#39 - Control (Happy Halloween!🎃)

Happy Halloween!  I had planned to play one of my favorite games this month, Alan Wake, but another screenshot poster in my online communities has 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, 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.

#38 - Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare

I had another game I planned to play last night, but then the first Red Dead Redemption finally released on Steam yesterday, including its Undead Nightmare story mode, and I found myself up all night enjoying the zombie western horror fest!  Finally!  It only took them 14 years to port it to the PC.

I'm going to be talking exclusively about Undead Nightmare today.  I'll go over Red Dead Redemption another time, but this extra content is basically its own game, with a story that veers off from the main game's campaign.  Treat it like an alternate universe to the main game.

Undead Nightmare takes place after the main campaign of Red Dead Redemption, but before the epilogue.  Honestly, you could say it's an alternate ending to the game that replaces the epilogue with a dark twist.

John Marston, the protagonist of the main game, sends his boy to bed and is settling in to bed with his wife when Uncle shows up, bloodied, deranged, and violent.  John knocks him out, then goes to get his shotgun.  But Uncle isn't down for long, and he chases John's wife out of the house, getting a solid bite on her throat before John returns and guns him down.

John's son comes running to his mother's aid, only to be bitten by her!  They both rapidly turn into the undead, and John hog-ties them to keep them from hurting anyone else.  He leaves them tied up in the bedroom, then promises to return once he's found a doctor.

John goes to the nearest town to find it overrun with the undead.  He helps the few remaining citizens liberate the town, then asks random survivors what's going on.

One girl mentions that her mother came back long after being dead and buried, and ate her dad's face off!  She recommends burning coffins at the local cemetery to keep the dead from rising again.  And also suggests she had an evil uncle who was buried there.

Considering her contempt for him and the loving message scrawled on his tombstone, it hints at the dark kind of relationship they may have had.  Also, she mentions all the horribly abusive things that her own father does, but dismisses them because "he's a good man!"  So her uncle must've been a truly terrible person.

From here, you're going from town to town, helping people survive undead attacks, following rumors about what might be causing it, and trying to find an end to the nightmare so you can cure your wife and kid.

In the original campaign, there was an easter egg where you could go way up north into the mountains and find a family of Sasquatch hiding in the forest.  In Undead Nightmare, you get a quest to hunt them down.

After killing several of them, you find one crying against a tree.  He can speak!  He begs you to end his life because "some maniac" has killed all of his friends and family and he's the last of his kind left.  It's up to you whether or not to end his life.

There are several other mythical creatures to be found roaming the lands, like chupacabra, black horned goats with red eyes, unicorns, and even the Four Horses of the Apocalypse - War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death.  The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are not to be found.

You can wrangle and tame the first three horses, then the horse Death will appear in the wilderness to be tamed.  Death is automatically awarded to you when you complete the whole storyline too.  My favorite is War, because it's the only one with a fiery mane.  The other three just look like regular horses with creepy eyes.

My original horse was just a normal horse... until I encountered an undead bear, which knocked me over and killed my horse.  The next time I called for my mount, this undead horse showed up!  Turns out there are some tame undead; although the undead horses have a bad habit of ignoring commands and doing their own thing sometimes.

There are many theories as to what's causing the undead to walk again.  Some have some merit and warrant investigation, but others are completely outrageous.

Still others are so wrapped up arguing over what to do in this new chaotic world that they don't pay attention to their surroundings...

The most interesting theory I heard was that this was just a thing that happens every couple hundred years.  A sort of cleansing ritual or something.

I bought Red Dead Redemption ages ago, specifically for this Undead Nightmare content.  But I didn't want to jump into a story-rich game without knowing all the characters and lore, so I rushed through the campaign as quick as I could.

I later regretted it, as I felt like the campaign was much better than this zombie storyline.  Sure, you get a quick tour of all the characters from the campaign and see how they're handling the "zombie apocalypse."  Hint: most aren't handling it well.  But the undead story just feels like it was tacked on last-minute, with very few story missions and a lot of side quests to keep you running back and forth across the land.

