I recently posted a new video to my YouTube channel about my frustrations with the design of Control's "challenging" gameplay. I'm not going to transcribe the entire video here on the blog because most of what is in the video is already in my previous written review of the game.

In summary, the video compares the "tough but fair" design philosophy of From Software's games (most notably, Dark Souls) with the way that difficulty is implemented in Control. Even though I found Control to be a much easier game overall, and I suffered far fewer deaths in Control compared to Dark Souls, I did feel that Control lacked that "tough but fair" feeling that Dark Souls is famous for. Control uses a lot of seemingly cheap tricks to artificially inflate the difficulty of the game. If deliberate, then they are cheap tricks. If not deliberate, then they are faulty game design. I may not have died as often in Control, but the few deaths that I did suffer rarely felt deserved.

The video also contrasts Control's healing system with that of Doom (2016) and Bloodborne. All three games seem to be trying to encourage fast-paced, aggressive play by rewarding the player with health for relentlessly assailing the enemy. Yet this intent doesn't come through as clearly in Control because the player needs to be close to where the enemy dies in order to pick up the health, but most of Control's action is done at medium or long range. Doom and Bloodborne, however, give health to the player when the player performs melee attacks, ensuring that even if the health is dropped on the ground as a pickup, that the player is always close enough to immediately get it if they need it.

One thing that I neglected to mention in the actual video, but which I want to add here, is that Control also has enemies with hit-scan weapons. Most enemies have machine guns that instantly damage the player if the enemy has line of sight. Attacks are not always projectiles that travel across the arena and which can be dodged, blocked, or otherwise avoided. This means that exposing yourself to crossfire is almost certain death if your health is critical in Control, and it contributes to the player needing to slow things down and play cautiously and defensively, instead of maintaining that fast-paced, aggressive play.

I kept hearing good things about Remedy's Control, but I never got around to playing it. For some reason, I was thinking it was an XBox exclusive. Maybe it was a timed exclusive? Anyway, it showed up as one of the free PSPlus games of the month a couple months ago, and I downloaded it to play over the summer. I kind of regret not having purchased it, since it's a pretty good game with a lot of neat and innovative ideas, and Remedy is a smaller studio that could definitely use the money and deserves the support, especially considering that Control was released as a mid-budget, mid-price, $30 release ($40 for the new Ultimate Edition). I'll probably buy it as a gift for a friend at some point, so that I can support the studio for making a quality product.

In any case, consider this a recommendation: if you haven't bought and played Control yet, please do so. It's definitely worth checking out, especially if you like a game that will give you a substantial challenge. It's available on the next-gen consoles, but if you're like me and haven't been able to secure a PS5 yet, then it's also available on the previous-gen as well. It won't have the fancy ray-tracing and other advanced graphical effects, but it played well and ran mostly smoothly on my PS4 Pro. The only technical issue I had was long load times and a temporary freeze whenever I unpaused the game. No big deal. The game is tough, but it wasn't so overwhelmingly difficult that I was stuck constantly staring at the long load screens.

Spectacle action worthy of The Matrix

Control is certainly a spectacle to behold. Every fight feels like it has the bombast of the climactic lobby shootout in The Matrix. Nobody is running up walls or doing slow-motion kicks, but the player (and enemies) can levitate, bullets are whizzing past, furniture is getting thrown around, loose paper and stationary is flying everywhere, and chunks of the walls are being ripped or blown off. At the conclusion of each fight, the environment is completely trashed, and it looks fantastic. Even on the PS4, the level of detail is impressive.

The aftermath of every battle reminds me of the lobby shootout from The Matrix.

There's also a surprising amount of expressiveness in the combat mechanics. I can go in and just shoot all the enemies as if this were some basic cover-based shooter. Or I can use telekinesis to barrage the enemies with the clutter in the environment. I could even run in with the shield up, attack with the "melee" psychic push, then dodge around, managing my energy like the stamina bar of Dark Souls. Even within one of those broad play-styles, there's a handful of support abilities that can be used to varying effects. I can haphazardly throw any old object at enemies with telekinesis, or I can specifically search out objects that might explode and do larger amounts of damage to be more efficient. I can mind-hack an enemy and turn him against the other enemies to act as a damage sponge and spread around my DPS. There's a surprising amount of options here, especially considering that first impressions make Control look like just another run-and-gun shooter.

By midway through the game, the challenge had started amping up to the point that I wasn't able to rely on simply shooting every enemy with the pistol anymore. Doing so was still possible, but it was difficult. I started using all of my psychic abilities in many encounters, and I was rotating through all of my available service weapons based on the situation. Even the abilities and weapons that I initially thought were garbage (such as the shield and the pierce weapon) started getting regular use against certain enemies or in certain situations. I even learned to spend time scanning the environment for particularly destructive telekinesis objects.

Abilities and weapons that I had initially dismissed as "garbage" were getting regular use later in the game.

This was a far cry from my recent experience with Resident Evil Village, in which I was able to breeze through a vast majority of the game by just shooting everything in the face with the pistol or shotgun, and never had to utilize the more diverse tools and environmental opportunities at my disposal, because using them was more trouble than they were worth. No, here in Control, I am using everything! In fact, I even had a viewer pop up on my Twitch stream and comment that he had never bothered using the shield, but watching me use it against the Distorted made him realize that he could have been using it in his playthrough to save himself a lot of frustration and respawns.