WAKE UP HONEY, CONTROL TURNS FIVE-YEARS OLD NEXT WEEK.

Control, huh? Woo-wee what a video game. I remember where I was at when I started Control. It was April of 2021. COVID was going on. I've been working progressively less due to mounting dread, anxiety, and COVID crippling my ability to be out of my house or around people for extended periods of time. In retrospect, it's kinda funny looking back on COVID in the context of a video game, but a lot of us feel like these games came out decades ago and felt influential to your growth as a person; they got us through the darkest periods of our lives and felt their impact for years, if not decades to come. And then we look at the calendar and it's only been four years.

I remember COVID explicitly through video games. I remember moving in with my new roommates in January of 2020, finally out on my own, picking up additional hours at work, becoming more autonomous in my life. I scoped out the place earlier last year when I went to visit, took eight shots of vodka, two bong rips, trounced my friends in Mario Party, and then proceeded to pass out on the hardwood floor so fucking blasted that I was attempting to not drown in my own vomit for half the night. I had to do the drunken walk of shame to the shower and with my clothes soaked, I had to sit in a towel in the guest room at 4am. Those people would later choose me as their new, most qualified roommate after the last one was kicked out for abusing his dog and in general being a twat. I had a breakdown with my current roommate and best friend about how I pissed away money on a brief fling with a drug addiction, so I had far less money than planned to move with. Things were coming up Edie in early 2020. Fuck yeah, let's live and let live.

Right, and then I distinctly remembered a phone call with my close friend after somebody close to them took their own life. It happened a month before COVID really got into the swing of things. It was one of the big pushes to start writing a book, which would become a helpful distraction during what would soon follow. “Well, things can always get better this year, right?” And yeah, then the COVID stuff happened. I felt like my life as a NEET prepared me for this event, and initially things were actually pretty good. I had foodstamps rolling in, we only shopped at 11pm at night. My life was mostly unchanged since I barely left the house in the first place. I even already owned a mask purely for aesthetic purposes that I was able to start wearing and looking adorable while keeping myself safe from the plague.

I also remember how FFXIV basically became my real job in lieu of my actual one that went on indefinite hiatus. I remember getting Paper Mario: The Origami King and it being the last game I played at my new apartment before getting evicted; COVID caused my roommates to disperse and go back home, leaving me alone for the vast majority of the time in the apartment. Just grinding away at FFXIV and then playing TOK before returning back to my friend's house with my tail between my legs. I remember TOK being my eviction coping game, and to this day it remains one of my favorite games for what was otherwise a very dark period in my life.

In April of 2021 I was perusing my backlog and forgot I bought Control for like 15 bucks during a Steam sale. I bought it on a whim, and the only thing I knew about it was the Alan Wake/Max Payne guys made it (games I never played), and Jeff Gerstmann really liked it. So I watched the E3 2018 trailer of the game.

This remains one of my favorite trailers of all time. I was utterly mesmerized by the Brutalist aesthetics. There are loads of articles on the internet dedicated to the Oldest House's design and architecture. And that's important for reasons beyond just looking cool, because the Oldest House is an ever-changing entity that's effectively its own character. The world within the Oldest House is fucking surreal and constantly restructuring itself. It's basically a haunted government building infected with a supernatural hell aura called the Hiss that has warped most if not all its inhabitants into horribly mutated enemies trying to hunt you down and kill you. The halls of a government building seems hardly the place for a game to take place, but the Oldest House has a shitload of nooks and crannies to discover. The implementation of ray-tracing gives every piece of architecture a breath of life in what appears to be a very sterile environment of offices and mail rooms and meeting rooms littered with obelisks and broken geometry. It's filled with mysteries ripe for the taking, with mythical objects, hellish monstrosities, and a LOT of redacted government files and paperwork. What exactly was the Federal Bureau of Control doing in the Oldest house? A lot of shenanigans, apparently.

Wait a second... an abandoned environment that feels alive? Fighting off infested enemies? Collecting data logs? Getting new weapons and abilities that allow you to progress and backtrack for secrets? ...Did I get bamboozled into playing a Metroid Prime game?

There are definitely a lot of similarities in the general gameplay design philosophy between the two games if you cast a broad enough net. But at least to me, this is the Metroid Prime game we didn't get for most of this generation. And yet, Control manages to forge its own unique identity; an identity that is very distinctly Control. I think most of this comes from the upgrade system and how you interact with enemies and the environment. Of course you have a shape-shifting gun that comes with a variety of ways to kill the Hiss, with gunshots and explosions dismembering not just enemies but a very interactive environment. And it has to be interactive, because the stars of the show are the telekinetic powers that you gradually unlock by acquiring obscure objects of power.

Want to kill somebody without a gun? Use your psychic powers to throw objects at people. You can launch pieces of the environment, explosive barrels, fire extinguishers, and eventually you can catch explosive projectiles and send them back at enemies, launch heavier objects like forklifts and soda machines, and even launch people. You can also gather a shitload of objects and fling a verifiable wall of shit at people. Speaking of flinging walls of shit at people, you can rip terrain and use it as a shield against enemy gunfire and even ram people or shoot your wall at them. And if you get tired of fighting alone, you can seize the mind of your enemies and turn them into temporary allies. And of course like every good Metroid Prime game, you eventually unlock a lategame mobility tool that fundamentally changes how you interact with the environment and enables a bunch of backtracking opportunities, which is where the Levitate power comes in; it's literal flight.

Also the other factor that carries this game worth mentioning is the lore and world-building. The Oldest House plays by its own rules, obscure rituals, and has a myriad of Objects of Power with their own mysteries to themselves. You learn of some of the inhumane experiments that took place there, the very nature of what warrants death and existence, and also frankly some hilarious shit about backfired experiments and objects of power condemning people to death, or worse, a fractured existence. I have purposely avoided discussing the narrative at length because frankly I think you should all play this game and enjoy the psychotic ride that the story takes you on. And also because it's filled with so many story threads and mysteries that it would take a whole other article discussing them. That being said, I'm going to spoil this part and discuss the Ashtray Maze, one of the most brilliant levels in video games. The Ashtray Maze is the ultimate security measure walling off the Dimensional Research facility, being virtually impossible to navigate until funnily enough you get a cassette player and headphones and blast music while traversing it. What proceeds to unfold is one of the most mind-fucking set-pieces in a video game in the past 5 years. It really has to be seen to be believed.

Control is one of, arguably the wildest ride I've been on in the past 10 years. If it weren't for Bloodborne, Doom 2016, Shadowbringers, Breath of the Wild, and Elden Ring, it would be my favorite game in the past decade. But being able to tango with the likes of those is a testament to how good this game is. It's a phenomenal experience, pure and simple.

...Oh god I just realized Bloodborne turns 10 next year. What a wild ride it's been. Thank COVID for the time compression.