Control

There are not many game developer studios making big PC/console titles in Finland. Remedy Entertainment is one of the few, known in the past for their Max Payne and Alan Wake games. In 2016 they released Quantum Break which has basically TV show episodes mixed in. I don't like that. Games are an interactive medium; passive entertainment should be kept separate. That's why I haven't been interested to try it. Neither have I played Remedy's other games, simply due to lack of interest.

Paranatural third person action

Their latest release in 2019, a third person shooter/action adventure game Control however appeared appealing enough for me. Its gameplay seemed to be to my liking and the setting interesting. Evidently Control was hugely inspired by the 'new weird' literary genre and could almost be considered a game adaptation of the SCP Foundation project.

Control begins with its protagonist Jesse Faden entering the headquarters of Federal Bureau of Control in New York. An entity in her head, called Polaris, has told that it is there she can find her long lost brother Dylan. Jesse soon discovers FBC's late director who appears to have shot himself. Jesse picks up his gun, the Service Weapon, and just like that becomes the new Director. Before she can get to Dylan, Jesse needs to put things back in order: something called the Hiss is on the loose in the building. It is controlling FBC's personnel not protected by a resonance device and in addition has caused various Altered Items and Objects of Power to get free from containment.

The building itself is an OOP of sorts, a shifting dimensional pocket plane called the Oldest House. In gameplay that shows as maze-like level design. After you've been through places a dozen times, they do become familiar and the levels hardly appear confusing anymore. But early on I was often quite perplexed at where to go. I wished for something to point me to main mission locations. Something like Dead Space's diegetic line projection guide would have been awesome.

Stylish

I did like the brutalist architecture of the environments: bare, unpainted gray concrete everywhere. (Or is it granite in the game?) Brutalism has been used to design various building around the world but I was constantly reminded of the local Oulu City Theatre and Library, and they're not even the only buildings around here like that. I'm not a fan of how brutalist buildings look from the outside -- they're usually ugly as hell, particularly when wet -- but as interior design I think it works. The simplest added decorative elements so easily contrast and enhance the otherwise plain and square looks.

The game's environments are also (superficially) destructible, spraying bits and pieces around when hit. There can be quite a lot going in the game in fact, all manner of effects making it hard to see what's happening. You can tone it down a bit by turning off motion blur and film grain. Chromatic aberration has no setting unfortunately. It might very well be an essential part of the visuals.

My aging PC had trouble running the game at a stable framerate despite lowering graphics. The setting to run the game upscaled from a lower rendering resolution was the only one that made a noticeable effect. With it on the game became less clear but also ran at solid 60 FPS -- an acceptable trade-off. It allowed me to turn other setting back up too. I think there's some texture loading issue in the game though because even at high settings environmental textures sometimes stayed completely unreadable. Safe room doors for instance should be have readable text on them but occasionally they showed up as gray blurry wall without a hint of any text even being there.

Spiky difficulty

Control's gameplay starts as basic third shooting with the Service Weapon pistol but soon in comes dashing, telekinesis, and other stuff as you acquire powers from objects. The Service Weapon also gets new modes that make it function like an SMG, shotgun, sniper rifle, or even a rocket launcher. Your energy and ammunition replenish while not being used and so you balance between using your gun and powers.

Combat is almost great but is missing something to make it quite so. At times enemies would feel bullet-spongy or I would end up dead all of a sudden feeling like there was nothing I could have done. Additional shield bar in addition to health could have been nice. Like in Mass Effect; one that regenerates to full after you haven't been hit in a while. Control has a health gate mechanic so you can't outright die to one big hit but there tends to be some enemy left to take off that last sliver of health once the grace period of immunity is over.

An alternative way to heal could work as well. As far as I could tell, the only way to heal is to gather the blue giblets dropped by enemies you've damaged. It's a risky way to replenish your health if the giblets are in the open. For instance, there could be a personal mod that adds a healing effect to ground slam. I think that would be pretty fair as it wouldn't be spammable due to the slam spending all your energy. Such a mod could even be in the game already and I just didn't find one.

A possibly amusing/cringeworthy detail for Finns is FBC's Finnish tango loving janitor Ahti, played by Martti Suosalo. He speaks English with a heavy Finnish accent, as is to be expected really, but worst of all is how he uses Finnish idioms and sayings translated literally into English. I'd imagine most of them are nonsense to anyone who doesn't speak Finnish. I thought it was all a bit forced but I don't know how it comes off for non-Finnish people.

I played Control on the Game Pass but it's also Epic's free game of the week currently. Both versions are just the base game and thus don't include the two DLC it has. I'm undecided if I want to play them or if I have had enough of the game. I kind of solved my difficulty problems in the end but I also doubt the DLC have that much new to show me. Maybe I'll check them out in the future when the season pass is just a little bit cheaper.