The Backbone One (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is a delight. Plug the Lightning connector into your iPhone, stretch the controller over it, and play. The buttons and bumpers feel nice and clicky, with super-fast response times, and there's broad support for PS Remote Play, Xbox Remote Play, and Steam Link, as well as Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, and GeForce Now. Essentially, even if you don't love mobile gaming, this little controller can turn your phone into a console or PC. But the experience might change your mind about mobile games; I played Stardew Valley for so long I forgot I was playing on my phone. The built-in headphone jack is a nice touch.
Game controls built into a slim phone case. Why are we not funding this
Control is inspired by paranormal stories about the fictional SCP Foundation created by an online collaborative wiki fiction project, based on the genre of the new weird. The environments of the Oldest House are designed in the brutalist architecture style, common for many government buildings created during the Cold War era, which served as a setting to show off the game's destructive environmental systems. The core game includes many allusions to Alan Wake, one of Remedy's prior games with similar themes of the paranormal, and Control's AWE expansion is a crossover between these two series, which Remedy said forms part of the Remedy Connected Universe. Control was one of the first games released to take advantage of real-time ray tracing built into the hardware of newer video cards.
Control is played from a third-person perspective. Control is set within the Oldest House, a featureless Brutalist skyscraper in New York City, and the headquarters of the fictional Federal Bureau of Control (FBC), which studies Altered World Events (AWEs) and collects and studies Objects of Power from these AWEs. The Oldest House, itself an Object of Power, has an interior far larger than its exterior; an enormous, constantly shifting supernatural realm that defies the laws of spacetime.[1] At the onset of the game, an entity called the Hiss is attempting to cross over through a dimensional barrier into this reality and has taken over numerous parts of the Oldest House, reconfiguring its architecture to its needs, as well as many of the FBC employees to fight for it. The player controls Jesse Faden, who has come to the Oldest House seeking answers about her brother after a prior AWE, and becomes involved in the fight against the Hiss.[2]
Control is built in the Metroidvania format, with a large world map that can be explored at a nonlinear pace, unlike Remedy's previous titles which were primarily linear. As the player completes the main story missions, they will encounter areas known as Control Points, which can be unlocked after clearing the area of enemies and then used both as save points and for fast travel throughout the building to previously unlocked Control Points. As the player completes missions, they unlock more of the building to explore, along with additional side quests, in addition to various rewards. These include skill points which can be used to improve psychokinetic powers that Jesse gains over the course of the game, such as projectile-launching debris at enemies or seizing control of enemies' minds temporarily to turn them into her allies.[2] Mission rewards include resources that can be used to improve the function of the Service Weapon, a special gun that can take on multiple forms, ranging from a close-range shotgun-like blast to long-range sniper-like form, with each form outfitted with various perks. The player can equip perks to improve Jesse's base attributes. Various side-quests and optional time-limited mission alerts are available with additional rewards if completed.[3][2]
AWE is a crossover between Control and Remedy Entertainment's previous title, Alan Wake. Alan Wake takes place in Bright Falls, Washington; in that game, writer Alan Wake finds himself coerced and trapped by the Dark Presence that inhabited Bright Falls' Cauldron Lake, able to turn his writings into reality. Following the events of Alan Wake (as described in Control), Emil Hartman, a psychologist who attempted to investigate and exploit this power, was confronted and arrested by agents of the FBC, who confiscated all of his research on the lake. In a final act of desperation, Hartman dove into Cauldron Lake and was possessed by the Dark Presence. Hartman was subsequently captured and brought to the Oldest House by the Bureau, who attempted to contain him in the Investigations Sector. However, after Hartman breached containment, the Bureau was forced to completely abandon the sector. During the Hiss invasion, the Hiss mixed with the Dark Presence in Hartman, twisting him into a monstrous entity which haunts the sector.
