Happy Halloween! I had planned to play one of my favorite games this month, Alan Wake, but @MyNameIsAtticus@lemmy.world, the other screenshot poster here, already made several posts about that game recently. So in order to generate new content, I’m posting a tangentially-related game, and another absolute favorite of mine, Control.
This game is loosely based on the SCP Foundation, a fictional secretive organization that contains anomalous or supernatural items and entities away from the eyes of the public. They Secure, Contain, and Protect (SCP).
Their wiki linked above is a creative writing project, where anyone can sign up and submit their own creative writings on supposed anomalies that the SCP has encountered in the world. And they have a Creative Commons ShareAlike license (CC-BY-SA) for all work posted to the wiki, so anyone is able to use it for their own creative projects. As such, a lot of SCP-related video games have been popping up lately. If you search on Steam alone, there are about 75 games with SCP in the title, and that’s not counting derivative works like Control.
Control starts out simple enough. You play a 28-yr old woman by the name of Jesse Faden. She’s been looking for the Federal Bureau of Control for 17 years, ever since they kidnapped her brother, Dylan, in their childhood. The shady secret government organization has eluded her all this time, but Jesse just happens to find them in New York City and enters to an empty lobby.
The place seems deserted, except for an odd janitor with a heavily-Scandinavian accent, named Ahti. He asks Jesse if she’s here for the job interview, because he’s in need of an assistant. He points Jesse toward the Director’s office.
The first thing you might notice is that you’re trapped in the building now. When you turn around, you realize that the hallway you came down just dead-ends, as if there was never a hallway there in the first place. Also, some of the offices and meeting rooms in the hallway don’t seem to have any doors leading into them, just windows. Welcome to “The Oldest House,” the office building which is an ever-shifting anomaly in itself.
You enter the Director’s office and find the Director dead on the floor; an apparent suicide. Jesse is compelled to pick up the handgun lying next to him, where she suddenly finds herself pressing it to her own temple. You hear distorted voices who refer to themselves as “The Board,” and they test whether you’re capable of wielding it.
Jesse is transported to the “astral plane,” a bright white space with disjointed black and gold marbled cubes to walk on. A giant inverted pyramid looms ever-present in the background.
You fight some faceless humanoid enemies, learning to harness a limited psychic ability to attack them. When you find the gun in the astral plane, you learn how to take down the faceless enemies with it. You have a limited clip of ammo, but it regenerates infinitely, without the need to manually reload or resupply.
When you’ve completed the training, Jesse is appointed the new Director by The Board. All of a sudden, you’re in charge of the Federal Bureau of Control! Portraits can be found already updated with professional photos or paintings of Jesse all around the building.
You also start to find official documentation scattered around the offices concerning various Objects of Power (OoP), including your own service weapon. Just like SCP documentation on their wiki.
Almost immediately, Jesse finds herself exposed to an invasive hissing noise that feels like it’s trying to invade her soul (See first screenshot). She’s able to withstand it, but it takes over other Control agents and forces them to attack her. Fighting your way to the Central Executive room, you find a marked circle under an inverted pyramid and realize you can use your psychic energy to dispel the “Hiss” from the area and restore the distorted space to its normal state.
Survivors call out from a nearby shelter and Jesse gives them the all-clear. The assistant to the Head of Research, Emily Pope, comes out and immediately recognizes Jesse as the new Director. She’s stoked that Jesse’s able to withstand the Hiss without specialized equipment and she’s excited to perform some experiments to test Jesse’s abilities.
Pope quickly becomes your go-to for any information you need about this strange place. She explains that the building has come under attack by a deadly and invasive anomaly that Jesse helped dub the “Hiss,” and since Jesse is the only one who seems able to resist and fight back, she’s needed to help clear sections of the building and rescue other survivors.
Jesse is also desperate to find her brother, but Pope doesn’t have access to that level of information. She suggests Jesse rescue the rest of the former Director’s team scattered throughout the building and they should be able to fill her in on what happened to Dylan.
From there, the game is spent running back and forth across the various floors of the building, rescuing people, fighting the Hiss and liberating areas, and learning more about Control and what they do. You can find various sources of media scattered throughout, including documents, tape recordings, and video recordings.
Not to mention, some more OoPs that bind to Jesse and enhance her abilities. You can telekinetically lift and throw objects, rapidly dash through the air to evade enemies or reach far-away platforms, construct a shield out of psychic energy and physical objects, and even fly! Keep progressing through the game to find these OoPs and bind them, then enhance their powers through missions and side quests. Eventually, you’ll be practically invincible!
