So, in case you couldn't tell over the course of the past few weeks, I've become kind of obsessed with Control. In part, it's inspired my delve into the "New Weird" literary movement that the game is meant to be a part of, and the realization that a lot of my own writing could be classified as New Weird (as a note, I think that these specific, granular genre categories are useful when used descriptively, rather than proscriptively. In the past I've described my writing as "modern fantasy" or "surreal fantasy." I don't really like the Magical Realism descriptor because I tend to associate that with works that seem kind of embarrassed to include the supernatural or paranormal and seem to try to reassure readers that it's all pure metaphor and not taking the unreal on its own terms).
I've watched a pair of long video essay critiques of Control, one by Monty Zander and the other by Eric Crosby, neither of whom are video essayists I've seen anything else of, but they had interesting angles to look at the game in their essays. Zander begins his essay with a poo-pooing of the very idea of having to specify what the New Weird is, claiming that you could simply use a broader label like Science Fiction.
Personally, I actually like having the label, though again, as a way to describe a work done on its own terms, noticing patterns and tropes, rather than as a set of rules one must follow to earn the "new weird" certificate.
Control was explicitly and intentionally made to be a "New Weird" video game, and borrows ideas and tropes from some of the key pieces of that genre, like the Southern Reach trilogy (of which I've only read the first, though that was only a week ago, so give me some time).
Remedy Studios has made clear that they had an ambition to link up their games in a kind of shared universe. Alan Wake's in-world-fictional protagonist of the books he writes, Alex Casey, is likely meant to be a legally-distinct equivalent of Max Payne. And while it's hinted at in the main game, Control's second DLC, AWE, makes explicit that the events of Alan Wake take place in the same world as Control (and given Alan's reality-warping powers from that game, might have actually been the reason for the events of Control in the first place).
While Alan Wake is clearly inspired by the works of Stephen King and David Lynch. Lynch's Twin Peaks is a deeply oneiric take on the soap opera (you could argue, and many have, that Twin Peaks: The Return is a similar look at the gritty "peak TV" dramas like Breaking Bad or the Sopranos) but if you squeeze through the disorienting formalism of Twin Peaks, you could interpret it as a sort of investigation into the paranormal with a branch of the FBI dedicated to investigating such weird things. (The X-Files also took a lot of inspiration from Twin Peaks, toning down Lynch's dream logic to tell a more straightforward but nonetheless weird series of paranormal mysteries). The FBC in Control (which is of course also inspired by the internet-born SCP Foundation) plays an odd role as both the vast government conspiracy that covers up the truth but also the Scully and Mulders of its world, who go and actually seek the truth about the strange and paranormal.
However, I think you cannot discount Stephen King's influence. I started reading King when I was 17, and I picked up The Gunslinger, the first book in his Dark Tower series. The Dark Tower series is fantasy... of a sort. But while there are, yes, wizards and some kind of demonic dark lord in it, our knight errant on his quest looks more like the hero of a Spaghetti Western, who lives in a world that is part medieval fantasy, part post-apocalyptic hellscape, part wild west. Robots, sentient trains, mutants, invisible demons, and freestanding doors that lead into the minds of three separate people from New York in different decades are all parts of this story. The World Has Moved On, which means that the very rules of reality are breaking down, so why should anyone be bound to any specific genre conventions?
I've read other King books, and though he is of course the most popular living horror writer, I'm always tempted to argue that he's not really a horror writer at all. Certainly, he writes stories in which profoundly scary things happen, but they also tend to have really weird elements.
In the Shining, yes, the Overlook Hotel is filled with some sort of evil presence (that is probably not simply ghosts and more like some cosmic horror... thing). But in that world, Danny Torrance also happens to have psychic powers, which help him and his mother escape the madness the hotel infects his father with. In 11/22/63 (admittedly one of the less horror-genre works of King's), there's a doorway in an old diner that lets you go to the same precise moment in 1958 (I think I've got the number right,) resetting any changes made to the timeline each time you step back into it, and there are people from some other time or universe whose job it is to monitor that portal.
The point is, I think you could make an argument that, though the term only came about after most of the Dark Tower series had been written, it might count within that category of New Weird. Or maybe it's just Weird Fiction. King, after all, was inspired by Lovecraft (though replaced, for the most part, Lovecraft's misanthropy and bigotry with a much more caring dose of humanism). But in that case, you could argue here that Weird Fiction is the larger category, not far off from just Speculative Fiction in general.
Which now brings us back to Control.
The sequel, which has been announced, has the following problem: the original game's most iconic element is its setting, the Oldest House. Now, you could in theory set a new game still in the House, and merely have us explore other sectors we didn't see on our first trip. Of the two DLCs, the one I enjoyed more was AWE, which took place in the abandoned Investigations Sector, while the Foundation DLC took place in natural caverns beneath the House. Foundation is certainly a larger departure in terms of aesthetics, but I personally found the look of it less inspired - the advantage to the Oldest House was that, even if many of its spaces purely served to act as places for you to fight Hiss and navigate the labyrinthine corridors, there was a sense of purpose to it all - people worked here, and there might be someone who had to find this one particular office every day at 9 am. The caves of the Foundation were sort of... just video game spaces.
