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Control - supernatural third person action-adventure from Remedy

Ivan

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Jun 22, 2013
Messages
7,474
Location
California
Alan Wake was decent. That's not a bad thing.
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-06-25-control-is-remedys-most-exciting-project-in-years

Control is Remedy's most exciting project in years

I'm calling it, I'm finally letting go of Alan Wake. There is more to Remedy than its hoodie-and-tweed-wearing writer hero, and more to the studio's trademark brand of pulpy sci-fi than his gravelly, never-ending voice-overs. This is a good thing. Six years on from Wake's last outing, with no sequel in sight and Remedy's odd, live-action hybrid Quantum Break out of the way, Control feels like a clean break for Remedy.

Control is the studio's first game for PlayStation 4 - its first for any Sony platform since Max Payne 2 on PS2 - something underlined by its unveiling at Sony's E3 conference. ("It felt like a good way to announce it this way and make this statement," Sam Lake, Remedy's chief writer and public face of the studio tells me after.) Control is also a clean slate to tell a new story with a more modern approach - albeit one which will still feel familiar to the studio's fans.

The demo shown to press at E3 2018 is a proper peek at what everybody saw during the game's Sony conference trailer. You play as Jesse Faden (Courtney Hope, AKA Beth in Quantum Break), who like all Remedy protagonists is skilled in third-person shooting and physics manipulation while exploring dark, mysterious surroundings. These surroundings will host a big change for Control - a space to explore with a narrative path, but also side-missions and Metroidvania-inspired exploration. At one point in the demo we pass a series of prison cells, the unlucky occupant of one screaming for help. It's a side-mission which we can return to later.

"There's a hub, but it's big sprawling location," Lake says. "From the outside, the Department of Control is a big, brutalist building in Manhattan. Inside, it's vastly bigger, operating on dream logic and magic, ritualistic rules. If you know the right steps, the building shifts and you have access to areas you didn't before. You might have gone through an area multiple times before you gain the power of levitation which can then lead you elsewhere again. [Metroidvania] was certainly an inspiration."

The Department of Control is a space specifically designed for the type of storytelling Remedy wants to employ - one not constrained by cut-scenes, lost pages of a book or live-action TV episodes, but which unfurls itself more naturally as you venture deeper into its world. As someone who enjoyed visiting the worlds Remedy created in the past but left them frustrated by the limitations of their narrative devices, it's promising news. ("I'm proud of what we achieved - live-action was an experiment," Lake says when I ask if Remedy had any plans to dabble in live-action again. "I don't think we'll do that again, exactly the same way. Coming out of that - it was a long project and a lot of work - in Control we're trying quite a few new things.")

What begins as a mundane US government office building quickly turns into a creepy TARDIS-like expanse, a house of horrors. Dead agents hang motionless in mid-air, offed by Control's mysterious reality-bending force, the Hiss. Others, still alive, possessed, drop to the floor and open fire as Jesse conjurs up some quick cover using nearby items. Tables, chairs, and nearby debris act as part of a force field which can then be flung back into the enemies' faces, alongside their own bullets. Jesse also has the coolest-looking sci-fi gun in any game at E3 - a hand cannon made up of Rubik's cube-esque blocks which fling themselves into various formations as you switch between different firing modes. The coast again clear, the action shifts again back to a mundane building, and a moment of calm.

"It's a very mysterious, deep world and lore," Lake continues. "And the main story has a slightly different purpose now - to introduce this world to our main character and the player. And, in a different way to how we've done before, there are other stories in this world, other missions to go on. It's less linear, more player-driven."

I'm all for more story and more mystery to solve, and somewhere with a bit more to explore than the straightforward if beautiful environments and set-pieces in Remedy games of the past. Expect a couple of nods to those games, too - ("I can't confirm, but yes...", Lake confirms when I ask about Alan Wake references). Due out in 2019, Control still has plenty of time to get its right, and flesh out the first steps seen here.
 

ColCol

Arcane
Joined
Jul 12, 2012
Messages
1,731
Partly channeling Warren Spector: https://www.pcgamesn.com/control/control-gun-service-weapon

In Control, your gun is basically Excalibur

Remedy’s new game Control is a bizarre one. It’s an open-world game that is set entirely within one building. It’s not a normal building - the whole thing is vastly bigger on the inside than the outside. It will also change shape and rebuild itself in answer to supernatural rituals that you’ll learn as you progress through the campaign.

