Retro Replay Review

Gameplay

The first hour of Control makes a strong case for itself because it does not treat its supernatural setting as wallpaper. You enter the Oldest House looking for answers, pick up the mantle of Director, and quickly find yourself trading shots with the Hiss in rooms that feel far too large and strange for an office building. The initial shooting is solid, but it can feel a little exposed before your powers fill out. Stick with it. The game becomes much more exciting once you stop treating the Service Weapon as your whole kit.

Launch is the star. Ripping nearby objects loose and pitching them into enemies gives every fight a blunt, improvised force that ordinary gunfire cannot match. Later, levitation, Evade, Shield, and Seize widen your options further. You can get airborne, break pressure with a quick escape, protect yourself with debris, or turn an enemy into a temporary ally. That mix encourages you to stay aggressive, and the recharging ammunition on the Service Weapon helps prevent combat from settling into the usual habit of crouching and endlessly refilling a magazine.

The Oldest House is built for backtracking, with new abilities opening routes through its connected sectors. That structure makes discovery feel rewarding when you remember a blocked passage and return with the means to cross it. Mods and ability progression also give you room to lean into the tools you enjoy most. The tradeoff is pacing. Optional missions, files, recordings, and videos are often fascinating, but stopping to read Bureau material can cut into the urgency of the main push. If you love digging through a weird fictional institution, you will happily linger. If you want a clean, forward-driving campaign, it can feel like the game is repeatedly asking you to step off the road.

Remedy’s earlier Alan Wake is a useful point of comparison: both pair a supernatural mystery with third-person action, but Control gives you a freer headquarters to explore and a much more physical set of psychic combat tools. For an overview of Jesse’s role and the base game’s central powers, 505 Games’ launch guide to Control captures the pitch well.

Graphics

The Oldest House looks best when it turns plain institutional architecture into something huge and wrong. Jesse, in her dark jacket, can look tiny beside immense stepped blocks and sharp stone columns, while saturated red light floods floors that fade into black shadow. Small cool-blue points against that red-and-black space add an eerie contrast without softening the hostility of the place.

An industrial power plant area pushes the scale even harder, with a massive cylinder, towering red pipes, suspended catwalks, and human bodies hanging in open space under a crimson ceiling. It is striking imagery, though the heavy red lighting and deep shadows can swallow smaller edges when you are trying to read the room.

Story

Jesse’s search for her missing brother gives Control a personal reason to enter its bizarre bureaucracy. She is not just sightseeing through a haunted office complex. She wants answers about her past, and the Hiss invasion makes that search immediately dangerous. The premise gives the game a clear emotional hook even as the world around it grows increasingly hard to explain.

The stronger storytelling choice is the Bureau itself. Case files, audio recordings, and videos turn mundane administrative language into a source of paranormal unease. A document about procedures can be as intriguing as a combat encounter because it suggests an entire organization has spent years trying to file, contain, and rationalize the impossible.

That dense lore asks for some patience. You can race through the main path, but much of the flavor lives in material you choose to stop and absorb. The mystery works because it leaves room for uncertainty, yet its constant side documents can make the narrative feel fragmented if you are only interested in Jesse’s immediate goal. Read selectively if the momentum starts slipping, then return to the files when you are in the mood to explore the Bureau’s stranger corners.

Overall Experience

Control is at its best when a confusing hallway opens into a monumental chamber and you answer the threat by launching the furniture at it. The game understands that psychic power should feel disruptive, not merely decorative, and it keeps finding ways to turn its peculiar setting into a place worth pushing deeper into.

Its rougher side is structural rather than fundamental. The interconnected building invites detours, the lore invites reading, and neither always cooperates with the pace of Jesse’s search. You may occasionally want the game to stop handing you another intriguing report and point you toward the next big confrontation. Even then, that excess is part of why the Oldest House sticks in your memory.

Give it a chance if you want third-person action with a genuinely odd sense of place and combat that grows more satisfying as your powers accumulate. Skip it only if backtracking and optional lore-heavy detours reliably drain your enthusiasm. For most action fans willing to meet it on its eccentric terms, the payoff is absolutely worth the occasional loss of momentum.

Retro Replay Score

8.1/10