Amongst the video recordings, there’s a cheaply made kid’s puppet show called the “Threshold Kids” that has episodes randomly distributed all over the building. It goes over various anomalies and supernatural situations, as if it was meant to explain complex topics for young children. It seems simple enough at first, but there’s something creepy and off about it, and it gets very dark and existential in later episodes. I love the world-building it brings to the game!
I mentioned Alan Wake was tangentially-related to this game. That’s because the development studio of both franchises, Remedy Entertainment, included documentation you can find in Control that explains Alan Wake as an Altered World Event (AWE), with Alan’s typewriter being a suspected OoP! And if you play Control’s AWE expansion after the main campaign, it sets up Alan Wake II.
I love SCP-related content, and the Federal Bureau of Control is a whole SCP-like organization, with rich and detailed lore dealing with supernatural and otherworldly objects and powers. And then adding lore to tie two separate game franchises together in the same universe? I absolutely love it! This has been one of my all-time favorite games since it released and I’m really excited to play Control 2 whenever it finally comes out.
By the way, the Alan Wake Franchise bundle is 80% off on Steam, so you can play the first game and its spinoff game for only $5, then save a few bucks off Control by buying the Alan Wake/Control Franchise bundle. Or wait for a better deal; Control was only $8 for a couple weeks last month, so keep an eye out for their next sale and get it super cheap.
My one gripe is that Alan Wake II was published by Epic Games, which means it will probably never come to Steam. I’m adamantly against using Epic Games, as they have very anti-competitive practices with the gaming community. So unless someone else gets PC publishing rights, I may never get to play Alan Wake II. (Note: I don’t own any current-gen consoles, so playing it on console is out) The rest of the franchise is published by 505 Games or Remedy Entertainment themselves, including the upcoming Control 2, so I can enjoy everything else in the meantime.
I am now reading every goddamn one of these you write. If only the other screenshot posters would put forth your respect and effort, we could have an honest gaming journal going.
I don’t think I’ve posted this here yet, but I’ve actually been compiling all these posts into a separate blog. As much time and effort as I’ve been putting into them, I’d hate for them to get wiped if this community goes down, or heaven forbid, I got booted by a mod, etc. So you can either follow my posts here in /c/games, or check them out on my blog. I upload them at the same time, so it doesn’t matter where you go to read them.
Honestly? I like both the screenshot poster.
The current OP’s posts I tend to skim over, (unless its a game I already played, like this one) cause spoilers. . The other poster has less spoilery posts that I like to read more often (specially the ones he plays with his friends). . To each there own ¯\(ツ)/¯
Thank you! I try to avoid spoilers in mine. I usually use Lemmy’s built in spoiler feature when it’s though inevitable or i really want to share it, but i just recently found out that not every client does spoilers the same way so i think i’ll have to think up some other idea
I usually give a warning in advance that spoilers are upcoming and to skip the next paragraph if you don’t want to read them, then do the spoiler tag for an entire paragraph. That way, even if the spoiler tag doesn’t work, people know to skip the next paragraph to avoid it. Sometimes I’ll even do a full-caps “END OF SPOILERS HERE” to catch eyes and help people skip over them.
That’s what I ended up doing for my Alan Wake II post last night because there was just a lot to talk about with the ending. I figured in clients that don’t support Lemmy’s built in spoiler system though the ::: at the end will tell them where the spoilers end
I’m actually very careful to avoid spoilers in my posts. Sure, I get pretty far into the meat of the gameplay before I end my post… but I do my best to avoid any big reveals that might ruin the game for interested players. And I’ve never revealed the ending to a game.
At best, I’ve posted my speculation for the direction a game’s plot might be headed, based on my incomplete gaming session. But I made it clear it was just a personal guess.
My intent is to get people invested in the story, so when I leave off, they’ll want to go check it out and see what happens next. Besides, some of the best screenshots are from the action in the middle of gameplay. I can’t play 15 mins of a game and expect to make a solid post about it; I need to have some sense of what the game is about, and that requires a bit more exploration into the plot.
Since you’re familiar with Control, you’ll probably notice I left out some pretty big details from nearly the start of the game. You gotta have some unknown plot elements, or else I’m just narrating the first hour of the game, and that’s not fun when you actually go to play it for the first time.