Perhaps the oddest aspect of the whole thing is your Service Weapon. You're an agent and it's your sidearm, but it’s unique and the capitalisation is earned because, as Remedy’s creative director (and face of Max Payne) Sam Lake readily admits to us: “It's our modern take on the King Arthur legend.”

When you find the Service Weapon in Control, it’s like drawing the sword from the stone, you become the Director of the Bureau, a group Lake describes as “a secretive government agency that deals with the unexplainable.”

In that way they’re a little like Mulder and Scully in the X-Files, but also not. “They seek out the unexplainable,” Lake continues. “They investigate it, they contain it, and ultimately try to control it and it use it to their ends - so not necessarily the good guys but maybe the best we have.”

We still don't know Control's release date but we've learned that you will discover the Service Weapon early in the game and have to overcome a trial to prove that you are the rightful wielder of the gun and the rightful director of the agency.

The Service Weapon isn’t a fixed gun. As you progress through Control, you will unlock new forms the gun can take. These will open up new attacks and abilities for you to use in combat. Couple that with the technology Remedy has been working on with its engine, Lake sys that the team “wanted to push the physics and the dynamic destruction of the environment as far as [it] possibly could.”

You can also use telekinetic powers that let you lift and throw objects with your mind, so as you break the environment you have all the debris at your disposal to hit enemies about the face with. Of course, as your enemies also have their own powers, you could also be providing them with weapons to attack you.


Channeling in What sense?
 

Master

Arbiter
Joined
Oct 19, 2016
Messages
1,160
The stupid "Service Weapon" doesnt even eject shells (caseless ammo?) What happened to the literal rain of gunshells you could create in Max Payne?
:decline: of guns.
 

Farewell into the night

Guest
So it is basically a GIGA WRECKER 'inspired' 3D game. I don't blame them, I love the original.
 

Ivan

Arcane
Joined
Jun 22, 2013
Messages
7,474
Location
California
Sam Lake's mug will always bring a smile to my face.

Will be sad when he passes away.


Probably replay Max Payne when that happens.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
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Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-07-16-how-remedy-is-taking-control-of-its-own-destiny

How Remedy is taking Control of its own destiny
CEO Tero Virtala on the Finnish developer's plans for its newest IP and the lessons learned from its Microsoft collaborations

Quantum Break taught Remedy Entertainment a series of hard lessons.

The ambitious original IP combined action gameplay with live-action TV episodes that changed depending on choices made in the game, which dramatically ramped up production time and costs. It was also exclusive to Microsoft platforms when it launched in 2016 which, being a second-place platform, didn't help it sell well enough to warrant a sequel.

The latter is in part due to the Finnish developer's long-running collaboration with Microsoft. After Alan Wake proved to be a hit (although, again, not enough to warrant a full sequel), work on Quantum Break began at a time when neither the Xbox One nor PlayStation 4 had been released. With Xbox's strong performance in the previous generation, plus Microsoft's original plans for a TV-infused strategy with its next console, it's understandable why Remedy maintained that relationship.


Tero Virtala, Remedy Entertainment

Nevertheless CEO Tero Virtala, who joined just a few months after the launch of Quantum Break, is disappointed the studio hasn't be able to follow up on all the effort put into that title.

"You always learn on every aspect, definitely on the creative side," he tells GamesIndustry.biz when we meet at E3 2018. "But maybe the biggest lessons were on the business and production side. We can create excellent games, but the type of games we do with an immersive world and characters, memorable stories - those are typically building blocks in any entertainment business for franchises that could live for a long time. And now for the second time being in a position where we had done all that groundwork and then there was not a possibility to continue those stories... we didn't want to face that again."

With Microsoft holding onto the publishing rights for Alan Wake and the Quantum Break IP, Remedy has been determined to retain ownership of its upcoming 'Project 7', unveiled at last month's Los Angeles expo as the fittingly-titled Control.

The game is a supernatural action adventure set in the mysterious building known as the Oldest House, the official headquarters for the Federal Bureau of Control. Shown only via a surreal teaser trailer during PlayStation's press conference, Control was further demonstrated with a behind-closed-doors preview of the gameplay.