Don't get me wrong, Undead Nightmare is a lot of fun to play if you want to run around and shoot zombies in a "spaghetti western" setting.  But I much prefer Red Dead Redemption.

#37 - Call of Cthulhu

I went into Call of Cthulhu blind, not knowing anything except that it's somehow connected to the Cthulhu mythos.  Not only was it another period piece supernatural detective story like yesterday's game, Kona, but it also stars a private investigator who was a former veteran.  This time, though, it takes place in 1924 and our protagonist is a veteran of the first World War.  You play Edward Pierce, a down-on-his-luck P.I. who is struggling with insomnia, alcoholism and PTSD from his service in the war.

The game opens with Pierce lying in an underground cavern, panicking as he realizes he's soaked in the blood and guts of mutilated marine animals.  He escapes, only to witness faceless cult members attacking a faceless intruder on their ceremony.  Then they come for him...

He awakens on the couch of his office.  Just a nightmare.  A client comes to his door, the father of a famous painter, Sarah Hawkins.  He wants Pierce to investigate the mysterious death of his daughter and her husband and son.  Supposedly, they all burned to death in a house fire, but the police blamed it on Sarah.  They said she went mad and killed them all.  Her father doesn't believe it and asks Pierce to uncover the truth.

Pierce travels to Sarah's former home, an island off the coast of Boston called Darkwater, which has been mostly forgotten by the mainland.  It's home to a small town of fishermen, as well as the wealthy Sarah Hawkins and her family.  While trying to investigate Sarah's old warehouse, Pierce runs into the local muscle, a woman named Cat.  She doesn't take kindly to him snooping on her territory.

Did I mention this game has dialogue choices?  Depending on how you handle situations (and in what direction you level your character's stats), you can change the course of action in the game.

In this instance, I got my ass kicked by Cat.  But, as you may remember from my former posts, I like to play the altruist in my games.  I got the option to sneak into the warehouse again, but I was also given a chance to talk with Cat directly instead, and I was polite and honest enough with her that she decided to help me out instead of kicking my ass again.  She actually escorted me to the warehouse this time!

In the warehouse, you switch into detective mode, which allows you to scan for clues and piece together the crime scene.  Kind of like the visions in Kona, except instead of glowing, moving silhouettes in a dark space, they're transparent, unmoving silhouettes in a frosty space.

The local police burst in and kick Pierce out, but through dialogue choices, I got them to not only give me more valuable information, but also give me a lift to the decrepit Hawkins mansion on the island.  Which did NOT burn down.  Hmm...

Exploring the mansion, Pierce eventually finds an underground passage and ends up falling into a cavern full of mutilated marine animals... the same one from the nightmare at the beginning of the game!  Panicking, Pierce attempts to escape, only to experience the same cult scenario play out similar to his nightmare earlier.  While running for his life, he's knocked unconscious by falling debris.

From this point, the line between fantasy and reality starts blending.  Pierce wakes in an insane asylum, breaks out, and then has to confront the indescribable horrors that he's witnessed.  Finding allies to his experiences is difficult though, as most end up insane or dead.  Or some people he witnessed being murdered will instead show up healthy with no memory of being harmed.  Edward Pierce finds his grip on reality slipping and he needs to solve the case quick, before he falls into complete madness...

There's a lot of lore throughout the story, and despite my lengthy explanation of the plot, there are tons of details that were omitted, to avoid spoilers.  Plus, your choices can lead to slightly different outcomes.  There are actually four different endings to this game, depending on interactions and how intact Pierce's sanity is by the end.

