thoughts about Control (2019)

I’m a big Remedy enjoyer, I like Alan Wake and Max Payne and Quantum Break, and I want to like Control, but I don’t, though I like a lot about it. I completed it, was bewildered, and now can’t go back to it. More than anything I’ve seen before, every little thing in it feels like a missed opportunity, and like the thing it should have been was well within reach.

The way Alan Wake 1 sort of peters out, dragging its vague conclusion out over three DLCs that also don’t really conclude, somehow remained pretty charming. Control feels like it took weird lessons from that, and is now not interested in conclusions at all, even unexpressed ones.

I’m not someone who needs closure on everything, but I want it to feel like the author knows kind of what’s happening, even just as a vibe, even if they don’t want to tell me. But everything in Control, every monster, character, document or concept, is a cool intriguing setup that’s left dangling. What pulls me through an experience is the sense that the author is Going Somewhere With This, and for me they’d earned that trust, but it turns out they aren’t, and once you lose that trust it’s difficult to keep going. Every little plot stub feels not like a tease or an unfinished thought, but like a discarded one, an elevator pitch for a book they were never really interested in writing.

The shame of it is that the setting’s rad, and puts ideas in your head that are better than the ones in the game. I had figured that Jesse’s becoming Director was a setup for her destroying the FBC: She’s a victim of the Bureau’s bullshit, it’s consumed her life, it’s a terrible organisation whose task is impossible and misguided, and the building itself is sentient and probably feels that way. But nah, she’s into it. Alright.

On the other hand, Control introduces (or clarifies) the idea of the Remedy Shared Universe, and this is actually the only instance of this sort of bullshit that I think is worthwhile. Instead of forcing every work into a unified whole, the underpinning principle is incoherence. Their “universe” is a representation of the creative process itself – a weird, fluctuating, amorphous soup, where everything exists and doesn’t all at once. Alan Wake’s characters literally rewrite reality, but you get the sense that that sort of thing happens to reality all the time. It’s cool to have a fictional universe’s made-up “rules” be so in alignment with the actual process that creates it. Plus, the answer to any stupid fan question about “is alan wake in the same city as max payne” is automatically “sure, sorta”, and that’s great.


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