"Being in a position where we had done all that groundwork and then there was not a possibility to continue those stories... we didn't want to face that again"

At first glance, it seems similar to past Remedy titles, with heroine Jesse even showcasing abilities reminiscent of those seen in Quantum Break. But the bizarre happenings within the Oldest House, the transforming environment, and the promise of less linear gameplay indicates Remedy is trying something very different.

Virtala says it "represents a new step for Remedy", pointing to the firm's previously announced strategy to branch into shorter games and multiple projects, of which this is the first. He also stresses that there's more of a focus on gameplay this time around. In addition to faster-paced combat and wider, more open levels, Control also veers towards a Metroidvania-esque structure where players will revisit areas to uncover new secrets.

But, the CEO insists, the team has not lost any of its flair for storytelling - and that's going to be crucial to establishing Control as more than just a Remedy one-off.

"If you want to create a memorable story, it's not just a story," he says. "It's the characters, their background story, their motives, and the locations. In order to create these worlds, characters and stories, it's a huge investment of really high quality people that are really hard to find and those typically provide a basis for long-term franchises, long-term brands in which you could put multiple games.

"Considering our history... Alan Wake was really interesting but it was a collaboration with Microsoft. Due to certain reasons, it never got a sequel. Quantum Break, also, we put a lot of effort into creating the world, the characters, the stories, but still it was Microsoft IP. They decided not to take it further. If we owned the IP, it's fully in our hands to decide how we create it, how we develop, what are the creative decisions that we take? And then maybe one day in the future, if it proves to be successful, it's again in our hands to decide what will be done. That was important for us."

"If a player sees our game, [and] intuitively he or she is not able to compare it immediately with another game, then we have succeeded"

The gameplay demo for Control is certainly impressive, and hints at a compelling and unique fiction from Remedy - perhaps their most unusual to date. While so many games (particularly at E3) have familiar settings, whether real-world or a mix of familiar fantasy elements, there is something unnervingly unorthodox about the Oldest House's brutalist architecture and shifting strucutre.

In fact, the closest comparison we can make is Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding - if only in that it's not overly clear what's happening to someone who knows nothing about the game. But Virtala assures us all will become clear in time.

"It's a Remedy game," he says. "It's from our creative people who think about what type of stories they would like to tell and what type of games they would like to create. There is a meaning behind it all, and supernatural elements play a role there. All that you see in the game, eventually it will turn out there is a clear reason for that. That's the driving factor in what type of game we want to make, what's the game we're creating. That decides the location and artistic style we are creating.

"[In the console space] so many games are coming out, but there are only a few games an average gamer can play, so we feel that in order to succeed it needs to be super quality but also needs to be different. We say that if when a player sees our game, intuitively he or she is not able to compare it immediately with another game, then we have succeeded."


But if you're unable to immediately compare Control to any other title, surely that increases the risk - especially as it's a new IP? Consumers need those familiar touchpoints so they know what they're getting when they invest in a new purchase.

"Well, we do have gunplay, we have loadouts, we have supernatural abilities," Virtala says. "If players look at our game they will see features they see in other games but we hope that the entity somehow sparks the imagination of the players and creates interest, and looks somehow fresh and different."

"Now we have in our hands an IP that we own, we definitely want to bring it to as wide an audience as possible"

It's the first time Remedy has owned a major IP since the original Max Payne games, which were later picked up by Rockstar Games. Virtala, of course, was not present at the company when such a deal took place, but even today he understands why the firm made that decision.

"Remedy was a completely different company back then, 15 years ago," he says. "It was a team of 20 to 30 people who had created this massive success. Selling the IP was a significant business deal and that provided so much freedom for the company for the years to come, so I think it was a really smart move."

For Control, Remedy has teamed up with a different publisher. While Microsoft's ambitions to bridge the void between games consoles and TV aligned with Remedy's plans for Quantum Break, the growth of 505 Games speaks to the Finnish developer's own desires to fortify its future.

"We want to be the best studio in creating certain types of games and that's where we focus," says Virtala. "We have business understanding, we have competencies that can help in commercialising those but we know there are good publishers that are so much stronger and have a wider competence base on the marketing side, on the community side, on distribution, on sales and so on. 505 Games proved based on all the discussions we had that they understood what we are looking for strategically. They had the same intention as us. It felt like a good combination and has proven to be."

