Saturday Morning Gaming: Control

Back in the late 80s, early 90s, there was a television show called “Friday The 13th: The Series“. The show had nothing, absolutely *NOTHING* to do with the Friday the 13th movie franchise. No Jason Vorhees, no Camp Crystal Lake, no nothin’. It was, instead, a surprisingly good horror television show. The basic premise was this:

Lewis Vendredi had a deal with the Devil and sold cursed antiques in exchange for power. He tried to break the deal and the Devil killed him. Now Lewis’s niece has inherited the antique store and she and her cousin-by-marriage now have a mission to go out and recover all of the cursed antiques and store them in the vault underneath the antique store.

The show was, seriously, surprisingly good. It was pretty much a procedural where the protagonists would check the list of artifacts sold, say “okay, the next one is a cursed thingamajig… it was sold to Joe Schmoe who used it to gain power, but he died mysteriously”. And then they’d go off to the last known location of the artifact and find out that Joe Schmoe was killed by Jane Schmane in order to get the artifact and they’d have to figure out how to get the artifact back from someone with no desire to give it up (and, indeed, would use to artifact to try to kill the protagonists). The protagonists would wrest the artifact away, the antagonist would go insane or die or end up with some ironic punishment, and we’d go back to the shop and put the artifact in the basement… tune in next week to see what’s next on that list!

Warehouse 13 is a show from about a decade ago that has a similar conceit: There is a secret service division that goes out and hunts down artifacts that have become too dangerous. They grab the artifacts (from people who don’t want to give them up) and then bring them back to be kept safely in Warehouse 13 (there have been 12 other such warehouses, you see… dating back to Alexander the Great who built the first Warehouse). Less emphasis on the supernatural (and less graphic violence) but the same basic idea: We need to get these powerful artifacts and store them away.

Like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

That show wasn’t as good as Friday the 13th, if you ask me, but it was still a great conceit.

(There was a Saturday Morning Cartoon released in 1985 called “The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo” that also ran with this basic idea: Shaggy and Scooby released the 13 ghosts. They then spent the rest of the series trying to get the ghosts back. The show was awful but, as the shows above demonstrate, the idea behind it was pretty solid.)

Well, imagine a video game where your task is to go through the basement under the antique shop or Warehouse 13 itself.

That’s Control.

You are Jesse. 17 years ago, the men of the FBC came and took your brother away after an Event.

Now you show up at the Federal Bureau of Control looking for your brother. You walk through the front door expecting to talk to the receptionist who will, as a matter of course, turn you away. But nobody is there. No receptionist. No security guards. You walk through the metal detectors and walk into the security room and nobody is there.

This isn’t good.

You meet the janitor who cheerfully and creepily directs you to the elevator for your job interview and you go up through the abandoned office hallways past empty conference rooms to find the director’s office where the director has, about a minute before you got there, shot himself in the head.

Shortly thereafter, you get your first Artifact (as well as a job). And then you’re on your way to figuring out What Is Going On. Oh, and it turns out that the building ain’t anywhere near deserted enough.

This is one of the games that is firing on all cylinders. The story is compelling (what happened to your brother? What was the event? WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON?), the gameplay is strong (third person shooter), and the little extras and collectables everywhere are delightfully rewarding. The environment itself is delightfully creepy.

There are a lot of games (maybe the Arkham ones, maybe) where running around collecting every single little thing can feel like a chore to get in the way of playing the game.

Warning: Salty Language:

games that think more gameplay mechanics equals more fun pic.twitter.com/D8ej0V843m

— SungWon Cho (@ProZD) June 5, 2017

This game has the collectables be part of the game. Sure, you can leave them behind if you don’t care about the story or don’t want to get every single possible upgrade for yourself… but, if you get them, you get more story! More upgrades!

The game is really good. It feels like a mashup of The X-Files and Warehouse 13 and The Matrix. And it’s on sale at Steam for 60% off. It’s one of the rare games that would have been worth paying full price for.

So… what are you playing?

(Featured image is game splash screen. All screenshots taken by the author.)