Game 245 — Control – Medium Quality

The older I get, the less interested I am in video games whose primary mode of interacting with the world is shooting a gun. I tend to get bored quickly in shooters. Meanwhile, I will happily select the “attack” command in a JRPG hundreds upon hundreds of times. My preferences being what they are, it takes something special to pull me through a shooter. Control managed to do just that, becoming the 245th video game that I’ve completed in my life. Here are my thoughts on the game:

I played Control from beginning to end while it was available for free on Amazon’s Luna cloud gaming service by way of my Amazon Prime subscription. I’m not sure my computer would have been pleased to run this game locally, so streaming the game from the cloud freed me from having to find the right balance of performance and graphical fidelity. As bandwidth-hungry as Luna is (up to 10 GB per hour at 1080p), I would only want to use it on games that really need the extra computing muscle.

And Control is exactly the sort of game that deserves to be played at maximum settings. It’s a strikingly beautiful game set inside of a constantly-shifting office building that houses a government agency called the Federal Bureau of Control. This setting is easily the most compelling aspect of the game; though, the characters in this game are excellent across the board. Very early in the game, the main character Jesse Faden becomes the director of the Bureau. What follows is a wild ride that I can’t compare to any other media I’ve experienced. It’s all very mysterious and supernatural.

I had a good time running around blasting the hiss, but I would have been just as happy to play a slower-paced adventure game set inside this strange world. If you enjoy stories full of mind-bending paranormality, Control is worth checking out. If you like character action games and have a penchant for the surreal, Control is an absolute must.

I’ve tentatively ranked it 86 out of 245.