Control cold-opens in principia res, in the lobby of the Federal Bureau Of Control, an SCP-adjacent agency that amounts to the Department of Managing the Unreasonably Supernatural. The building itself we soon discover is called The Oldest House, an organism and architecture both fully committed to 1970s-vintage bureaucratic brutalism and actively antagonistic to the notion of object permanence, quietly and implacably menacing the way only bare concrete and carbon-paper triplicate can be.
As you progress through it, game and building alike, it gets stranger and more committed to being its own weirdest self; your relationship with the department, your backstory and the building both inhabit get more convoluted, twisting narratives and conflicting backstories leaning into some of the best dynamic storytelling and subtle psychological horror gaming has on offer.
But mostly you go get the important things and shoot the bad things on the way and there’s an inescapable tension between the potential of cold-war institutional bureaucracy writ vast and the pragmatics of genuflecting to the architecture of the gun and it feels vaguely like a waste.
To be clear: the story, the environmental elements, the architectural design and aesthetic execution, the wider narrative as discovered, all of it is so consistently so good. The world-building, mood-building, discovered and environmental storytelling, the beautifully executed perma-70s-office-hijacked-by-supernatural-madness, solid voice and video acting, great level design and all polished to a dark-mirror finish, as well-crafted and stitched together as I’ve seen in a game. Even the shootyguns part is done really well! Balanced and smooth, you’ve got your Close But Boom Shooties and your Fast But Loose Shooties and your Far Away But Slow Shooties, hooray for good shooties, go team shooties, high five.
Anyway, the story.
There Is A Bureaucracy For Managing The Supernatural, You Are Somehow A Part Of It And Something Has Gone Very Wrong: You have my attention.
All These Mysterious Artefacts Have An Interesting Backstory Intertwined With Your Own And Are A Problem: I respect a well-crafted macguffinning, I’ll play along.
Your Character Is Leading This Weird Bureaucracy As The New Director By Way Of Some Sort Of Obliquely Described Accident Of Ceremonial Circumstance: I’m invested, tell me more.
Each Of Those Threads Has A Third-Act Twist That Deepens The Story, Raises The Stakes And Heightens The Tensions And Is Even Reflected In The House’s Evolving Architecture: You’ve got me. I love it, I’m in.
The Entire Exercise Is Encased In An Architecture Of Unbounded Seventies Bureaucracy Straining Over The Precipice Of Madness, Relentlessly Pedestrian In Detail And Terrifying In Absolute Scale: I am kissing my fingers like a chef here, this is excellent and I want to be a part of it, keep going.
The Mysterious Supernatural Powers Available To You In Your Role As Director Of This Mysterious And Fascinating Agency, As You Seek To Resolve The Agency’s Mysterious And Fascinating Ills In This Mysterious And Fascinating Building are… Jump, Punch, Throw and Gun.
What. What?
Later On You Get Jump But More, Throw But Also, And Gun But Different.
Oh, come on. Come on, what?
This is the thing I’m hung up on. This game is so good at everything except being the game it decided to be: an above-average shooter. It’s one of the best games I’ve played in the last few years and it still feels like a squandered opportunity just by being only what it is.
It’s impossible not to ask what Control could have been if it hadn’t turned away from all the possible it offered and decided to be a shooter. Hard to say, I guess, and hard to say what, but it’s so easy to believe it could have been something.