Control

The core concept of the game is cool. Very cool. But the execution fails on multiple counts. It seems that since the game was developed from the original vision many things got lost, likely proving too costly to implement, so that finally too many half-baked ideas got jumbled together. We're left with an OK game that never lives up to the tantalizing promises that keep appearing in it. A real shame.

Ironically, this is exactly the bottom line I would give to the disappointing Prey (2006), while Control seems to want to be the amazing Prey (2017).

Let's start with some game design frustrations. The save system is bad. So bad, in fact, that it almost made we want to quit playing early on. Save points are few and far between, and any death or desire to quit the game will throw you all the way to the last point. It's not just that you have to trek back to where you want to be: enemies are regenerated, grindy random encounters may happen, and any destruction you've done to the world is erased. This is the worst way to increase a game's difficulty: punishing you for making a mistake by forcing you to grind. And the "reset" that happens to the world is a great way to break immersion.

Relatedly, the UI system for reading documents and listening to media, one of the only ways in which the game tells you its story, is unbelievably bad. When you find new documents they are marked with a red flag, to show you that you have not yet read them. But you need to scroll all your documents one at a time to see which ones have a red flag. Scroll too quickly and you might mark the document as read without having actually read it. As your list grows in the late game this becomes a ridiculously stupid and annoying task. I'm sure I've missed reading some documents simply because I passed them by too quickly. How could this nonsense have passed through playtesting?

Speaking of annoying random encounters, you also get random missions. There is a set of about 10 random missions that keep repeating themselves. And they are all as annoying as the random encounters.

Which leads me to also say bad things about the content of the game. There are a few inspired moments—likely remainders from the original concept—but for the most part the levels are boring and samey. You find the same office décor everywhere. There seem to be just 3 main enemy types, the rest being variations. The "open world" aspect is wasted on a linear, simplistic story. There's really not a compelling reason to explore or go back to areas you've visited before. That locked door that you can now open just has some crafting resources, nothing that will blow your mind or reveal story secrets.

Yeah, there's crafting and some special "skills". The system is unremarkable. Around mid-game I found the set of weapons and skills I liked and stuck to those and stopped caring about upgrades.

The reason this is a disappointing game is that the core concept is so, so cool. It seduces you with ideas about travel between universes, alien consciousness that exist outside of reality, virtual realities, mundane objects that can tear away reality and reveal deeper truths. As in the Matrix films, all this life and world we have is a stable lie. But nothing in the game lives up to that promise. You just move between samey levels and collect the samey stuff that doesn't make much difference to gameplay.

Even the narrative seems to have been rushed through quality assurance. For example, early on you—the protagonist—invent a name for the main enemy in the game. Cool. But then you find all these documents that existed before you've ever arrived at the scene, and they use the same name. So, clearly at one point someone wrote the dialog for you inventing the name without thinking that it wouldn't fit the existing content. And nobody caught it. Sigh.

Graphics are OK. I'll repeat myself: the design is repetitive. For the most part, the game does not look as good as other 2019 AAA games. But facial animations are very good. And the game does use ray-tracing, a very new feature: but only for rather gimmicky add ons. There are some cool special effects, but nothing that's really amazing. Note that I played this at 4K with NVIDIA ray-tracing. Ray-tracing adds some cool effects, but technology can't make designers do better.

I should say that as a fan of Alan Wake I did enjoy the explicit connections made to that (much better) game. (There are also some Alan-Wake-like gimmicks, like a recurring TV show, but the execution here is atrocious.) Control happens in the same narrative universe, and it's satisfying to see some ideas tied together here. I'm just unsure if it's worth playing a mediocre game in order to find these things out.