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.

An endlessly creative collectathon platformer from the talented folks over at Double Fine. It's got some OG xbox game jank and the pc port is honestly not good but the game itself stands tall even among games almost 20 years later.

I can't quite overstate how creative it is in it's gameplay elements and presentation. All the brains feel unique and the game has a consistant fun tone with some great jokes sprinkled in. They aren't all hits, but it's enough i can call the game funny. The gameplay is a bit simple, it's a 2005 xbox platformer game, but the mind powers are all pretty well thought out and you can find some fun interactions with pretty much every part of the game. Game falls a bit flat on its face at the end, but honestly it's forgivable, since the game is such a joy up until that part. What a lovely little game this was.