I am not finished with the game - I get a sense I'm building to a climax, but also that I might have progressed Saga's story faster than Alan's (I sense that for Alan's bit doing a "studio" segment followed by a "figuring out a plot" section could be the equivalent of one of Saga's regional explorations, so my alternating was short-changing Alan's side of things).
Admittedly, I'll confess to the fact that this is a game that hits me almost precisely in the sweet spot of my tastes (I think the one tweak required to make it dead-on would be less of a horror focus and more of a weird focus - which makes me very excited for Control 2 whenever it comes out). So any superlatives I throw out there should be taken with the usual grain of salt that one blogger's opinion is just that.
Still, a few things strike me as particularly ambitious about this game:
The first is its detail. The world of the game - worlds, really, given we hop between realities as we swap protagonists - is utterly plastered with little details.
The plot and characters, of course, are also deep and interesting - and Remedy seems to understand that a plot and its characters are really two sides of the same coin. The story is one of mysteries upon mysteries. Even knowing the context from having played the first game, there are elements here that will sneak up on you. There are difficult questions raised about grief and the value of our own lives.
Remedy, of course, has liked to play with mixed media - famously, they're one of the only studios using full-motion video with live actors in games, and allowing that to lend a strangeness to the various cutscenes. Like the first game, "chapters" end with a sort of end-credits song, which were all evidently written specifically for the game, often commenting on it. Naturally, Poets of the Fall (whose lead singer is an old friend of Creative Director Sam Lake) contribute a lot here, but a number of other groups also provide music, much of which is quite excellent (you'll hear multiple variations of a song by Poe, who is an artist I was vaguely aware of when I was in high school and just found out writing this sentence is the sister of House of Leaves author Mark Z. Danielewski (a book that had a big influence on Control).
It's also unapologetically abstract. There are elements that were a little ambiguous in the first game that have been blown out to become far stranger here. Whether we ever get concrete answers for the existential, ontological mysteries the game explores or not, the game invites players to really contend with and interpret what is going on.
There are also moments that I'm hesitant to spoil that will have you flabbergasted by the sheer audacity of what Remedy has put into this game (there's a sequence that will make Control's Ashtray Maze look conventional in comparison).
More than anything, this game feels like the work of a lot of different people who came together to pour all their passion and talent into it.
I'm not sure if I'm close to finishing the game or not (though given the hours I've put into it and the general sense of the tone we've reached, that seems probable) and while I'll be sad to have finished it after so much anticipation, I'm also really excited to see how it all comes together. And scared. Because just like the first game, I would not be shocked if we get a difficult, bittersweet ending.
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