A romp through the annals of the SCP wiki, rendered as a brutalist third-person metroidvania. Compared to
Alan Wake and its series,
Control makes the player feel very powerful-- you wield a handgun with the spirit of Excalibur and toss the bodies of enemies as a mentat railgun on a negligible cooldown. And this really takes away the game's ability to generate any fear, or even anxiety, despite the game's horror style. It has the hallmarks of a game which wishes it were a movie: long cutscenes, lots of mocap, a couple of big, grandiosely-soundtracked setpieces that consist mostly of walking forward. That filmic narrative straitjackets the game, which becomes far more linear than it otherwise could be. Each floor is bookended by story dumps and navigation depends mostly on quest progression. In a few glaring moments, making it to certain areas 'early' conspicuously dead-ends the player until the key item is handed over in another stage of the main quest. This is lethal to the way the player engages with the built space within the game; rather than exploring the Oldest House as a mysterious, living dungeon, players largely beeline for quest objectives, listening in as Remedy tells them all the answers.
Now, a linear and filmic storyline has its theoretical advantages, especially with the type of budget that Remedy spent on its VO cast. But its main character is given the type of generic motivation that you expect from a silent-protagonist CRPG: searching for a lost sibling. In fact, the game seems anxious to prevent the player from questioning the moral standing of its main character, going well out of its way to explain that the poor souls infected by the Hiss mind-virus are beyond saving, and there is nothing for it than to execute them with the satisfying thud of a flying piece of furniture. She is thrust by fate into a position of power, which she neither embraces nor declines, the Chairman position being mostly a bit of tubing that allows the game to funnel Plot into the player's ears. It is not hard to imagine a different version of Faden having the moral complexity to interrogate the themes of authority and paternity beneath the surface of
Control-- the titular Alan Wake is treated as far more fallible, and thereby becomes far more human. And having a psychological tabula rasa as a protagonist would be no flaw if it allowed the story to be presented in a more minimal and flexible manner. There is a specific dissonance in the combination of the two, where the game seems to hamstring itself to fit in cutscenes and setpieces that might create some sort of emotional bond with Faden, and then fails to render her with enough depth for it to be worthwhile.
The real 'main character' of Control, though, is the Bureau from which the game gets its title. Taking more or less its entire shape from the collaborative fiction project, the SCP Foundation, the game is centered around a mysterious government bureau that contains and covers up paranormal entities. This universe is something like an American version of the wizard underground of Harry Potter: Rowling depicts British cultural institutions mirrored as magical counterparts, such as magic boarding school or magical parliament; the SCP Foundation is a magical three-letter agency using magic dark money to fund magical ghost prisons. Control seems to understand the Americanness of all of it, and depicts the Oldest House clad in cold-war brutalism, with stylish mid-century furniture and uncountable file cabinets (the file cabinet being perhaps the pure cultural icon of bureaucracy). There is a paternalistic quality to the Bureau-- the country must be protected from the unknowable evils of the paranormal, and the country must not understand the Bureau's responsibility or its sacrifices. Equally paternal is its relationship with its bumbling, faceless employees, mostly dead, and explained to the player mainly with posters and handouts that describe their haplessness. Even prior to the cataclysm which set about the events of the game, Bureau pencil-pushers seemed to die and die and die in tortuous fashion, and every time, there was a note or a poster by management dispensing the wisdom that would have saved their lives. The Bureau is correct about all of this to an unnerving degree. Regular people are mostly depicted as a helpless infant, which should make fewer decisions and cede responsibility to their betters. The mistakes and immoralities of the Bureau's managerial class are never really depicted-- in fact, management itself is never explained, or even depicted, save for the story-relevant named characters which have leadership roles as nothing more than a way to denote their specialness. Managers and management speak as if channeling the paternal spirit of the Bureau itself. It paints such a grim view of regular Bureau employees that it seems
deliberately dehumanizing, especially since the managerial class in a lot of SCP Foundation webfiction is depicted both as fallible and cruel, appropriate for a secret police which regularly sends its members into incomprehensible horror-movie meatgrinders. And this paternalism is never interrogated within the story of
Control, either. The ultimate good or evil of the Bureau sits there for the entire game as an unaddressed question, an extradimensional elephant in an amorphous concrete room. If anything, the final events of the story reiterate the fascist
necessity of all this. The inability of Jesse Faden to ever ask serious questions about the nature of her own authority further undermines the stakes; she spends the entire game listening uncritically to a benevolent voice in her head, which spends the entire game being correct and remaining benevolent. And if you ever wanted to ask if the game suggests a sort of relativism between the primordial forces of harmony and dissonance at the heart of the game's metaphysics, don't bother-- one is ontologically good and the other is ontologically evil. You can tell, because the latter acts really mean to you in an extended point-and-click cinematic setpiece late in the game.
Ironic, then, that the game's main flaws lie in dissonance-- dissonance between the game and its narrative, dissonance between the emotions the game engenders and those it wishes to evoke, dissonance between its style and its substance. Perhaps if Respawn were headed by an omnipresent alien gestalt, it would have the singular vision necessary to make all of its elements sum together.