this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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Finally started playing Control and I'm blown away (hexbear.net)
submitted 2 months ago by joaomarrom@hexbear.net to c/games@hexbear.net
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I originally pirated this game on release, but my PC back then couldn't run it reliably. I played it a couple hours and for some reason I can't remember, I just dropped it and never came back.

Picked it up for really cheap recently on Steam because I wanted to give it a second chance with better hardware, and holy fucking shit, how is this game six years old?

Playing in 2025 a game originally released in 2019 really shows me that there's a certain degree of diminishing returns in the games industry, not necessarily in a bad way, but in the sense that I think we've pretty much reached kind of a peak in game development, in terms of tech. As long as you can provide a solid experience, games will still feel great for much longer than they used to.

I might be mistaken and I don't have any handy examples to back this argument, but I feel like ten years ago, a six-year-old game would definitely feel much more dated than this does. Does that make sense? I don't think games used to age this gracefully 10+ years ago.

I can't think of any modern game that just feels this good. Everything is incredibly responsive, the graphics and art style are stunning, the sound design is top notch, the lore is really captivating and it just overall feels like an incredibly polished experience that's leagues ahead of most recent games.

If it were not for the Hiss and all the nightmarish SCP shit going on in The Oldest House, I'd want to live there. I want to touch these gorgeous brutalist slabs of concrete.

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[–] fox@hexbear.net 16 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

The gameplay really does boil down to "pick up large object, throw to kill enemy instantly" once you get the powers rolling. The gun has so many different modes and options and upgrades but flying into the air and turning Hiss into wallpaper with a boulder is pretty much always the most viable option.

I'm sure there's some metatextual things going on there with how Jesse is increasingly embracing her anomalous power as Director while literally rejecting the Gun because it's a direct symbol of the Board's hold over the department of control and the Directorship.

[–] Nacarbac@hexbear.net 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I put it down from boredom at the gameplay, and the pretty visual design became stale quite quickly. I did eventually push far enough for the Ashtray Maze, and that redeemed most of it, since it proved they could do interesting things and the effect would have been lessened had they been doing more warping.

But it's kind of a weird game. I liked that it had actual characters, and they were good. But they treat Jesse sliding along the rails to Next Location and shooting a dozen possessed coworkers as though she was doing actually useful Director stuff. Metatextual "the director is the puppet-gun of the Board" blah blah. It reduces all this Lovecraftian Cosmic SCP Mystery to "shoot gun at problem, move boxes".

[–] 7bicycles@hexbear.net 6 points 2 months ago

I honestly found it pretty thematically fitting to the SCP-with-the-serial-number-scratched-off setting that the crossdimensional wordsalad sound that turns you evil has the achilles heel of "having a forklift launched at it". Felt grounding.