I have conflicted feelings on whether or not I’m actually finished with Control, but I figure I have to do it sometime. I’ve completed the story, and Jesse is now the “official” director of the Federal Bureau of Control, and while I’m completely down with the weirdness that usually accompanies Remedy’s games, I can’t help but feel like I missed something. And in a game like this, you can definitely miss something.
I know there were some things left undone. For example, I attempted the Mirror Dimension but was repeatedly getting my ass handed to my by Essej, so I tipped my hat and bid it adieu and moved on. I honestly thought I was doing main story content, and decided to tackle the Ashtray Maze instead. That ended up being the main story quest and I accidentally beat the game. So that was that. I got the weird fake ending and then played through to the real ending, but did I do everything? Is there endgame content to tackle, the DLC notwithstanding?
With the ending of the game feeling a bit abrupt, it leaves me with the feeling that I didn’t do something. Like, for example, the story with Jesse’s brother, who is (we’re led to believe) the entire reason Jesse is at the FBC in the first place, kinda turns out to be a red herring. Then we’re led to believe he’s the main antagonist. Then we’re led to believe…. something. To be honest, the ending main very little sense to me. Her brother is nothing more than a McGuffin, apparently.
I haven’t done either DLC yet, at that is what has me torn. There are only two, but from what I understand, the first one, The Foundation, is passable, but the second, AWE, is not to be missed. It ties in with the Alan Wake Xbox 360 game, but whether or not it’s a direct epilogue to that game is still a bit unclear to me.
In any case, I’m kinda glad to be done with that game. It was a great experience, and the combat was really fun, but damn I got tired of wandering around the Oldest House. I loved (read: LOVED) the concept of it, that it’s a building inside of a pocket dimension that’s always shifting and phasing between realities is fucking awesome. I also loved the retro 60’s aesthetic of the offices and hallways. It reminded me of every old office building I walked into as a kid. I could smell that place. Mainly musty carpets and cigarettes. Nostalgia was strong there.
But damn it got old fast, especially when the Hiss could spawn in anywhere, at any time. There are only a handful of different Hiss types and after a while it just became a chore to have to fight them off when you just wanted to get from Point A to Point B. Trying to remember where you’re supposed to go, and navigating using an extremely unhelpful map, when most of those hallways tend to look similar, just made things a bit more tedious than I think they were intended to be. It really is the fun combat and the intriguing story that moves things along.
I like Jesse’s character. I also like the fact that her inner monologue, her psychic conversations with an entity that never speaks, leaves us with only her half of the conversation. More like the entity is nudging her along using only feelings and impulses rather than actual words. Which is cool, but at the same time, it makes the ending kinda confusing, since you never really know what the entity is or what it wants, and only know what Jesse tells us in her thoughts. I feel like this hurt the ending, because we only have Jesse as a proxy, and never communicate directly to it. Think of it like a conversation with a friend that tells you they just got cheated on by their significant other that you’ve never actually met. Yeah, you feel for your friend, but can you really hate a person you’ve never seen, or heard, or even talked to? You’re basically just mad at the idea of the person. You have no focal point for your feelings, they’re just nebulous feelings for a person named Frank, or Jill, or whatever. Since there’s no tangibility for this being, there’s nothing to focus your anger on. And the end of the game is the same. You see this containment object, that breaks open and is… empty. For one brief encounter, you (and Jesse) have a physical object on which to focus your feelings. But then that’s it. It opens and you’re back to a nebulous entity that you can’t touch or see. It makes the whole thing feel a bit empty, and that’s the main shortcoming of the game as a whole. The whole thing just ends up feeling… empty.
Did Jesse save her brother? Did her brother even exist? Was he just a manifestation of the Hiss? Did the Hiss completely consume him? Honestly the game might have answered this, but there was so much weirdness and flashbacks and exposition going on, it might have gone in one ear and out the other, or just been buried under all the other things. It was a bit of an info dump, and very little of it actually sunk in. I may have to read a wiki or something just to see if what I think happened is what actually happened.
So there you have it. Control. It’s weird “more questions than answers” approach is what made it so intriguing, but also what made it ultimately unsatisfying.
