imo the shooting feels bad in control because you’re not supposed to feel good about mowing down possessed scientists? the hitstun animations are all really unpleasant and the visual feedback is intentionally disorienting
7 Likes
That would be so cool if it was intentional, but I honestly don’t buy it. The game feels floaty and awkward like their previous game Quantum Break did when its combat sequences went on for too long and didn’t end in an abrupt flash of time bubbles and exploded office equipment and glass. Nothing about Control seems to me like it wants you to care about the violence you’re committing or the white collar mannequin people you’re committing it to, not even in a way to make you think about why it is that you don’t care. It’s a just shoot shit type of game I think.
4 Likes
control is very mid but there’s some nice fuckin’ graphics if you have the headroom to turn all of that on
yeah this was my experience too
6 Likes
They did the same thing with the enemies in alan wake though
3 Likes
so why are the enemy animations like that if not to make you feel empathy with them? i’m game to discourse but “you’re thinking about it too hard, i didn’t like their last game that we aren’t talking about” doesn’t give me much to work with lol
my take on Control is that it’s literally about power hungry leadership fucking everything up, you help out the confused lackies of nearly everyone responsible for the mess and they’re the only people who aren’t blatantly lying to you, i found myself caring about them and their colleagues by extension. it’s very much about Corporate Bullshit in this way imo
i can’t take it as a straightforward power fantasy because every other director lost their minds or became Something Else and jesse is always seeking tools for survival not conquest
12 Likes
I didn’t mean to be reductive or to not offer much for you to go off, sorry if it seemed like that. I am willing to think of it differently, and would like to. There is everything you said about it being a bleak (accurate) depiction of bureaucracy, and it has the noir kind of premise of the director at its core. It is a game that wants to be about those things, but I think that is primarily what the cutscenes and written documents are doing. the friction I experience from the million repetitive floaty combat sequences does little to make me feel connected to these targets as humans.
Alan Wake did try to make you feel something for the enemies too. I guess in my memory I think it was more successful, but I haven’t played it recently to know if I was just moved by the way those enemies were depicted more than they were in Control, but I think the combat in that game being just as desperate feeling with more accurate weapons and fewer annoying cooldowns allowed me to keep that empathy in focus as I fought them.
Most survival horror games from the 90s and 2000s also derive a lot of horror from your instinct to empathize with the thing ambling towards you with human like qualities, which is drawn to your attention even more by the mental calculations you have to make in order to either navigate around them or decide you can expend resources to kill them. This same kind of horrorific empathy is definitely what Control wants, but the game is so frantic and it feels like you could be super-powered if you just learned how the mechanics really jelled together… but I think all of that minimizes the time you have to develop empathy. Maybe repetition is supposed to instill it, but for me that just made me pay less and less attention to the horrifying twisted forms and provided more opportunity to get frustrated.
4 Likes
I like the flow of combat in Control, it has a very pleasant rhythm to me: expend ammo, expend throw, repeat, use other powers as reaction. Works in every situation and you get Throw so early that it has to be the intentional combat loop.
It’s funny Control and Prey were mentioned back to back because I consider them both expressions of the Metroid design ethos. I also think they’re both extremely good. Mooncrash is also amazing.
11 Likes
prey was better before they patched out the ability to use trash cans as levers to move those big cabinets that block all the doors at the beginning of the game
also i got one of the fakeout endings after exploring and it completely killed my desire to play the rest of the game
10 Likes
I’m definitely an outlier Control hater. And I’m suspicious about my opinion anyway. I really was not having a fun time playing it but kept playing.
3 Likes
same, totally ran out of steam after i hit this. also felt the same way about the various gag endings when you veer off the prescribed path in nier automata but maybe not for the same reason
i’m okay finding alternate endings in a VN where you can and are expected to fast-forward
5 Likes
On rare occasions I’m totally okay with a Bad End
3 Likes
I love Bad Ends so any game that has tons of them appeals to me
the combat flow in both Quantum Break and Control were very good for me. I enjoyed them so much. The only Remedy game that I don’t like is Alan Wake because that one has the most noxious turnkey combat. Zero depth, zero player expression, monotonous, couldn’t wait to skip past it to get to the sub-stephen-king pastiche
7 Likes
I would have been happy if it was a bad end but the game abruptly ends. Like at least most of the bad ends in steins;gate had a little substance to them and weren’t a 15 second cutscene implying I fucked up for unclear reasons. I get that the “secret ending” i got is just a huge hint for the games actual twist but it’s poorly executed. if they gave me an actual game over reload a save IDIOT screen for doing it I would have respected it more
5 Likes
I had a friend get that ending and somehow not realize it was a false ending. It seemed like he was pretty happy thinking of it like that.
9 Likes
one day I hope to reach similar levels of gamer enlightenment
9 Likes
People who say “the guns feel bad” in Quantum Break and Control make me feel absolutely insane. Or on better days I guess they just make me feel the infinite abyss of human subjectivity.
Bottom line: Control is definitely good enough and interesting enough that it is absolutely worth your time and money to give it a try, though no one can guarantee you won’t end up disliking it.
Prey is a really great flag planted in the soil of the asscreeds of the world reclaiming some territory for noble imsim. Also worth your time and money. Mooncrash I couldn’t make myself give a shit about but I’ve never been able to enjoy a roguelite, I guess that makes me the weirdo now.
15 Likes
Is it controversial to say that if a game rolls the end credits i should take it as a sign that its goddamn over and i can go play a different game now? joke fakeout bad ends are fun in theory but if you can just stumble into one after however many hours i’d be annoyed too
Also i would not have given a single shit about Control if not for SB, that title is so nondescript they should have like subtitled it “The SCP Game Made By The Max Payne Guys”
6 Likes
I resent calling it an SCP game since it seems they were more inspired by the things SCP writers were plagiarizing, like Delta Green and Unknown Armies (the writing in the dead letters section was pure UA style weird-horror, no resemblance to SCP)
11 Likes
I wonder if Unknown Armies was probably quietely influential on Something awful because way too much internet horror is just Shitty Unknown Armies. Like Rooms of Renunciation are very similar to a lot of really creepy outer world spaces. Or if this is just a case of parallel evolution.
And yeah, now that you mention it control is literally a 50/50 blend of unknown armies and delta green and I can’t believe I never noticed that sooner.
6 Likes
this could be settled very quickly if anyone remembers if there was an unknown armies page on 1d4chan or not
2 Likes