Today’s game is Control. I went through the ashtray maze today. I had wanted to get a portrait of Jesse with the headphones and everything on, but i had a friend asking about the game and was focused on getting a small clip of this segment to show to him to convince him to try it. I had missed my window. From what i hear you can replay it in the AWE DLC so i’ll settle for it there.
I’ve been stopping and taking in the Hotline calls this playthrough too. One thing i noticed was Trench is awfully close to Max Payne. And i don’t just mean that in the way they share a VA/Actor. I mean it literally. Wife is gone (either dead like Max or Gone like Alex Casey), similar tone and habits, wielded a gun, works for a government agency of some sort (NYPD for Max and FBC for Trench).
spoiler
As far as i remember, it was implied Alan Wake had a little bit to do with the events of control. I wonder if Trench is a result of that and it was another one of his attempts. It’s interesting to me because it kind of mirrors how he’s following in the footsteps of Alex Casey in Cauldron Lake. Only in Control it’s Jesse following Trench’s Echoes.
Something else i missed in my first playthrough were some of the control points that are way out of the way were made by Ahti. I was in a hurry and missed that they were all made out of Cleaning Supplies which i thought was a cool detail.
Anyways, i was a bit short on time and went through the Ashtray maze today. That’s where i left off. I want to actually finish this tomorrow and start the DLCs too. So that will hopefully be tomorrow.
control is such a cool ip, it’s a real shame that it’s so combat focused. i wanted more mystery, more things to solve. instead i got “look at this weird thing! now shoot some guys next to it” for 10 hours.
like, that thing with the central power generator? genuinely great environmental storytelling. but then they don’t really do anything with it. not that they have to examine every little thing in detail, but… they could have examined some things.
it’s sort of related to how i feel about pacific drive; full of neat ideas that are just used as set dressing for the main loop.
For sure, I think they did a very interesting thing with the game. This organization has a purpose and a daily function. You spend your whole time in a workplace of sorts. But you are not a worker, you’re not even an employee, and you as Jesse only show up after shit has hit the fan. They’re already in the emergency. She’s never been here before, and neither have we. And she doesn’t care how the company operates day-to-day, she doesn’t care how the lights are kept on or the heating functions, she’s showed up in an office that’s turned into a combat zone to do combat and rescue her brother.
And so I kinda like how we aren’t given rundowns on normal operations because this is not normal operation, and Jesse isn’t interested, and so we’re pushed through the emergency. But there are bits of environmental storytelling, and scraps of paper, and notes and tapes, that tell curius players “you know, on a normal day, this place is a different kind of weird. You’ve just shown up on an even weirder day”
i like that kind of thing in theory but when “even weirder” equates to “there are guys to shoot everywhere” i lose interest. alan wake had the same issue. it worked in max payne because the story is already batshit insane.
I feel like they did through the tapes that Darling left behind.
Yeah. I knew I was getting bored with pacific drive once
Tap for spoiler
The Tourists stopped bothering me.
Control IP needs a game like Cultist Simulator.
for me i was done with it almost as soon as it started. for a game called pacific drive you do basically no driving. i had hoped for some sort of supernatural stormchasing sim, but the tiny maps and frequent obstacles mean you really only have any use for the car when leaving or entering. otherwise it’s just in the way.
also, i got so fed up with the damage system that i disabled it, but that also disables quirks, which just seems like the game punishing you for not playing the correct way by removing unrelated gameplay elements.
Oh, well. I finished and got almost all achievements because I’m like that, can’t let up.
I wanted to do a permadeath or some other hardcore run but by the point I finished the main story I was kinda checked out.
Tried the roguelite mode, it seems interesting, but nearly totally separate and see above.
I’d like to revisit, but dunno if I will.