Eyes-On: Remedy’s Control will bend your mind

The invocation of the SCP Wiki and that idea of a facility of unexplainable items, opens up a way to play the game that Remedy has never explored before: the Metroidvania. Remedy’s games have always been pretty linear, taking you from one area to the next, down a corridor, into a battle. They’re well paced, they’re fun to play, but they have a relatively limited space. You can explore, take in the world, but there’s only so much to take in.

With a shape-changing building full of mysteries, Remedy now has space for you to explore, and many of the abilities Faden acquires will allow her (and you) to reach new places and go back to places you’ve already been and find new ways of approaching them. Kusarinen suggested that an empty wall might change depending on what you do or even when you do it. This presents a unique challenge, because the team has to make this stuff grokkable without explaining everything about it. The world has to be comprehensible and incomprehensible at the same time.

“It was important to us to make sure that all the pieces click. What inspired us early on was this brutalist architectural style, which is all about simplicity of form and materials. You understand what these things are, how they behave, you understand how they react when you say, shoot them or kinetically control them. That set a base that allowed us to create an environment that is consistent, readable, you understand what you see, what you get. And then we have approached new techniques on how to build worlds, relying more on modular systems for instance that allow us to create a sense of repetition. We can create vast spaces quite quickly… and it’s been important to use because we didn’t want to create this linear small path through the world. It’s open ended, different directions you can take. You can tackle the main quest if you want, but there’s other opportunities… sidequests, explore areas, other game modes beside just the quest. It was important for us to rethink how we built these environments. But we take these ideas like a more modular environment, we used procedural systems, the brutalist architecture – it all kind of clicked together. It’s a world you can understand, a world that behaves in a consistent way.”

With Control, Kusarinen and his team hope that what draws us in isn’t just that the game is fun, that there are achievements to unlock, but that the mysteries of the world itself will be compelling enough to make that metroidvania-style exploration appealing.

But to be clear, you’re not just going around tugging on light strings and unlocking otherworldly doors. This is an action game. You have a supernatural firearm called the Service Weapon that the team isn’t saying much about yet. It can be a standard pistol, but it can transform. The one other form the team has shown, they’re calling Shatter. It’s a close range form that turns the pistol into something more like a shotgun, allowing Jesse to take on her enemies in groups. There are powers, too. We saw Jesse defend herself and attack with countless items in her environment, we saw her levitate from one area to another.

The demo we saw feels very much like a Remedy-made game, but it feels like the game they’ve been reaching for all this time. And it’s really exciting. We can’t wait to see Control when it hits for PlayStation, Xbox, and PC next year.

Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/2018/06/19/eyes-on-control-preview-remedy/