Control

I agonised for a good while before putting a rating on this, because honestly I didn't know whether I could, in good conscience, give such an enthusiastic recommendation to something so broken. I played Control for about 15 hours and in that time I experienced 10 crashes that bombed me out of the game completely - or to put it another way, Control crashed on me more than every other console game I've ever played put together. There are a bunch of technical problems beyond this too, with some missions failing to kick in properly once you've started them, another mission ending up being completely broken with an unsolvable puzzle until it refreshed itself a couple of hours later, facial animation glitches that make some very important and serious story beats look a bit silly - even the pause button is fundamentally broken, with a full three or four seconds or so of painful lag every time you come out of the pause menu. (If you have to pause in the middle of a battle, you might as well just reload your last save there and then, because you will almost definitely die while your controls are unresponsive after unpausing.) Add in the lengthy load times, the rendering issues that appear while you're moving at any sort of speed, the sudden frame rate drops when too many enemies are on screen at once, and at least one absurd difficulty spike, and Control ends up feeling like a development build that needs another few months of work before it's ready for release. It's very, very unpolished, and it remains so more than a year and a few patches after its release. I've decided not to let those frustrations influence my score for a few reasons - partly because my experience is limited to the Xbox One and other platforms may not have the same problems; partly as a show of faith that some of this will be fixed when the game comes out for PS5 and Xbox Series X, and those become the de facto default versions for console players; partly because what it gets right is so extremely, extremely good.

That's really why those bugs are so enormously frustrating - in every other regard, Control is a very slick, very impressive achievement, one that looks and feels like it was put together by a team that had a clear idea of exactly what they wanted it to be at every stage of its development, one that has a distinct tone in the way all truly great works do. Technologically it may be a bit of a mess, but artistically it is strikingly complete, a work of considerable imagination and startling clarity.

Control takes place entirely within a single (massive) building named the Oldest House, which functions as the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Control: a secretive branch of U.S. government that investigates the paranormal. If your mind has immediately drifted to The X-Files, then yes, that's the ballpark we're in - though there's also a healthy dose of the woozy weirdness of Twin Peaks, the shifting impossible architecture of MC Escher and Doctor Strange, and most charmingly of all, of 1980s BBC educational videos. You, as Jesse, arrive for a job interview with the ulterior motive of finding your long-lost brother and find yourself swiftly appointed the new director (the mysteries of why this happens and what became of Jesse's brother unfold over the course of the game), then subsequently tasked with saving the building from an extradimensional encroachment by an entity named The Hiss. The Hiss has the ability to corrupt both physical space and people, and has already claimed so many lives that the building is filled with eerily floating corpses, suspended in the air above the player. Handily, Jesse also has an extradimensional entity on her side, named Polaris - and she can act as a conduit for its superpowers.

Control uses this promising setup very intelligently. In explaining its supernatural elements, it creates its own language that makes it distinct from its influences: one of Objects of Power (mundane everyday items that act as bridges between dimensions) creating Altered World Events (outbreaks of paranormal activity outside of the Bureau's borders), where a mysterious and potentially supernatural cabal named The Board reach out to The Director through The Hotline (itself an Object of Power), where Bureau employees can be protected from The Hiss through Hedron Resonance Amplifiers and Resonance is understood as the key to understanding other dimensions, which are accessed through Thresholds....that the game's story could do with a glossary of terms is a mark of the completeness of the world that it builds. The Hiss distortion within the building allows for some very bold, memorable visuals, and a thematic use of color that is sometimes more reminiscent of something like Utopia or The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover than your typical action-adventure game. There is also a true director's eye in the way it uses full-motion video: the stylish, artful way it lays Jesse's broadcasts from previous director Zachariah Trench over ordinary game animation, making his profile part of your surroundings, and in the video recordings you can find of Casper Darling, the former head of research, explaining the concepts behind the Bureau's science. That's the influence of 1980s BBC educational videos I mentioned earlier - they're all beige backgrounds, wacky cardigans and bowties under lab coats, relentlessly cherry presentation and jaunty jingles, and as somebody who had to watch a number of videos like that at school, they honestly might have been one of my favourite things about this game. And the gameplay....wow. It starts out as a relatively vanilla third-person shooter, but as your powers develop, it becomes an absolute joy to play. The first time I levitated through the air, used my telekinetic powers to pick up one bad guy, and then threw him at two others, killing all three in one fell swoop, I realised that of all the games that have given me superpowers, the only other one that was this fun was Saints Row IV. And neither of them was even sold to me as a superhero game.

When I think of all the things this does right, I want to say I can't find fault in Control - but of course, I can, because of those bugs and crashes. This game and this world deserves better. If those issues can be ironed out for the next console generation and future PC builds (and both the fully destructible environments and the pioneering use of ray tracing on the PC version make a strong case that Control is really only guilty of being too ambitious, and that more powerful machines will be a much better fit for it), then we'll have a minor masterpiece on our hands.