Like a lot of horror games right now, Call of Cthulhu is currently 80% off on Steam, so take advantage of the seasonal deals if you like this kind of thing.  Apparently, this game is the latest original story in a (non-related) series of "Call of Cthulhu" video games, which are independently licensed works based on an old tabletop RPG of the same name, which itself is loosely based on the H.P. Lovecraft short, "The Call of Cthulhu."  So my initial impression, that it's "somehow connected to the Cthulhu mythos," is a pretty good summary of this game.

#36 - Kona

Kona is a supernatural detective story, taking place in Northern Quebec in October 1970.  You play as Carl Faubert, a private investigator from Montreal and a veteran from the Korean War.  He's hired by the wealthy industrialist, William Hamilton, to come to Atamipek Lake and investigate a simple vandalism issue.  Most of Carl's thoughts are spoken aloud by a narrator as you play through this game.

As soon as you arrive, a car desperately trying to get out of town swerves out of control and sends you careening into the ditch.  When you wake up a few hours later, a blizzard has set in and you find yourself freezing to death.

You immediately set out to warm and heal yourself so you can repair your truck and get back on the road.  The other driver took out a bridge, trapping you in the town.  The driver is nowhere to be found, so all you can do is continue on to your prearranged meeting with your client.

You eventually get up the road to the general store, where you were supposed to meet your employer... only to find him dead!  Your detective instincts kick in and you start exploring the store for clues.

You find an unusual chunk of glowing ice behind the general store, almost as if an iceberg came out of the ground (see first screenshot).  There are wolf tracks leading away from it, but when you take a picture of it, you discover hidden moose tracks alongside it too.

Following the various trails of glowing ice and hidden moose tracks, you will occasionally find completely frozen people - encased in ice from head to toe!  Walking up to them will start a vision, showing you what they were up to before they were frozen.

The screen started pulsing uncomfortably with a heavy heartbeat sound every time I got close to them, so I avoided them at first, thinking I would freeze or die or something.  It wasn't until I accidentally wandered too close and started a vision that I realized I was missing out on story-advancing clues.

As you uncover more clues, you scribble in more details on your map of Atamipek Lake, giving you more places to explore.

You also discover that Atamipek Lake is mostly a ghost town, with everyone either frozen, having fled, or are dead.  There is one living person I came across early on; a surly old French man who's defending himself from the "hybrid wolf/moose creature" in the woods that's freezing everyone.  He has some folklore books on his table about Wendigos and what creates one, which I suspect is either a clue as to what's happening, or possibly a red herring.

Either way, the old man gives you a proper winter coat if you go find him a bottle of Caribou (a sort of bootleg alcohol one of the residents was making in their cabin).

I've only played 3-1/2 hours of this game so far (and most of it was spent wandering in the woods or rummaging through abandoned houses), but it's been quite enjoyable.  You learn about each of the townsfolk and their motives against William Hamilton.  Being a rich guy who swooped in and took over the town, he's not very well liked, so there are plenty of motives for the people to kill him.

I also like that there's a driving aspect to this game.  You can walk around in the cold, but you need to occasionally warm yourself and drink/eat to keep your brain power up.  And when the cold is affecting you, you can't move fast.  So being able to climb into a truck and quickly drive cross-country to the nearest house is convenient.  And I do love driving in games.

All of the text in this game is in French, with an automatic English translation popping up over it.  I'm not sure if this was originally a French game and/or made by a French developer, or if they were just trying to be authentic to Northern Quebec, a French-speaking region of Canada.  But I do enjoy the authenticity of seeing everything in French.  The narrator speaks in English, and the old man you run into speaks French, but with English captions.

There's apparently a sequel to this game that released in October last year - Kona II: Brume.  It follows Carl again as he explores the same region, trying to explore the reality-altering "brume" (French for mist or haze) that covers the region and isolates it from the rest of the world.  Sounds almost like a tribute to Silent Hill.

And both games are on sale on Steam right now.  80% off for this game; 70% off for the sequel.  If this sounds like your kind of game, it's only a few bucks right now, so now's the time to check it out.