Most notably, the partnership with 505 opens up the possibility of reaching that market-dominating PlayStation audience. For 15 years, Remedy has, by nature of its partnership with Microsoft, been restricted to PC and Xbox devices, but Control will be the firm's first truly multi-platform release since 2002's Max Payne 2.

With close to 80 million units sold, the addition of PlayStation 4 to its distribution puts Control in good stead to far outsell previous Remedy titles - hopefully to the point where the studio can finally justify creating a sequel.

"The business needs to be well run and systematically run," Virtala concludes. "It should be profitable so that we are able to sustain and be there for a long time in the future and continue investing in our people, our games and our technology.

"Now when we have in our hands an IP that we own then definitely we want to bring it to as wide an audience as possible, so it made sense. [Multi-platform] was a natural next step for us."
 

Machocruz

Arcane
Joined
Jul 7, 2011
Messages
4,318
Location
Hyperborea
I'm actually digging the concept. Character design is bland, but I'll survive. Never played Alan Wake, didn't seem very inspired from what i saw when it finally released. Quantum Break looked confused, trying to serve an idea of what a AAA blockbuster is supposed to be.
 

Wirdschowerdn

Ph.D. in World Saving
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Messages
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Clogging the Multiverse with a Crowbar
https://www.pcgamesinsider.biz/news...uantum-break-pc-launch-mistakes-with-control/

Remedy wants to make up for Quantum Break PC launch mistakes with Control

September 4th, 2018 - 10:17am
By Alex Calvin, Editor - PC Games Insider

Finnish game developer Remedy has said that it wants the PC version of its upcoming title Control to be as good as it can be.

That's according to communications director Thomas Puha, who says the firm wants to make up for the botched launch of its last game, Quantum Break, on the platform.

That title was published by Microsoft in early 2016 and was released on that company's new Windows 10 storefront - via the Big M's United Windows Platform (UWP) platform, which presented a number of challenges for the studio.

The Windows 10 SKU of Quantum Break launched with an unstable frame rate, crashes on PCs using Nvidia cards and poor data loading, among others issues. But Remedy is a studio that knows PC, and the company is keen to show its expertise with its 2019 release, Control.

"You always build on PC first, but then you lock it down to certain specs that reflect what the console versions will be. We're in a pretty good place," Puha said.

"We announced that we are going to have RTX (raytracing) support for PC, at least for the people who have the relevant cards. We're definitely making sure that the PC version is well catered for. On Quantum Break, our reputation did take a bit of a hit and we want to make sure that when Control comes out in 2019, the PC version will be as good as it can be."

He continued: "The challenge with Quantum Break on Windows 10 was that it was basically like launching on a new platform. There are difficulties when the storefront is new, UWP is new and we were probably slightly understaffed for it. In the end, we were able to work it out. It wasn't ideal."

I hope the PC port also comes with a pair of trousers.
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Messages
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/09/04/control-remedy-shooter-preview/

Control is a dream logic Metroidvania with a creepy fridge

70


There’s a man staring at a fridge, and he’s locked in a glass room.

“Oh thank god,” he cries. “I’ve been staring at it since yesterday with no breaks. Are you here to take over?”

This is a scene from Control, the upcoming psychological shooter from Remedy, the creators of Quantum Break and Max Payne. Our hero, Jesse Faden, is the newly appointed head of the Bureau of Control. She has entered a room where the Bureau keeps all the strange artifacts they find. One such object is this powerfully unsettling refrigerator, which must be observed at all times or else it will “deviate”. That’s why this man is so upset. He’s one of your agents, but an emergency has left him without a shift change for 24 hours. Unfortunately, we don’t have time to help. We’re just here to catch the Gamescom demo, after all.

“Wait!” he sobs as Jesse runs away. “Don’t leave me here!”

He never takes his eyes off the fridge. Control is a weird game.

Or maybe that should be “new weird”, if you want to indulge the developer as they chase a somewhat niche literary genre. As Remedy shows off the demo, they mention this as an inspiration. But they cite many movies and books with a sense of weirdness they want to capture. The Stalker movie by Tarkovsky, Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, the trippy ending of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.



