Talvez tivesse feito mais sentido eu jogar esse jogo antes do Alan Wake 2 já que ele explica e introduz uma cacetada de conceitos pro universo da Remedy, mas jogando agora foi até um refresco entender melhor algumas coisas. Control é realmente impressionante tecnicamente, ainda mais em um mundo onde os jogos carecem de personalidade, todo lançamento da Remedy esbanja disso e sempre tenta fazer algo de diferente, Control consegue fazer um ótimo uso da física, que é algo que eu me amarro, sou simplesmente viciado em ficar me jogando de prédios e carros no GTA IV só pra ver o Niko se esborrachando, e aqui os cenários são altamente destrutíveis, tudo tem interação de acordo com suas ações e a gameplay é uma delícia, os poderes são extremamente divertidos e o conceito de uma arma que se transforma em diferentes armas acrescentam ainda mais variedade pra gameplay.

Eu vi muita gente falando que a história desse jogo é muito confusa e complexa, até certo ponto realmente é, mas por trás de tantos termos complicados e conceitos sem explicação, a história é bem simples, o problema é que o desenrolar dela é bem lento e se você não ler nada ou não prestar atenção suficiente, você vai ficar boiando do começo ao fim. Superficialmente, a história não passa de uma irmã tentando achar seu irmão e salvar ele, a questão é que o universo da Remedy é repleto de coisinhas complicadas, Objetos de Poder, Itens Alterados, o Ruído, a Presença Obscura, o Lugar Escuro, o Plano Astral, mas sinceramente nenhum desses termos tem muita utilidade, o quê você precisa saber é que os objetos de poder são conectados com o plano astral e o plano astral se conecta com qualquer fenômeno paranormal no mundo, já os itens alterados não se conectam, porém, são afetados por fenômenos paranormais.

O Ruído é uma espécie de infecção paranormal que toma controle de tudo que toca, menos a protagonista por ela ser imune, aí cabe a você achar seu irmão e acabar com essa praga. O interessante é que a Jesse não tem "livre arbítrio", tudo na vida dela foi manipulado, a Polaris basicamente controla ela o jogo todo, o próprio Alan Wake interferiu na vida dela pra história do jogo acontecer, e você, como jogador, também tomou controle da vida dela durante toda a jornada, então mesmo que ela tenha controle sob o ambiente, sob os inimigos e seja super poderosa, no fim, ela não controla nada, e sim os outros personagens desse universo que controlam ela.

A trilha sonora do jogo é fodástica igual nos outros jogos da Remedy, principalmente o pedaço tocando rock com o cenário inteiro se modificando, os gráficos do jogo são do caralho apesar dessa engine ter um problema chatão de delay de render e ghosting no PC, a direção das cutscenes trazem alguns ângulos bem inventivos, o level design do jogo é bem intuitivo, raramente você se perde e quando se perde é por culpa do mapa horrível desse jogo que funde todos os andares em um só, as missões secundárias são bem legaizinhas e recompensadoras, no geral o jogo é extremamente competente, infelizmente a má apresentação da história e alguns problemas de pacing acabaram estragando a experiência de muita gente.

Control foi um jogaço, tava bem curioso pra jogar e eu me diverti muito, aí como eu sou pobre, gostaria de agradecer a @chrisredfield que deixou de comprar açaí pra me dar o jogo, te amo mano.

There's a really solid foundation here, but this game is held back by so many fundamental issues that keep it from being anything more than okay. It can be really fun to throw shit around with telekinesis for a while, but the combat eventually becomes really stale. Enemies are damage sponges and eventually you won't even be using your gun, just hurling shit at endless waves of the same repeated mobs, only shooting when your energy is on cooldown. The art design here is phenomenal, and implements live action in genius ways, but nearly every area you explore looks identical, and the in game models look incredibly uncanny, it's honestly hilarious every time it cuts from a live action scene to their in game model that looks like them made out of clay. The story has some really interesting concepts, but I was mostly just interested in the facility, Dr. Darling and the stuff with Alan Wake. The main plot involving Jesse, her brother and the hiss feels incredibly half baked, and ends as soon as it feels like it's really picking up.
The game really wasn't that bad, but it really started wearing me down by the end with it's repetitive gameplay. I only played this because I was interested in continuing Alan Wake and heard there was stuff relating to the story in this game, and I can't really say it was worth it in that regard, but if you're interested I think you should check it out. Despite it's flaws, there's still a lot of fun to be had here, for a while at least.

Remedy games are so good man, for real. I loved Alan Wake so I figured I would dig this one as well. And so I did, finished this in 2 days while sick and what a trip it was. The lore, the universe and the story are all pretty good - mysterious weird trippy stuff.

