Taking Control

 So, I beat the main story of Control.

It's interesting: Control is sort of a Metroidvania game - you get various things that allow you to explore more of the Oldest House, where the game takes place, and then find new items and abilities that let you explore further in those new places - but it's also playing around with being an open-world game. Frequently over the course of the game, you'll get side missions and even randomized, periodic alerts that require you to complete their missions within the next 20 minutes (this actually reminded me a bit of the turf wars from GTA San Andreas, actually).

Of course, Control's Oldest House is almost the opposite of an Open World. The brutalist nightmare is all labyrinthine corridors and artificial lighting. In that sense, it shares a bit of the Metroid-style exploration where sometimes the challenge is more about how one gets from here to there.

The version of the game I got (unsurprising given that it's a 4-year-old game) comes with DLC, which I'm sure I'll get around to, though it felt like a good stopping place to pause when the credits rolled (the real credits, I should say).

While the source of the major threat is removed with the game's (or, perhaps we should say, the main mission's) ending, the justification for allowing you to continue on with other content in it does have the sort of bummer effect of never letting you truly consider the crisis resolved. If the Hiss-infected people in the building were all gone, there wouldn't be much game anymore, but also, you know, until then, you can't actually leave the building.

I guess that's just the nature of video games - you can't go beyond the boundaries of the spaces they've actually built.

I've been feeling kind of sick and gross the last couple days (possibly food poisoning) and to an extent I think maybe I should have held off on playing more of this until I was feeling physically better. The aesthetic of this New Weird genre that I find so interesting is, in part, interesting because of the kind of unpleasantness of its mundanity.

I don't really know what I think of the thing overall. I think mostly positively - though as is often the case I kind of see this as a lot of really good first ideas that maybe need refinement (I'll have to see how the DLCs are).