“Basically the idea is that you encounter something that is possibly beyond human understanding,” says Mikael Kasurinen, Game Director. “There’s no physical way that you can wrap your head around what you are seeing.”

It’s a third-person shooter. We can wrap our heads around that much. When Jesse aims her gun, it can cycle through different firing modes. The gun itself is an “altered object”, one of those items that the Bureau seeks to quarantine, observe and control. It’s an unusual firearm, in that it throbs and shifts, with small metal cuboids floating around and re-ordering themselves to create different gun styles, according to the player’s whim.



The security staff and other Bureau officials have turned against you, so it’s time to use your weird gun to take them down. You don’t know exactly why everyone is acting aggressive, but it has something to do with a phenomenon called “the Hiss”. Another thing we’re told that is “beyond human comprehension”.

This otherworldly antagonistic anomaly is also causing the building itself to warp and shift as the player makes their way through its offices and hallways. Which means you are shooting your former colleagues while the walls turn inside out. Oh, and you’re throwing heavy furniture at them with new-found psychic powers, and telekinetically raising debris to use as a shield. If you were to pitch this game in an elevator, you’d say: “It’s Max Payne meets David Lynch”. And then the elevator doors would open into a caravan.


The Bureau is beset by this dream logic, we’re told. It’s very Inception. In a quieter moment, we follow Jesse as one door leads from a government building into the crimson lobby of an old motel, where the sunset is bleeding through the blinds. Later, in another concrete room, a cathode ray television will take off from its pedestal and create a swirling corkscrew of grey architecture through which Jesse will “levitate”. This is another ability granted by the strange objects of power she collects. So far, so unusual. But through all this, Control doesn’t entirely abandon the rules of reality (or game design). The Bureau’s corridors and research rooms are built with Metroidvanias in mind, says Remedy.

“You need to pay attention to the environment,” says Kasurinen, “everything you see has a meaning. If you see a door it can be opened, maybe not immediately, but eventually.”



The ability to levitate, for example, will get Jesse over pits. At one point, we follow our hero as she lifts herself into the air to cross a broken bridge that she wasn’t able to cross before. Her legs dangle unsteadily as she floats, like a rookie stunt double attached to an unseen wire. Later, we spy a wall of ice blockading a corridor, which suggests we’ll get some kind of melting power later. It puts in mind the backtracking and door-prising of Prey’s space station.



“[It’s] something very different compared to previous Remedy games,” says Kasurinen, “where most of the time the world was more like a backdrop and then you have this linear experience within that. Now, we have a very different type of approach. We’re not hand-holding our player anymore…

“They need to go the extra mile if they want to fully understand what’s going on, if they want to get all the possible rewards and resources to fully upgrade their character. They have to try and find that path and do side missions and find all of those secrets and so on.”



Side missions will crop up as you meet people, like the officer trapped by the attention-seeking fridge. We could help him out through some side quest, we’re told. But, like I said, we don’t have time for that. Mostly because we have the rest of the demo to see but also because an intense man in a strait jacket just flew through the wall and is now firing some metallic objects at us. Jesse chases him into an open area, and dodges his projectiles with a speedy “blink” ability. The enemy flies around, the cloth arms of his strait jacket flapping like wings.



Everywhere he flies, he leaves an oily trail of vapour behind him. This same warped gas also puffs out of his body as Jesse finally kills him, a creepy visual effect that adds yet more dream rules to this world. People don’t bleed when they’re hurt. They leak gas.

This dreaminess has to be embraced by Jesse, if she is to succeed. Or so she’s told by the disembodied voice of the Bureau’s former director. A big, shadow-faced man called Trench. Basically, he’s the voice guiding you through the game (at least he is at this stage). It’s not the tinny voice of a support agent in your earpiece, but a ghostly figure overlaid on the screen in certain moments. If you’ve played Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, you’ll recognise the effect. He’s a ghostly image, bleeding in and out of your vision to deliver cryptic advice.

“Dream logic is a requirement,” he says.



