Control is the best Remedy game I've played thus far, because it's the only Remedy game I've played that lets the gameplay speak for itself. Alan Wake 1's RE4 imitation has certainly not aged as badly as a lot of people say, but it didn't always feel like it suited the game, and Alan Wake 2's mixture of survival and action horror was certainly ambitious but it wasn't exactly good either.

Meanwhile Control has a different problem: it's too fun but doesn't shake it up. Control definitely gets pretty repetitive at times, the enemy variety is low even when accounting for how short the game is, and the telekinesis power is just so OP that you'll rarely want to use any other strategy than spamming it in between gunfire. While the repetition definitely wore me down in some play sessions, overall I have a hard time being too critical of it when this is some of the most pure fun you can have with a third person shooter. What you're basically getting here is InFamous: but the rest of the game is good now too, flaws and all.

One area that really surprised me in the game is the setting. I absolutely loved it. If you asked me in 2019 what I thought of Control's setting, I would have told you it looked like one of the most boring ever conceived for a game. Every video was just about running through some offices or some random shapes, with not a lot else. Once you actually play the game, it becomes an entirely different experience. That can be said about a lot of Control, honestly, as I found my expectations were positively outdone pretty consistently throughout playing it. But it's especially true for the setting, as the Brutalist architecture combined with the fantastic lore logs make for some of the best atmosphere in gaming. Seriously, Remedy is uniquely great at collectibles.

By now saying that Remedy has good stories is pretty cliche but yes, the story in this game is good. I was surprised by how much I liked Jesse considering the marketing made her look like a pretty flat character. The narrative conceits of having her own internal voice, and also struggling to find where she stands during the course of the game ended up winning me over. I don't think this game stands up to Alan Wake in the character department though, and notably there's some odd things about the way it handles characters. Mainly that the supporting cast rarely feels important despite the fact that the game is always trying to make them seem important, even when they show up a lot and move to your base, they never have much impact in the story or major events and it's bizarre considering how much emphasis each individual character gets in their own chapters.

Unfortunately I feel like I kind of ruined the ending for myself, because I stopped playing the game 30 minutes before the end thinking I had at least another hour or two left, so I sort of experienced all the mini-climaxes before the finale. The actual finale itself is a bit lame, it really shows that this game could use more bosses when you're fighting the same trash mobs in the last two hours, but also I don't think it entirely works thematically. One of the things that really endeared me to Jesse was that it becomes clear that the game is more about Jesse overcoming her doubts and becoming the Director, and reappropriating the grooming into the role the FBC has been doing in the process by finally making a stance and taking the leadership role. This is more or less just hinted at in the final few hours of the game, but it isn't treated like a twist into the final hour. Even as someone who understood the theme very well long before the game had to reveal it, the fact that it's only really touched upon in detail right at the end of the game felt really sloppy. Or maybe it's more like the fact that Faden's transformation into letting go of her insecurities and taking up the role felt really sloppy, considering the office sequence is only like thirty minutes before the end of the game. The internal conflict itself is done really well, and the leadup to the finale is amazing, but it doesn't quite stick the landing.

I've been pretty critical of Control but overall I loved my time with it. It has a lot of flaws, and I mostly wish the gameplay was given a bit more attention so that the player would have to use more than one strategy, but it's one of the best games I've played in the last few years.

This is a weird one. As far as NES games go it's a lot more polished than even the best games in the library, and this makes it feel a lot more "modern" than a lot of its contemporaries, At the same time it doesn't have the consistent fun of Mario, doesn't come close to the fantastic level design of Castlevania, and push come to shove I think I'd even say Mega Man was doing more interesting things at the time. It ends up feeling pretty unspectacular for a lot of its playtime aside from some amazing audio visual design, and it isn't helped by the few ways it does feel unpolished. Mainly character control seems inconsistent, pretty often you'll get hit by something that you think you should have been able to dodge in time because some actions have a lot of startup. Kirby's controls never feel as smooth as they should which in some ways is practically a staple of his character but can be an annoyance.

It's made up for by the last three worlds being very good thanks to some really interesting settings, and the final boss is incredible. Even as my second Kirby game I wasn't expecting yet another boss to subvert my expectations this early on in the franchise, and not only is it great but I have to seriously think about if it's better than the final boss in Forgotten Land, which was already one of my favorites of all time. Crazy that a Kirby game did Dracula better than any Castlevania game.

