Control

Fri, 03 Sep 2021 19:08:32 -0700

Control exerts full mastery over videogames as a unique narrative form, blending motion-capture acting performances, live-action filmed skits and monologues, puppet shows, radio programs, rock albums, short stories, technical documentation, a whole slew of homages to other videogame genres, and — of course — shooting weird shit that needs to be shot. While not a must, Control and its Oldest House are best experienced in the progressive revelations and immersive weirdness so carefully crafted by its developers. The remainder of this review may contain atmospheric and thematic spoilers.

Control should be remembered, if not for any of its other solid qualities, as a milestone in storytelling with the gaming medium. It’s one thing to have high quality voice acting and motion capture — especially for facial expressions — so that your game characters can converse more naturally than, say, Siri. It’s another thing entirely to film talented actors and put that footage in the game, a technique Remedy continues here from their past work in Quantum Break and, to a lesser extent, Alan Wake and Bright Falls. The narrative tricks needed to pull this off (namely, the Hotline and littering the Oldest House with instructional films and research updates) are clever. Weaving tie-ins between those short films and the mass of mixed-medium work throughout the rest of the game is impressive. But slowly coming to grips with the collective efforts of directors, writers, actors, visual artists, programmers, managers, and the many, many others involved in developing a game of this caliber is staggering. To experience artistry that feels genuinely new is a deep joy.

Jesse Faden (Courtney Hope), our protagonist, is solid ground in the physically and metaphorically shifting strangeness of the Oldest House. We get to watch the depth of her inner worries and assessments balance with her do-what-we-came-to-do attitude to round out a reasonably believable human being. She’s relational, witty, and exceptionally brave: unlike me, she does not freak out when ambushed by shrieking resonance zombies. The player may be holding the controller, but this is Jesse’s story and she is in control.

Control, aside from being the literal name of the game, is a central theme under exploration. What does it mean to have control? Who had it before and who has it now? What do you do with control when it’s yours?

Power, the story posits, is not the same as control. Control is more elusive. It requires understanding, trust, and genuine leadership — qualities that Jesse’s predecessors Northmoor and Trench traded away in their pursuit of, ironically, control. But instead of probing this theme more deeply (for example, asking whether control itself is just an illusory sense of security), the game’s conclusion is satisfied with replacing entrenched, toxic leaders with Jesse and other critically thinking young people and calling it a day. The Foundation and AWE DLCs do a little more work in this direction, but fall short of staking out a thoughtful value claim to complement the robust narrative creativity. I’d hoped for more.

Amidst all this focus on artistry, narrative, and hopes for philosophy, it’s still worth mentioning that the gunplay and paranatural combat abilities feel great. Returning to other games after being Jesse Faden is markedly disappointing. Said another way, you know how exhilarating the combat in Control is going to be from the first moment you accidentally bump into a table and the physics engine sends it flying into a wall, papers thrust into the air.

I’m excited to know the talented folks at Remedy are already working on new stories in the Control universe, and for what other developers and artists this quality of videogame storytelling might inspire.

Bugs

It’s minor, but there was an occasional issue where the floor would just… disappear. At first I thought this was a thing the Oldest House did; then after an extended period of confusion I realized some textures just weren’t loading.

Also, while not a bug, I’m highly skeptical of an office building with lids on their public toilets. Like. Who does this? The Federal Bureau of Control, I guess.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Tue, 20 Feb 2018 12:24:36 -0700

I decided to watch Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (and even convinced my sister and aunt to join me) because I was looking for something firmly in the thriller category and I’d heard it was good. What I got instead was a movie with an initially inscrutable plot and a star-studded cast of exclusively white men (Gary Oldman, Colin Ferth, Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch, etc.) whose acting was as dull and bleak as the color tones the film is washed in. Don’t get me wrong — the greys, blues, and browns were probably the right artistic choice for a spy film set in the Cold War — but there was no help coming in the form of visual effects when the rest of the plot, acting, and music were lacking.

The movie follows a retired MI6 veteran George Smiley as he tries to uncover the truth about a possible Soviet double agent within the agency. He and four other agents worked directly under “Control,” who in the years before his (natural) death became obsessed with a “mole” theory. But when Control sends an agent to Budapest to uncover the truth, the agent goes missing and is presumed dead.

The setup is clear enough, looking back on it, but the film’s exposition does very little to explain itself. There’s a natural learning curve with any spy story — the cloak-and-dagger secrecy of any good spy isn’t all too conducive to laying out details plainly — but the issue with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is this: as the fog begins to clear and the secrets of the clandestine become known, you realize the truth wasn’t worth the intrigue. There is no twist. It feels as if the story becomes softer as it goes (with the exception of a particularly brutal pair of torture and murder scenes in Soviet Russia).

Perhaps my view is too uncharitable, or this film wasn’t my taste. But in my mind, the value of this film seemed hidden away, its existence known but always out of reach, just as a spy would prefer to keep information and leave the rest of us dissatisfied.

thriller | Mohammad Moshtaghi

Control

Bugs

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy