Control has finally been given a release date – August 27 of this year – after the developer confirmed to Eurogamer that a leak in the Microsoft store was indeed correct. The game comes from Remedy, the studio behind Alan Wake and Quantum Break, and, like them, will see a supernatural protagonist thrown into a bizarre and distorted reality.
Control was announced at E3 2018 as part of Playstation’s showcase, but will be available on PC and Xbox One too. The game features Jesse Faden as its protagonist, a chief at the Department of Control. When its headquarters are overrun, the player must guide Jesse through her surreal new surroundings as they transform and test the player’s perception of a fixed reality.
By the sounds of it, Control is set to be a lot less linear than Alan Wake and Quantum Break, encouraging players to “define their playstyle by integrating supernatural abilities[…] and modifiable loadouts”. The world doesn’t seem quite as bent on scarring the player either, as in other reality-warping games like Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. Players are said to be capable of mastering “complex rituals to alter [their] surroundings”, implying that by the endgame, Jesse could genuinely achieve a great degree of control…
Personally, I’m excited for Remedy’s heavily cinematic style to be cracked open a bit and allow for more player input. The apparent lack of live-action cutscenes in Control is welcome too, considering how much we were all scarred by FMV games in the nineties.
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Remedy has already reassured players that Control’s PC release won’t suffer the same shortfalls as Quantum Break, which saw widespread incompatibility with the majority of Nvidia graphics cards as well as limited graphical capacity.