The plot and characters were maybe just decent when compared with Alan Wake or even Bioshock and the likes. But, in a similar fashion to Alan Wake, the universe and lore are more interesting than the actual plot - though Alan Wake's is better.

Gameplay wise it gets kinda repetitive but it's got pretty fun and creative combat, with some sparse puzzles sprinkled in there.

The thing that makes the game what it is though is it's CHARM. The aesthetic, the narration, the live action videos are all super charming. The whole thing reaks of David Lynch, as Alan Wake did too. Although this one leans more towards Stephen King and X-Files too.

Overall really great game, even if it's a bit repetitive at times and doesn't have the strongest of characters or story.

I think I saw somewhere that all Remedy games are linked in the same universe too, which could make the lore in here even better.

One of the bigger disappointments I've played. As a premise, Control is awesome: Dynamic gameplay and an SCP style lore to it. However, it gets totally dull very fast. Its gameplay is repetitive and easily exploitable; with a story that fails to grip you along side totally vanilla characters.

If they ever do a sequel then I'm sure they can fix this. This first game though is not as fun as you would think and overall a letdown. Even the Alan Wake DLC: a game I really enjoyed, wasn't all that good. Great visuals and sound design though.

has its fun moments and overall a good game, just marred with the unnecessarily excessive, constant waves of enemies at almost every turn that simply feel like they're getting in the way of the storytelling. wouldn't have complained if at least the combat was more varied, but instead, seemingly, only the enemy quantities are turned up as the game progresses. wore me down enough for me to finish the last two-ish missions with the no-damage assist setting turned on.
also, the map UI is some unintuitive garbage for some reason. and some of the puzzles felt kinda lame.
the Ashtray Maze was really cool, though.

After playing Alan Wake 2, I remembered playing Control for free with PS+. I remember it was kinda neat, but this was like upwards of 3 years ago so i dont remember any of that. Eventually I just sorta dropped it and it skipped my mind. Until now i guess, and honestly? What a game.

Control is a start of the Remedy Cinematic Universe (positive) and tells a story about something going on at the SCP fou- i mean the Federal Bureau of Control. Right of the bat to get it out of the way, yeah it's more or less an unofficial SCP game. Difference is the FBC is less morally dubious (it still is but they dont feed prisoners into objects just to see what would happen). The story itself is pretty ok. Nothing amazing up until the end when a couple of big bombshells get revealed. What sells this game is the presentation, it's really damn cool to put it bluntly. It's a bit avant garde but not enough that you can't understand anything happening in it. The weird mist effect the Hiss soldiers have, the way the environment ends up falling apart as you fight in the big arenas the game has, it's small stuff that adds up to make the game feel way bigger then, in reality, it actually is.

The gameplay is where i was worried going in though. Remedy always has good stories and characters and such, but the gameplay has always been a mixed bag. In this game, it's honestly not bad but it's nothing mind blowing. It's a standard action shooty game, but you have some cool powers. Throwing objects, which does an OBSCENE amount of damage and breaks shields, is your main one, but you can also dash, make a sheild, just do a ton of fun stuff and it spices up what would normally be a very middling game. Especially late in the game. HOWEVER: at least on normal difficulty, its veeeery easy to cheese the game. Enemy AI isnt the best, and you can easily break the game with throwing objects. It's still fairly fun, but yeah it's...fine.

Honestly the biggest thing i have an issue with is the mods system. You get a billion different crafting elements and it's to craft weapons, which most of them I never ended up using more than once, and mods. Mods are just that, they modify your character and your weapons, but most of the mods are just kinda boring stat boosts. In fact, all of them are for personal mods. Weapon mods have some good ones though, like tightening the choke on Shatter (the shotgun) or other various effects like that, but generally the mods are uninteresting busy work and clutter. This is a pet peeve but i also just ended up using the starting pistol and the shotgun the entire game. Never really needed to switch them.

The side missions range from busy work to neat. The best ones are dealing with altered items, usually cause you get some sort of ability afterwards, and just cause it's fun to see what they come up with. The altered items/objects of power are always fun. It's my favorite type of SPCs too, just random things that do silly (or dangerous) stuff. You also get board countermeasures and protocols, which are just "kill enemies in [blank] area" missions. They're busy work, didn't intentionally do any of them.

Really, what sells this game for me is passion. This is clearly something that Remedy wanted to make, a story that Sam Lake wanted to tell, and something that the entire dev team put their heart into. The presentation, the story, the pretty dang neat gameplay, it all comes together to make a pretty good package. I haven't gotten to the dlc yet, but control is fantastic. Highly would recommend it if you haven't played it.