But setting a second game entirely within the House would, I think, also be a mistake. The open-world elements of Control make the end of the game a little depressingly non-final. Jesse is still trapped there, even if the worst of the crisis has passed. And while, yes, she's now embraced her role as the Director of the FBC, I'd have loved to have some cutscene at some point show her and Pope walking out the front door, being able to finally relax and go home before coming back to work the next day.
Another question I have about the game is whether we'll get any more of Doctor Caspar Darling. Much of the story involves a changeover in leadership, and by the end of the game, Pope has taken over from Darling as head of research. Darling's sins under the Trench regime are certainly not something easy to forgive, and his own status is ambiguous. But his videos over the course of the game are some of my favorite parts of Control, and in particular, his final video (which could be only Jesse's imagination, but I like to think it's a message intended to cheer on and pump her up from Darling himself). But could we really justify his continued presence in the story?
I could imagine a much different structure to a future game, in which Jesse goes out to various AWEs to investigate and solve problems. More conservatively, the game could simply focus on a single AWE in which Jesse is largely on her own, which would allow for the same kind of vaguely Souls-like Metroidvania structure.
The key, though, to retaining the strengths of the original game, would be to maintain the excellent environmental and breadcrumb storytelling. I suspect that the documents found across the Oldest House were in part inspired by the vast amount of lore you can pick up in FromSoft's games from item descriptions.
Luckily, if the story is about Jesse investigating some AWE, there's plenty of room to have fun FBC memos scattered around some devastated base camp for what you could imagine was some FBC task force sent there that has mysteriously vanished or otherwise been... incapacitated. But we could have all this take place in a new environment.
I will say that I think I agree with Monty Zander's criticism of the game's loot system. While I enjoyed the fact that the crafting materials were incorporeal concepts, appropriate to the psychic basis for the Service Weapon, I think that the loot chase has gotten a little too prevalent in gaming these days, and I don't think the system as implemented really serves to make Control more fun.
What I think would be better is to have a smaller number of bonuses that each sit at a single power level. This makes the choices feel more impactful - you're not just upgrading from a +12% damage boost to a 24% damage boost, you're instead deciding whether you want to spend less energy on Launch or allow Seize to take effect faster (these are both existing mods, but I don't think we need to have them existing in a hierarchy of quality).
It was, in fact, quite refreshing playing Alan Wake, in which there was no character progression system at all, other than perhaps sometimes finding more powerful flashlights. Video games had a long and storied history of letting you play the whole thing without getting explicitly more powerful. In traditional Mario games, the only way in which you get more powerful is that you, the player, gets better at playing the game. Now, I love a good progression system, but these are best when it's more about expanding the potential for strategy and tactics, rather than simply making numbers go up.
(I realize the irony of making that statement on a blog that started primarily as a World of Warcraft blog, but at this stage in my 16 and half years of playing WoW, I'm really in it to see the environments and witness the story and get cool transmog appearances, and only really worry about my DPS numbers so as not to be holding the group back.)
What I definitely want to see is a story in which the Hiss is over and dealt with. The Hiss worked fine as a villain for the first game - I really like the idea that the Hiss isn't even really intelligent, but just a sort of infectious frequency that perpetuates itself. But while The Dark Presence feels like it would have to continue to be the main problem of Alan Wake 2 (albeit taking new forms and demonstrating new capabilities) I think the promise of Control is that, while the Hiss crisis is bad, it's only at the top of the crises the FBC has dealt with. The presence of The Mold, for example, shows that even during the Hiss crisis, there are other problems the FBC is dealing with, and so it seems that a sequel should have a brand new crisis to deal with.
Again, like Monty Zander, I think some of the open-world elements of the game struggle to justify themselves. Pretty early on I found myself just ignoring the Bureau Alerts unless I was in the area already, and while Ahti the Janitor is one of my favorite elements of the world and the story, his janitorial tasks were pretty pure "open world busy work." Langston's Runaways, on the other hand, were great - each being its own unique little puzzle with its own unique set piece.
My general hope would be to nix any side quests that are dull "find x things to interact with in this section of the game and just click a button near them." Doing this and scaling back on the loot system would work together to better streamline the game.
And, don't get me wrong, at this stage I find myself wanting to go back and play more, only to realize that with most of those side missions complete (I think at this point the only things I have left to do are, like, the harder modes on SHÜM and the Jukebox) there's really not much point. But I think a game that leaves you wanting more is better than a game that wears out its welcome (though, of course, as I've just argued, Control hasn't).
As a last note, I think that, despite all the mods you can get for the Service Weapon, one of the problems in Control is that Launch as an ability is so much more fun and on top of that so much more powerful, that I often feel like the Service Weapon itself is more of a "filler" ability as you wait for your energy to recharge. And, of all its forms, I never really found a form I liked better than the standard "Grip" form. There wasn't really much of a sense that different scenarios called or using different forms, with a few exceptions.
Still, I loved Control, and I'm eager to see what they wind up coming up with for a sequel. I believe Alan Wake 2 is due this year, so I'll be checking that out.
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