interact and actually try to help
him. The fridge doesn’t just hold the
office vegans’ soya milk, it is in fact
a supernatural object, which has to
be constantly watched by someone
or it’ll most likely eat everyone, a bit
like Doctor Who’s Weeping Angels
in white goods form. It’s one of the
many things that demonstrate the
weirdness afoot in Control’s world,
something the game’s developers
are not at all afraid to embrace. In
fact, they revel in it, as well as the
influence of new weird fiction such
as Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation and
China Miéville’s Kraken, with maybe a
dash of David Lynch thrown in.
Side-missions such as Phillip and
his fridge have enabled the team to
turn up the strangeness to 11, while
enabling players to more deeply
explore the lore of Control’s world.
“Gameplay-wise you’ll also discover
a lot of very interesting and strange
gameplay experiences and events,”
confirms lead game designer Paul
Ehreth. “A lot of them give you the
bigger rewards in the game, and so
wondering what’s down this hallway
can lead you into a whole other
narrative experience that is beneficial
from a gameplay perspective. We get
real weird with it!”
Indeed. There are some fairly out-
there concepts in Control, so how
did the team work to keep thingsrelatable and grounded for the player?
“I think ‘relatable and grounded’
comes a lot from Jesse’s personal
quest,” highlights narrative lead
Brooke Maggs. “We identify with her
because she’s a stranger to this place
and so as she’s encountering things
for the first time so are we, so that’s
a nice narrative way to keep players
grounded in this place. But also in the
way NPCs react to her as director, we
develop an understanding of what
this role potentially was, and could
now be for her.”
“I think it’s really important,” agrees
Paul. “If you’re going to present
something that’s really out-there,
it has some kind of grounding or
relatable aspect and so in Control
we start out with the normal, the
mundane, we’d say, and from there itkeeps getting stranger and stranger
as you get out into the reaches of
the building where the very fabric of
reality begins actually breaking down.
If we just threw you right in there
it might be a little bit too much to
grasp, but the way we try to present
it is by getting you used to it and then
letting you go.”“That’s clear in the demo, too,”
confirms Brooke, “where you also see
the Bureau trying to understand, in
a very human scientific method kind
of way, which brings the mundane to
the unexplained.”
It’s a well-worn but very effective
sci-fi narrative device, to view those
stranger things through the wide-
eyes of a group of kids, a curious
scientist, a tourist ‘companion’. The
vintage scientific devices, it seems,
are deliberately analogue because
digital is too open to corruption, by
the Hiss, or the other powers lurking
within the Bureau’s collection of
oddities. It’s these touches that help
the game feel really well crafted, and
make Jesse’s new experiences and
the unfolding of events feel that much
more believable.“We’re trusting you can
handle this stuff, so we’re
going to put it all out there”
ABOVE The
Federal Bureau
Of Control is
home to all
sorts of
otherworldly and
bizarre things.“I actually think it’s really easy to
come up with something random and
bizarre,” considers Paul, “but what’s
difficult is giving that actual meaning,
that this exists for a purpose and that
this happened for this reason and it’s
connected to these people and these
events, and so we want to try very
hard to make sure all the weirdness
that we have does have purpose and
it does have meaning in the greater
context of the world. But we also kind
of didn’t want to rein it in, in terms of
weirdness, because there’s a sort
of trust that we have in the players.
We’re trusting that you can handle
some of this stuff, and we’re just
going to put it all out there and be
brave in the way we present this and
trust that players can figure it out.”More Xbox news at gamesradar.com/oxm THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE 047CONTROL