True, it all feels like one big lucid cheesedream, with extra bullets. The “altered objects” in particular have their own logic, we’re told, even if it’s not obvious at first. And the idea behind many of the Bureau’s encounters, is that they exist in a place “where the mundane meets the strange”, says Kasurinen. We see that formula in action when Jesse passes a cleaning lady who is calmly mopping up the aftermath of a gunfight and quietly whistling to hersel as if nothing is wrong. But this formula – mundane + strange = new weird – almost feels too easy. At any point, a level designer at Remedy could simply point at his desk and say: “That lamp could be a bit freaky.”

“It’s a bit more refined [than that],” laughs Kasurinen. “It always starts from a place of: what is compelling for the player but makes sense within the world that we’re creating? So it can’t be random, right? And there is a kind of strange logic to what these things can do, and you kind of follow that.

“I think it’s important that the team has a sense of freedom in exploring the different possibilities but what always seems to happen is a refinement process where we kind of end up with objects that click into place and serve the larger purpose of the game.”



To harness this dream logic, like Trench says, Jesse needs to perform rituals. In the demo, these seem to be baked-in bits of dialogue, rather than something the player can affect. She walks up to a light-switch cord dangling from the ceiling and turns it on and off multiple times.

“I have a right to be here,” she says to herself. “I have the clearance.”

This whole idea of mundane rituals, especially the turning on and off of lights, comes up a couple of times during the demo. It’s never explicitly said, but it feels like a clear nod to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (or the popular idea of it). The other things Jesse mutters to herself sound like the incantations of a woman who listens to self-help tapes. “Going forward, never backward,” she says. “I am in control.” At these moments, the game seems to be angling at some deeper observation about mental health (I mean, there was also that guy in the strait jacket). But precisely what the creators are trying to say remains unclear, even when I ask the game’s director about it.

“When we talk about rituals,” says Kasurinen, “we don’t mean this old-fashioned kind with somebody summoning a demon with goat blood and so on. We’re talking about real consequences to symbolic acts, basically.

“OCD is an interesting example of that, where people do certain types of things out of an obsession but they can think that it has real meaning – ‘if I don’t do this something horrible will happen’. And you can see the ritualistic angle to that kind of thinking.

“So when you see what we call ‘rituals’ in the game, they definitely come from that place, more than that, let’s say, old fashioned sacrifice… we wanted to have a fresh, modern take on that.”



Even if the imagery and dialogue seems obvious in this instance, Control is a game dense with unknowns. Both in the sense that it is purposefully mysterious, courting the weirdness of Inside and Virginia at the same time. But also unknown in the sense that I don’t know how it plays (this is a hands-off demonstration). I don’t know if the physical building of the Bureau follows the free-form code-busting of Talos station or if its powers and unlocks are given out in a stricter manner, whether it’s enough to appease the Metroidvaniacs. I don’t even know if it feels fun to hurl a desk at your former workmate’s head. It looks fun, like the old box-flinging of Psi-ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy. But as long as I only have a twenty minute presentation to work from, Jesse will be as functionally unknowable to me as the Hiss she is fighting against.

This is the problem with the unknowable, I can’t tell you if it’s clever or not. The “new weird” genre Remedy is channeling has the frustrating characteristic of being so open to interpretation that any reader or viewer can come up with a piping hot take about what the hell is happening, and it will be considered valid even if it is unconvincing. That broadness, the unrelenting force of weirdness, is always going to turn some people right off. But that’s not something the makers of this world are worried about, says Kasurinen.



“I’m not worried that people are alienated,” he says. “We don’t want to compromise too much just to make it approachable to everybody on the planet. We instead want to create a game that challenges the player, and in a positive way. It’s a world you have to explore to fully understand.

“I think there’s a way to do strange things in a way that is awe-inspiring and terrifying at the same time. But at the same time it also feels like there’s a hidden meaning or connecting tissue between all of these things that you can begin to try and understand. It’s a tricky balance to maintain but something that we’re willing to do.”
 

Master

Arbiter
Joined
Oct 19, 2016
Messages
1,160
"Later we spy a wall of ice blockading a corridor which suggests we'll get some kind of melting power later. It puts in mind the backtracking and door prying of Prey."

Hmm this reminds me of that old game, Prey... Imma gonna write it down!

- gaming journalist
 

Ivan

Arcane
Joined
Jun 22, 2013
Messages
7,474
Location
California
But is it a solid TPS? How does the gunplay hold up to American Nightmare?
 

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