickly becomes categorized and well, known? Instead, now the fear is about how we maintain control of a hostile universe, and the question becomes if we were ever in control in the first place, or if everything we call normalcy is just an illusion hiding greater horrors within.
So what I find interesting about Control is that most of that is just background set dressing. The core narrative of the game is a lot more straightforward- in the tradition of most Remedy titles their are these allusions to big ideas, but instead the focus is on a more personal, emotional story. In this case it's about a sister trying to reconcile with her estranged brother. As a grounding, relatable narrative through-line it works really well set against all the inter-dimensional chaos, although I have to say it is a bit disappointing that the only narrative payoff is this kinda well trodden hero's journey to self-actualization: our protagonist finally amasses enough power to be able to reunite with her brother. The presentation really is top notch though, and you can definitely read that self-actualization in a queer lens, where our main protagonist Jesse decides to embrace her true self (as opposed to her brother, who let in the inter-dimensional evil causing havoc to erase his true self and let himself be subsumed within something else), although what complicates that is that apparently Jesse's true self is to be the ultimate girlboss, and her rampant individualism and assertion of agency is kinda figuratively and literally shown to be the other side of the coin to her brother's nihilism- to the games credit there's a certain nagging sense that maybe all this good vs evil stuff isn't as clear cut as it's presented as.
To talk about that presentation though- wow, Remedy really knocked it out of the park with this one. Brutalist, Cold War era American architecture bathed in an eerie red glow is a look, and their use of level design and visual trickery to make all the supernatural stuff happen is gorgeous. And very trippy. All the liminal spaces and impossible geometry combined with the mundane corporate brutalism is a triumph of visual design, although maybe that shouldn't be a surprise since all this was stuff they've been trying to do since Max Payne, it's just that technology finally caught up.
I think what surprised me the most of the gameplay- I'd have gotten this game sooner if someone had just told me that this game was the true heir to Max Payne. The gunplay feels exactly the same- your characters fragility, your opponents fragility, the emphasis on using the environment and the emphasis on aggression (the only way to heal is to do damage to the bad guys, then walk over their dead bodies to collect the power-ups). Instead of bullet time Jesse gets a number of supernatural abilities, the most fun one being the ability to telekinetically throw a fridge at someone, and in a nice bit of ludonarrative harmony you go from timidly darting from cover to cover taking potshots at the start of the game to walking through a battle like a vengeful god by repurposing the building's concrete as a shield, floating around the cover the bad guys are using and then ripping out a light fixture with the power of your mind to hurl into a crowd of goons like a bowling ball. And the best part is that after the battle you get to look over your handiwork, at all the destroyed cubicles and office equipment. File that under "Workplace Incident", HR. It all neatly culminates in a really awesome climax I won't spoil here, aside from the track by poets of the fall that plays during the sequence.
I think that's my main issue with Control- the power fantasy of being in control. There's definitely liberal feminist subtext running under the hood- the toxic patriarchy running the show previously is responsible for this mess, but now with multiple women in charge things will be different this time... but that kinda fails to reckon with how the organization Jesse becomes director of is itself inherently corrupt, answerable to forces (the Board) that are literally unaccountable due to them being, well, beings from beyond space and time, and who might not have our best interests at heart. (Although, to be fair, the bureau does do a public good by not letting extra-dimensional horrors from beyond space and time destroy the world, so....) Triangle/Pyramid iconography is everywhere, and that kind of encapsulates the kind of hierarchy everyone in the narrative is trapped in. (Except the Janitor, but I think that'll require multiple games to parse what exactly he represents... my best guess right now is that he's a sort of avatar for working class wisdom.)
Again, to the games credit- the dlc's are set up to facilitate the story moving to interrogate things in that direction- one's laying down the story threads for Control 2, and the other basically sets up Alan Wake 2. So in that sense things are incomplete and it's clear that this was just the first act in a much larger narrative, but unfortunately I can't review things that don't exist yet: in comparison to the high water marks of this sub-genre of what I'm going to call for simplicity's sake Bureaucratic Horror, many of which are clearly inspired by Control itself, it kinda leaves off the table the most obvious- a critique of capitalism.
(For the record- I consider those high water marks the following- Chainsaw Man, Severance and the ttrpg Triangle Agency, the latter being very clearly Control inspired, but I strongly recommend everyone check that one out in particular for having some really incredible commentary on living in late-stage capitalism, in one of the most smartly designed games I've ever seen.)
To me, what should be the core question of any story like this is: What use are all our bureaucratized systems of oppression - capital, patriarchy, white supremacy, all these "lesser evils" and "best possible worlds" if they can't even secure a future? Has all this suffering and horror been for nothing?
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: Mr. Evart is helping me find my F-35.
If you're looking for a game to just relax and chill it's pretty alright at that.
I got bored after sinking a fair bit of time because once you get over the initial hump of just trying to survive (which doesn't last very long, compared to other Minecraft style survival games) the game kinda becomes a "thing accumulation simulator". Nowadays I usually just fire up the game after a couple of updates to see all the new stuff and then put the game away.
It's very wide with a lot of things to do, but each thing isn't particularly deep or rewarding e.g. keeping pets or running a trading fleet.
Imo the best way to play is to just go on a nice long search for a nice planet and then build a nice base on it to fulfill the power fantasy of owning a house, and that should probably occupy a good number of hours, but past that idk if the game will hold your attention because NMS lacks stardew's life-sim gameplay.