The first concept down was creating the fictional FBC, a realistic setting that would serve as a basis for paranormal events and a catalyst for events in the story.[11] This enabled Remedy to consider multiple stories they could tell, not just about the player-character but other individuals in the FBC, but this also created the challenge of how to present the stories of the other characters in the open-world format.[11] The gathered writings of the fictional SCP Foundation ("Secure, Contain, Protect") website was a major influence on Control. Stories on SCP Foundation's site are based on singular objects with strange paranormal impacts, and as a whole, they are narratively linked by the common format of reports written by the fictional SCP Foundation, which catalogs and studies the objects. Control was built atop this, having the various Objects of Power and Altered Items, along with numerous collectable writings about these objects or other stories in line with SCP.[14] They fixed the story in the genre of the new weird, a modern variant of weird fiction with stories that combine science fiction and fantasy often with a bureaucratic government agency involved in these events. In Control, they reversed the role to make the bureaucracy at the center of the story. Narrative designer Brooke Maggs stated "there is an invisible, assailing presence of bureaucracy in the corporate office setting that is in itself, unsettling".[15] The mundane features of the Oldest House helped to contrast against the paranormal aspects of the game, thus well-suiting the new weird, according to world design director Stuart MacDonald.[15] The design team's goal in using the new weird approach was not to create terrifying moments as one would do in a horror game, but instead create a continuing sense of dread for the player.[15]
The everyday objects that would become Objects of Power in the game were selected to be within the concept of the new weird. One such Object of Power is a floppy disk. MacDonald said he was drawn to use a floppy disk in this manner after reading a story about how many of the United States national missile defense sites had only recently transitioned off floppy disks, and prior to that, these disks could be seen as proverbial weapons that were held with high reverence.[15] The copious presence in the Oldest House of 1960s and 1970s technology such as pneumatic tubes, slide projectors and monochrome monitors, and the absence of modern-day technologies such as cell phones, is explained in-game as the result of the tendency of newer technologies to fail or malfunction within the boundaries of the Oldest House.
The Oldest House setting was based on brutalist architecture, a style utilizing large concrete blocks popularized in the 1950s and used in many government buildings at the time. The game's world design director, Stuart Macdonald, described brutalism as a good science-fiction setting, as it has "this sense of power, weight, strength and stability to it", and when the Oldest House's geometries are affected by the Hiss, "it makes for a really good contrast with the impossible architecture".[16] The relatively flat colors of the background walls made it an ideal canvas to showcase other design and lighting effects in the game. It served well into the telekinesis powers of the game, as the concrete walls would be used in lieu of a target object when the player throws debris at foes via telekinesis, and the initially pristine spaces end up showing the results of a large, destructive battle.[16] Among real-world influences in the game's architecture is 33 Thomas Street, formerly known as the AT&T Long Lines Building, a windowless building in the center of New York City. Macdonald used this building as a modern example of brutalism, and created the Oldest House as a "bizarre, brutalist monolith" to house the FBC.[16] Other real-world locations used as inspiration included the Boston City Hall, the Andrews Building at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and the Met Breuer.[16]
A further challenge in the game's design and implementation involved creating an environment that would encourage the player to explore, get lost in it, and learn by observation. Kasurinen felt they did not want to include a traditional heads-up display for the player, with mission markers or other clutter, and instead have the player use mission descriptions in their log and careful observation of the environment to figure out where to go next.[11] This further led to the decision to only tell player critical information via some means, leaving the player to fill in the missing parts with their own observations and imaginations.[11] They also wanted a fluid environment, where nearly any object in it could be used as part of the player-character's telekinetic powers, so that the game world could be both a weapon to be used by the player, or a weapon against the player-character. To achieve this, Remedy replaced the Havok physics in their in-house game engine with PhysX, and improved their artificial intelligence to enable enemies to take advantage of these changes.[11] Control is built using Remedy's proprietary Northlight Engine, which was first used on the company's previous title Quantum Break.[26] 2ff7e9595c