I was a huge fan of Alan Wake when it released on the Xbox 360, it had an absolutely perfect atmosphere to it. Finding the next segments of Alan’s novel a few seconds before events actually happened – or not! – and being barely able to see the shadowy enemies in the night was thrilling. You were constantly under siege in that game and, whilst the narrative took a few turns for the bizarre near the end, it was such an amazing package.

I was so excited for Control. I need to learn to stop being excited for things.

Control reminds me of nothing more than Inception if it was written by Tetsuya Nomura. Despite the promising premise it’s unimaginative and repetitive, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, and it does nothing to draw the player into its clusterfuck world. It’s a shallow, depressing mess of a game that is so far removed from Alan Wake that I can’t believe it was actually made by the same studio. It was a complete and utter waste of my time and I am bitterly disappointed in it.

I like weird things in games, I really do. The idea of a game where the boundaries of reality are completely fractured to the point that they don’t really exist sounds amazing to me. But Control really doesn’t live up to the promise of this – it’s a lot of bland, tedious white and red geometric shapes in a large office building. Are alternate dimensions and distortions of reality really so boring? Where are the monsters, the topsy-turvy scenery, the creativity?

I think the one and only time Control lived up to its promise was during the corridors at the end, as they shifted constantly around you, walls and pillars melting away and shooting up out of the ground, putting doors on floors and furniture on the ceiling. All whilst Take Control by Old Gods of Asgard blasted your eardrums to the point that you couldn’t hear anything else. That was fucking incredible, taking full advantage of the wacky scenery and the powers Jessie had accumulated up to that point. Why couldn’t the whole game be like this?!

For the most part, the level design in this absolute crap. I got the distinct impression that it was supposed to have a Metroidvania feel to it, and there were a lot of hidden secrets to find in the form of documents, but…well, the incentive to actually explore was kinda not really there. At all. There was minimal backtracking – for which I am extremely grateful – and fast-travel points were pretty numerous, which was nice. The signposts helped too, because areas looked pretty much the same…and therein lies the problem. I felt like I was exploring an office building for most of it, not a fragmented reality. Seen one white and red corridor, seen them all.

Narrative-wise…I’m not even going to go there. It started out as incomprehensible bullshit, and that was how it ended. Very little explanation was offered, and no plot twists were really given. I’m sorry, but I don’t buy into obscure for obscure’s sake – even in something that makes no sense, there has to be SOME sense presented initially, so that you can follow on from there and make up your own theories and ideas and interpretations about what is going on. You need a baseline to make sense of things. Control never really had that, it was just a string of events that were an excuse to drag the game out than there were an actual plot worth sitting through. The less said about Jessie as a character, the better.

But it did, ahem, control rather well, at least. They had the potential to really infuriate with Levitate and I’m so glad they resisted the urge to insert annoying platforming sequences. It was what it should be: a fun new dimension to combat. Hovering above enemies to shoot them into red dust clouds was extremely satisfying. I liked the other powers, too – seizing enemies for a distraction, speed-dodging, hurling whatever came to hand with telekinesis, etc. I could practically hear the 90s X-Men theme playing in the background the whole time. This was what kept me going through it: it was pretty fun combat. It was just wrapped up in a crappy plot and some of the worst level design I’ve seen in a while.

I wanted to like Control, I really did. But I didn’t. I don’t. It’s a far cry from the brilliant madness that was Alan Wake, and it falls so far short of what it could have been that it’s maddening. And this won 80 Game Awards? Goodness me..