I was really looking forward to an engaging narrative and I don't think this really delivers on that front (the main story, anyways). The first three-quarters or so of the game are structured in a way similar to open world games, where you're running errands and doing favours for different people. The decision to do this is all the more puzzling as the game feels as if it struggles to fit the story it wanted to tell in its last leg, as it crams so much in the last hour or two of the game, making what should have been important plot points feel rushed and underbaked, whilst the rest of the games feels largely empty.

Admittedly, I skipped reading many of the notes scattered about the game, and I really wish I hadn't. After seeing reviews which recommended reading through these and playing through the side missions, I spent some time doing just that and came to appreciate the game much more by the end of it.

While the story is quite bland, the real meat of the narrative in this game is the world building present in the collectables. Learning about the history and inner workings of the FBC was endlessly fascinating, and I really wish this aspect of the game had a much more central role. I swear, some of Trench's inner monologues, available in the collectables menu, were not even shown in the game. I also wish this was implemented in a way which didn't kill any momentum the game had, which is why I largely skipped these. And while some of the side missions are just glorified fetch quests, some do expand on the FBC in meaningful ways, and have some great optional bosses.

The actual gameplay, however, is brilliant, and I feel as though I would love this game a lot more on a second playthrough! Although I don't want to commit to that just yet, I am very excited to check out the DLC.

I get it. I get why people love this. But to me, the combat and enemy design was mostly bad. But much worse is the incredibly poorly designed skill tree:
The game has 8 different branches of powers to level up, but if you level up anything other than your throw power this is a huge mistake and you will have a bad time playing this game. The melee power even fully upgraded does essentially no damage. It is just wasted points. Health upgrades also don't matter at all, because everything basically tickles you or one shots you. I didn't explore the shield powers or ground slam, but I would be shocked if those could hold a candle to the throw.

I would have liked the combat and therefore the entire game better if that skill tree wasn't so horribly balanced.

did a quick replay through the base game plus all side quests and hidden areas so i can move onto the DLC and Alan Wake II finally. there's so many nice costumes/skins in this game that end up available after you're finished pretty much. such a waste tbh.

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as with Quantum Break before it, this was also a bit better than i had given credit for in the past. the combat plays like a refined version of what that game was working with but the powers stand out more on their own and have much more oomph/impact to them. Jesse feels like one of the biggest examples of glass cannon i've encountered in a game in that you will be reaming EVERYTHING but can only take two, maybe three solid hits yourself before dying. playing this the first time years back near release before any of the updates with combat settings and better performance (this game made my PS4 pro sound like a hairdryer constantly) made for a rough adjustment with the relative difficulty of everything but today it fared better. as long as you boost your health/energy a few levels earlyish on, level your launch to max asap, and keep moving you should be okay.

elsewhere i also enjoy the moment to moment gameplay of navigating the Oldest House which has a surprising amount of variance in pathways, hidden areas, and other stuff to uncover. getting from point A to point B at times can be more complicated than expected which is natural for its setting. this was a replay and my prior knowledge kept most of this just fresh enough that i wasn't getting lost much, if at all.

the only place this truly stumbles is in personal investment to the narrative, overall universe, and characters honestly. Jesse as a lead character is someone that i go back and forth on. some of the abrupt cuts to her inner monologue are funny and among the best parts of the game but at the same time she falls into the gabby protagonist/player character thing that wears thin for me. at large, the characters are stronger than the narrative and universe itself for me with Arish and Marhall being my favorites. almost every section of the Oldest House is absolutely stunning, it just ends up being a bit of a pretty but otherwise vacant thing for me.

who knows, maybe the DLC chapters will be what fully pull me into Control investment wise. at the very least, i'm under the impression that the second one in some way helps set up Alan Wake II so it should have that going for it at least. curious to how Control 2 turns out as well. exciting times for Remedy.

Not long into this, my other half and I realised the mysteries we were soaking in would never have any kind of satisfactory answers. That we were totally fooled by the fakeout ending ("well, THAT was SHIT") is a testament to how little we were invested. But then it does something really interesting! But then it goes back to being a shootybang.

I don't mean to be cruel, there's some fantastic stuff in here, but your only real contribution to this world of endless possibility is violence. One sidequest has you run back and forth between two NPCs until one of them dies. Do they stay alive if you just don't do the quest? Yes or no, either outcome is ultimately meaningless.

As many have pointed out, this is basically SCP: The Videogame. But you could just read some SCP and you wouldn't have to play a videogame.

You know what this reminds me of? Moon: https://www.backloggd.com/u/JimTheSchoolGirl/review/204858/

Queria jogar Alan Wake e li que seria interessante jogar Control pra entender melhor a história de Alan Wake, e como Control tava na ps plus extra (que eu assino) resolvi jogar.
O jogo começa lento e se sustenta na narrativa, depois a gameplay se sustenta sozinha e é perfeitamente temperada pela ambientação e narrativa.
Eu joguei com o ps5 focado na qualidade e não desempenho e com isso senti alguns pequenos engasgos que acredito serem meios absurdos, visto que o jogo foi lançado pra ps4, mas não é nada que incomode tanto.
Fora isso, o jogo dessa maneira é lindo, meio escuro demais em alguns ambientes, mas num geral eu gostei muito.
A gameplay é muito dinâmica e com um bom nivel de dificuldade, tendo alguns chefes e desafios opcionais bem complicados. Ela consegue se tornar bem diversa com os poderes que você vai aprendendo e com as diferentes formas da sua arma principal.
A exploração tem bem uma vibe metroidvania 3d, com áreas que só são acessíveis mais tarde, e o jogo faz você re-explorar essas áreas de maneiras orgânicas e divertidas.
Agora o que faz esse jogo ser incrível pra mim é o nível de criatividade do universo e narrativa. O nível de conteúdo pra contextualizar e ambientar o jogador, através de flashbacks, documentos, gravações é impressionante. Sinceramente é tanto conteúdo que eu devo ter pulado por volta de uns 20% por estar cansado naquela sessão de gameplay específica.

Esse jogo é um prato cheio pra quem gosta de narrativas instigantes e envolventes, e ainda se sustenta como um bom jogo para aqueles que só se importam com a gameplay e ação nos jogos.
Só não quis platinar pois tem muitas conquistas que são apenas pra render mais horas de gameplay, pouco criativas e muito menos divertidas.

a really good game with some absolutely transcendentally great moments (and some poor design choices, stiff writing/character performances and occasionally goes total cornball).

Overall the atmosphere is terrific. Such a great setting, very fun world building, a cool progression of powers and some fun excuses to get off the beaten path and explore. I wish there was more of that, the crates are fun to find because they're fun to find but the crafting system and upgrade tree is pretty poorly designed so finding stuff rarely makes you feel like you found anything actually helpful.

I think my biggest issue is that the Oldest House could feel more fun to traverse. It's big, and sort of interconnected, but never really gives the satisfaction you get in great Metroidvanias when you turn a corner or go down a hallway and realize you know where you are, where you gradually gain a deeper understanding of the geography of the space. There are too many fast travel points so you never have to learn how anything connects. This could've been fixed with more thoughtful design. More shortcuts, elevators, staircase, hallways zig zagging across the areas. Limit fast travel to maybe one control point per zone. Make me understand the space, make me figure out how to get back to an old area. More interesting traversal and better rewards would make the side quests a little more interesting, too.

Combat is usually pretty fun, has a decent difficulty curve. You are forced to evaluate a situation and figure out the best approach. Unfortunately in the end the best approach is usually "throw a ton of stuff at the bad guys with your psychic powers" and that gets a little repetitive.

This game was a blast to play through but it was far too short, preventing many of its great qualities from really shining. Control is a graphically beautiful game, which boasts a solid physics engine and destructible environments. It also does a lot of world-building through scattered classified documents that you can read, recordings that utilize 1980's-era video technology, and dialogue with a few important characters. All of these collectibles set the groundwork for a really mysterious and interesting story, though it sort of falls flat. As far as optimization and playability are concerned, I was able to run this game pretty well on high settings with ray tracing on, though there were many occasions where the game would crash abruptly. Combat was very fun, with a variety of special abilities, forms for the Service Weapon, and objects in the environment at your disposal. As you progress through the game and collect resources, the Service Weapon will become more versatile, capable of transforming into many different weapon types. Special abilities are unlocked by "cleansing" so-called "objects of power (OoPs)" found throughout the story or through side-missions, and these abilities will aid you in fighting certain enemy types or in traversing through the environment. The enemies you fight are personnel of the Federal Bureau of Control who are "Hiss-corrupted," with some possessing powers similar to those you are able to unlock. Each enemy type requires some strategic use of your arsenal. The building the game takes place in, "The Oldest House," is home to many different sectors with notable set pieces that were very fun to explore and fight enemies within. The architecture is very abstract and provides a lot of verticality to spice up enemy encounters. This game has two expansions available: AWE and The Foundation, both of which contribute to the lore and add some fun and distinct elements. AWE serves as a crossover between the new Control IP and the Alan Wake franchise, also by Remedy. I cannot really comment on the quality of this crossover as I still have not played the Alan Wake franchise as of the writing of this review, but from the perspective of Control, the new elements meshed well with the already established gameplay. In contrast, The Foundation is purely focused on a new threat taking place in The Oldest House after the events of the main campaign. This expansion provides more new abilities for you to use, though they are isolated, and unable to be used outside of the new sector that the expansion takes place in. In conclusion, this game was a very fun experience that gave me a lot to play around with. There were many unforgettable moments during this game that left me anticipating the sequel that is apparently in the works.