Control

Toward the end of Control, there’s an exhilarating sequence called the Ashtray Maze, in which the shifting nature of The Oldest House takes center stage, becoming part of what feels like a choreographed dance, all of it adding up to a dazzling, whirling, almost staggering multimedia extravaganza. It’s a real knock-your-socks-off moment, easily the most impressive video game set piece I’ve seen since at least Super Mario Odyssey’s New Donk City Festival. Yes, I loved the Ashtray Maze, but in the hours and days since I’ve finished the game, the maze has come to feel less like an audiovisual expression of some sort of meaning hidden at the game’s heart, and more like a distraction from the fact that, in the end, there is no there, there.

Jesse Faden arrives at The Oldest House, the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Control, with a past full of mystery and a head full of questions. When she was a child, agents from the bureau came to her hometown of Ordinary to investigate an Altered World Event, a paranatural disruption of our dimension, just the sort of thing the bureau works to, well, control, its work a secret from all of us who go through our lives unaware of the strange power that certain objects and people possess. The shifting hallways of the House waste no time in ushering Jesse to the director’s office, where a man, Director Trench, lies dead. She picks up his service weapon, and with that, instantly becomes the new director, soon setting off into the depths of the House in search of answers to the questions of her past. 

Or is it you, the player, who picks up Trench’s service weapon? Of course, almost all games allow us to question the relationship between the player’s actions and the actions of the character they play, but Control actively raises these questions. An entity or body known as The Board, that dwells on the Astral Plane, holds some authority over the bureau and its director, and when it speaks, words and their meanings splinter, sometimes breaking the fourth wall and making you aware that the game is addressing not just Jesse but you. Given Control’s concerns with other planes of existence and with objects that can be multiple things, initially the ways in which it also peels back the layers of its own internal reality and asks you to consider how they are constructed by game designers add a delicious added layer of seeming meaning to the proceedings. Who is in control? Me, or Jesse? The Board, or the folks at Remedy who made this game? Is there even a meaningful distinction here between the Board and Remedy?

There are pleasures aplenty to be found in The Oldest House. Scattered everywhere are memos and reports on events, objects, and phenomena that the bureau has cataloged and investigated, and in truth, I’ve never before found in-game text quite so fun to read. I mean, I may appreciate in the abstract that someone had to write all those in-universe books cluttering up every bookshelf in Skyrim, but I’m sure as hell not gonna take the time to read them. In Control, though, I stopped to read every memo I found, always game to read about some other strange object or bizarre happening. And then there are the charmingly off-kilter, official bureau short films hosted by Dr. Casper Darling (Matthew Porretta), whose sparkly-eyed enthusiasm for the phenomena he studies is infectious. Darling’s one of the few sources of any real warmth or humanity in the game, and while it’s certainly welcome whenever you come across it, the chilliness of most of Control ends up being to its detriment.

As you make your way through the labyrinthine halls of the bureau, you’re routinely besieged by groups of agents corrupted by something called the hiss. With your service weapon and the abilities you acquire from some of the strange “objects of power” the bureau has acquired, you dash around environments (and later levitate), popping off shots and hurling objects, a superhero with a gun. The combat is speedy, chaotic and kinetic as all hell, and definitely wants you to feel like an unmitigated badass. It works, too. I just wish that among all the questions Control was interested in exploring, one of them was about whether or not it’s such a good thing that games so often want to make us feel like the only one capable of fixing things, the only one who really matters. Or how about this: Why is a game whose narrative is so concerned with the strange and unconventional mechanically interested in providing us with only the most conventional, ordinary types of enjoyment that games so often aim to provide?

But in the end, it turns out Control isn’t really interested in exploring questions much at all, despite pretending to be in the beginning. I hoped the final few hours might contain, if not answers exactly, then at least some sort of meaningful suggestions toward possible answers. But they don’t. It all falls apart in a mess of rapid-fire events and revelations that don’t actually reveal anything. Haven’t we realized yet that “mystery box” storytelling isn’t any good if the box is ultimately revealed to be completely empty? Control could have been well-served by a commitment to saying things, even too many things, so that the truth or meaning was like one of the game’s objects of power, looking different from each angle or shifting so rapidly that the human eye couldn’t perceive it. But no, there’s nothing there, just smoke on which is projected the illusion of something, which might be enough for YouTubers to create speculative fan theory videos about “what it all really means,” and they’ll all be right and they’ll all be wrong, because Control can’t commit to actually meaning anything. That’s not enough to undo Control, because when you have as much style as this game has, it turns out that style is enough, but only just.

(6/10) (Recommended)