Control 3$ Rewards

- Control even finds a way to make chucking garbage into a furnace interesting. First, you get to use launch. Coooool. Second, an audio log says that the furnace is alive, it’s a paranatural object right under the bureau’s noses. It communicated with the researcher on the tape, it asked to be fed. What does it eat? I don’t know, but the researcher went to find… volunteers.

- The first personal mod I got was health recovery, it’s 20% extra health on every pick up, and that adds up a hell of a lot. So much so, that I really never saw any reason at all to use anything but it, and by the time I had 10 mods available, I never switched out once.

- You can find a document detailing the termination, which is a legal word for execution, of an employee who bringing altered objects to his home. One of which was a rubber duck. A rubber duck, that followed his daughter and said quack at night. Man this is some horror movie shit. You can actually find that same rubber ducky later in the level, and an audio recording of the tests ran. They tried to shock it, burn it, melt it with acid. No luck. They also tried to speak with it. “Quack if you can understand my response” And the duck never quacked. But you can actually come back here in a side mission. You gotta find a way into the chamber, at which point the duck starts teleporting about the place, so you’re thrust into a duck hunt, until it finally decides to stop running and you can cleanse it.

- The hotline is possibly the greatest way of doing audio logs I’ve ever seen in a game. The hotline itself is an object of power, it can be used to communicate with the stylish director trench and the board, the pyramid in the astral plane. The syntax it uses does most of the heavy lifting here. It provides alternate understandings for almost everything it says, which can be hard to decipher, but it gets across the feeling that it simply isn’t human, it thinks and understands in a different way from us.

- One thing comes to mind that annoys me about the structure of control, and that’s the anchor. It’s called an altered item, but it is also stated that it’s nothing like the others, implying to me that it’s an object of power. It also looks like an object of power. At this point in the game, every side mission that wasn’t timed or from ahti has lead you to an object of power, and you should have only one ability left to unlock, and what looks like an object of power is staring you in the face. It’s perfectly logical to assume this is how you unlock levitiate. It’s not true, this is just a boss fight, levitate is unlocked a bit later in the game. Not only has the game implied that this is an object of power, at a time when you’ll assume that’s the one you need to get levitiate, but it’s also implied that this gap could be crossed without it. Because the first gap can be crossed with a clever angle on dash. I mean, look down into this chasm, you can see outcroppings and you can land on both of them just by using dash, would it be boneheaded to assume that might lead you somewhere. They don’t. Despite all evidence saying this is it, this is not in fact it, you need levitate. It’s like game is trolling you

- I love the audio log you can find in Dylan’s cell. His opinion soured on Jesse after he assumed she left him for dead, and he flips out when the doctor won’t stop asking questions. A legendary rage quit if you ask me, I WANT PIZZA.

- So it turns out polaris and hedron are one and the same. I was about to attempt to describe the shape of hedron when I realised that shapes with this many sides are all called something something hedron, so I guess it all makes sense. Polaris clearly wants you here, but the hiss follows, and what follows the hiss is the polaris encounter. Talk about difficulty spikes holy shit. First, you have to clear out three siphons surrounding the base of hedron, each comes with a wave of powerful level 6 enemies. You can walk past them and go for the cleanse early, but if you’re hit, the guage resets, so that’s a strategy only for specific moments. This is already far more challenging than the vast majority of combat encounters thus far, but then, there’s another siphon. The enemies are more numerous, and far stronger in type. Then, there’s another siphon. It feels like the enemies just do not stop spawning, you have to stick to cover, sieze who you can and spam launch. Then, there’s another fucking siphon, with just about every enemy type in the game, including one who launches flurries of objects at you. Excuse me, two who launch flurries of objects at you. Then after them, there’s a giant named enemy. This alone is doubly harder than any previous encounter in the entire game, and there’s 6 siphons. There’s a checkpoint at the third. Have fun. While I didn’t like having to resort to endlessly repeating the safest strategy, the challenge was enjoyable, but I can’t approve of such an insanely aggressive difficulty spike.

- Then, polaris dies. Then hedron just falls apart, Jesse goes mental, the hiss gets her and then the game ends. You know I was ready to write this game off as probably the worst thing sam lake has ever done, and that’s assuming he is a serial killer. But then the credits die. And you’re spawned back into the bureau doing intern work. Oooooooookay then. 

- Then you have to do some real work. Cleaning up coffee, delivering mail, it’s all there. You’ve got to deliver director trench his mail 3 times over, each time getting weirder, before you learn the truth. Trench let the hiss in because the hiss got to him first. He brought the projector into the nostalgia lab, that’s the source. You’re somehow freed from the hiss because jesse polaris comes down from entity heaven. Yeah, somehow the polaris tied to you lives on despite hedron being dead, fuck knows what happened there. Then, you’re off to fight the hiss.

- The final fight opens with a dash, quite literally through the warped nostalgia lab to access the slide projector. You touch it, and the final fight where you actually fight something starts. It’s in the astral plane, dylan appears to be underneath the pyramid. That’s where you’ve got to head. The board gives you a temporary power boost to fight the endless waves of enemies that spawn to stop you. You kill enough waves in one arena, you move on to the next and kill waves there until you make it to the board. That’s it. That’s the final fight. The polaris encounter was harder. And there wasn’t even a unique boss. The game’s only unique bosses were down a hole, in a room with some clocks or hiding in a fucking fridge. 

- Mr Tomassi round 2 I guess is how they planned to draw you into the sterling AWE, but it is not a good boss fight. The problem with the enemy type that Tomassi is, is that when you can actually hit them is inconsistent. Sometimes you’ll hit em on your first launch, sometimes it’ll take 4, the difficulty of this fight depends on your luck. And it is difficult. But only because you have to survive long enough to kill him. Tomassi isn’t the problem, his ads are. There’s a hiss demon that’ll deal 90% of your health when it bursts open near you, you cannot see this coming most of the time. You can just be wiped off the map the instant you land due to something you don’t even understand. It’s a challenging fight, but it’s frustrating, and that’s not the way to go.