This is a very good game once you get into its groove, you just have to go in with moderate expectations. There's a reason why it's both considered one of the best NES platformers but isn't really talked about on the same level as the greats.

The hardships of expanding Silent Hill as a series are not that different from why Indiana Jones is struggling while Star Wars or Marvel are thriving, Star Wars and Marvel represent entire universes to explore filled with characters and different literal and figurative worlds, while Indiana Jones is centered on one main character who thrived in the 80's and hasn't been nearly as relevant since. Silent Hill in this case is the real main character of the franchise, and while the first few games are very different from each other it becomes increasingly harder and harder to make something that is both original and unique enough to validate the existence of a new Silent Hill game while still making it feel like Silent Hill. There's an inevitable strain in trying to work within the confines of a Silent Hill game, because so much of what makes a Silent Hill game feel like a Silent Hill game is tied to that original setting despite the fact that even Team Silent was struggling to work with it by the fourth game.

It's because of this that I have a lot of appreciation for The Short Message conceptually, I think fans really need to get over the idea of Silent Hill games having the same exact setting and themes as the older ones if they want the series to continue to get new games. The new themes are also fertile ground to explore some interesting ideas, I liked the fact that this game touched on a lot of generational themes relating to my generation. The game has a lot of cringy topics and moments, but I couldn't really give the game that much flack for it a lot of the time because it felt pretty earnest and I think it was honestly brave to put out a product like this for a game franchise like Silent Hill where most of the people playing were probably going to be old men who don't give a shit about lesbian teenage girls.

Sadly there's one series convention I think that is almost required in order to make a Silent Hill game that's completely absent here: subtlety. Look, I won't lie and say that the subtlety of previous games completely matches up with the Life is Strange type story they're trying to tell here, but it just would have made the whole experience a lot better. There's a painful lack of subtlety here, because the writing isn't really good enough to bear the brunt of the trauma and cringe we're put through, and it would have just been a lot better to have the story be a bit less in your face. While the writing of the teenagers is generally ok, there's a lot less meat to dig into here with there being no nuance to details or ideas to ponder, the text files you see jthroughout the first few minutes alone basically explain the entire theme of the game right away. The voice acting also does not completely live up to the part, I can again say that the teenagers do a pretty good job though there is more cringe here than I would generally like but that's more of a me issue, the adults however are absolutely awful and I couldn't stand hearing them whenever you found their abusive messages. I did like the fact that the voice acting for Cherry Blossom is desynced from her visual performance, I thought it was a very nice intentional detail as it added an uncanniness to it and it reminded me a lot of behind the scenes commentary about how Silent Hill 2 purposely wanted to use more digital looking animation to appear more humanlike.

The gameplay in the game is pretty bad though, while I wouldn't say it's completely irredeemable as you can understand what it's going for immediately and it's pretty inoffensive, I found that the game just kinda dragged on. Not gonna lie for a game like this where you kinda just walk around and interact with stuff the highest score I'd probably give it is a 6/10, so in that respect the few gameplay complaints I have aren't terrible but it just generally doesn't have great pacing - it's a 2 to 2 and a half hour game that feels like a 4 hour game and that's pretty bad. The chase sequences are also pretty bad and feel very tacked on, I did the first three without even knowing what I was doing and I didn't die. I usually don't complain about cameras in games but the camera in this game is pretty problematic, as your phone basically has to alert you before the horror segment even starts that you're about to encounter a chase sequence, completely removing any tension whatsoever. I did like the last sequence though - it was a genuinely great blend of puzzles and horror gameplay and it was pretty intense.

It feels appropriate that Another Code, Celeste 64 and Silent Hill: The Short Message all released around the same time. All are about girls trying to solve some personal struggles, but only one of them is being used to prop up a cold dead franchise. I'm not going to say something like The Short Message is cynical because it's part of a major franchise, you can tell the people who made it put a lot of work into it. But the flaws are all a bit too much, and after a while you have to ask why did this really need to be a Silent Hill game? I'm all for the series changing and having new messages and forms of expression but not even the writing here really takes any queues from the qualities of the older games. And there's a very thin line between trying to use Silent Hill to greenlight interesting projects, and using major themes to promote the revitalization of a franchise. By the end of the game when you get to the parental abuse chapter, which almost feels like it was made to check off a box on a list of traumas and is genuinely the worst written chapter by far with irredeemably bad writing, I started feeling colder and colder to this game despite any good intentions have. For what it's worth I still hope they keep creating original stuff.