Control (2019) by Remedy

As someone who loves a game with great atmosphere, I can recommend Remedy's Control wholeheartedly. This game absolutely bleeds style and a sense of otherworldliness. The sound design is exceptional, lighting and particle effects look absolutely fantastic. The design of the setting, too, is carefully crafted—lots of sharp angles, lots of really polished color palettes going on. You can tell the minds at work designing this world had a specific aesthetic quality they were going for, and I appreciate that. They've succeeded in spades, although some of the ham-fisted referential treatments inspired by governmental bureaucracy were a bit hokey for my tastes.

Apart from the artistic design of its spaces and lighting, the game is an absolute powerhouse technically, particularly with its lighting and reflections (check out the reflection of the desk lamp on the whiteboard—chef's. freaking. kiss.) Ray tracing is utterly amazing and some of the graphics I've seen in this game are unmatched by any game I've ever played. Slick, oily gray hallways whose only sources of light are cream-colored desklamps pouring through plate glass; a sickly looking industrial maintenance room lit by wan, elegiac yellow-greens; or inky basalt corridors bleeding with the warm orange glows emanating from the larger room ahead. The stuff they do with lighting in this game is absurdly gorgeous, with a touch of the morbid and weird. I love it. In general, it looks incredible; but I did have to rely a lot on DLSS (Nvidia's cutting edge AI upscaling technology) to do some heavy lifting, and its implementation in this game is not perfect. There are certain instances where textures are mucked up by DLSS, which seems that it can't quite manage full resolution images in certain cases; namely with certain paintings on the wall, and some decals which appear regularly. You're going to want to play in DirectX 12, though, and enable DLSS despite these issues, because ray tracing makes this game look so incredible that it's worth the drawback. I ticked down shadow resolution to help with framerate, but left most other settings on Medium to High. I am playing on a I9-9900K @ 5.0ghz and an RTX 2080 Super at 1440p and saw between 60-80 frames per second with mixed Medium/High settings. Your mileage may vary.

If you're looking for a good third-person action shooter, you're going to love this. The game seems to balance its pace between exploration—in which you exist within this compelling, affecting atmosphere and learn more about the lore behind the game's events—and all-out gun battles with challenging enemies, including boss fights that should satisfy most players. There's a significant ramp-up in difficulty here from other shooters you may be used to, and that leads me into my biggest criticism of this game.

The checkpoints. Oh, the checkpoints. Those buggers.

For some background: I hate checkpoints. I hate them universally and I hate them fiercely. I wish they didn't exist. I wish every developer allowed me the opportunity to save whenever I wanted, as many games do.

Checkpoints are always bad in my book. But! Sometimes checkpoints are not horribly, experience-destroyingly bad. Unfortunately with Control, this is not the case. Your checkpoints are limited to certain areas within the game, and the setting tends to be a bit convoluted and not so easy to navigate. While this imparts a genuine, lived-in feel for most of the game, it really becomes frustrating when you spend a lot of time hunting for goodies, checking all the nooks and crannies and not paying much attention to where you are... Only to get killed and have to respawn across the entire level to where that one point you saved at was, back 45 minutes ago.

These checkpoints are putridly awful because, not only do you have to traverse across territory you've already seen, but you've now got to fight additional peon enemies to get back to where you were. I'm all for challenging the player and punishing them when they make a mistake, but so much of my enjoyment of Control came from being fully immersed in its weird, creepy atmosphere, and helped along by its incredible visuals. Many times I found myself manually walking, fully in character, trying to figure out what the heck was going on here. When I died and was forced back to where I was half an hour ago, I was immediately pulled from the engrossing experience I was having and simply sprinted through these amazing environments, no longer caring about it and just wanting to get back where I was. It wasn't something like in From Software's Dark Souls, where each route was a challenge to be overcome by learning more and more—rather, in Control, it's a jarring interruption filled with disposable enemies, and dying, instead of being a learning experience, only served to make the gameplay a jagged, regular shift between being fully immersed and doing busywork walking from place to place. It seems the devs insisted on aping the bonfire system from Dark Souls without realizing what made that system so compelling and addictive.

This is a problem solved relatively easily. Checkpoints in Control are too few, too far between, and, in my opinion, it harms the experience as-is. A simple way to fix this would be to rely on a more precise, arbitrary checkpointing system rather than the rigid system in place. Remove the respawn functionality strictly tied to Control Points, and use them just as fast travel beacons and level-up hubs (which they already feature), and simply spawn the player at the beginning of the room before which they just died, and allow them to continue their progress sans tedium. But perhaps this would make the experience a bit too easy? Again, your mileage may vary! This may not bother you, but it substantially harmed a lot of the experience for me. I'm a bit embarrassed to say I've used the Assist mode more than once to bypass these frustrating instances so I could get back to doing what I enjoyed most in this game: Wandering around, being weirded out, and being constantly made tense by this wonderfully crafted setting. I know, I know: I'm not a real gamer; I'm a disgusting loser and I should get good. Noted.

Despite some of my harsher criticisms, if you're looking for an action-packed technical specimen of a third-person shooter, a graphical work of atmospheric art, or a weird, creepy story penned by Sam Lake which will keep you guessing, you should pick this up. It's worth it—if your machine can handle it, and if you can handle its putrid checkpointing.

⭐⭐⭐

Rimworld (2018) by Ludeon Studios

I have very little experience with basebuilding/colony sim-type games. The closest thing I've played to this is probably the extraordinarily popular Stardew Valley, which I loved, but which features some big differences from Rimworld.

One of the things I loved about Stardew was the added focus on the characters and their interactions, versus simply the cold, calculating efficiency of building a "base" (a farm in Stardew, of course, and a colony in Rimworld). The characters injected a welcome human aspect to the game, and Rimworld takes this approach one step further—and that's what makes it great, and what makes it stand out.

Rimworld eschews a more developer-handcrafted approach for a random, emergent system which guides its characters. The interactions between colonists and the game's encounters aren't scripted, but rather randomly generated. And while this typically feels far more artificial and less compelling in most games, it somehow works beautifully in Rimworld and really gives your colony the feel of an actual social ecosystem, rather than a bunch of video game systems mechanically and robotically at work. This is due to how deep and interweaved the systems of backstory, traits, and skills are, and how varied the social interactions between colonists can get.

I don't think I've ever played a game which facilitated my own 'head-canon' so strongly as Rimworld. This game's pseudo-random characters feel anything but random. For example, my prison Warden recruited a young native woman who was passing by, eventually fell in love with her, and married her. She's now one of my best shocktroopers, and as a great shooter, has an ongoing rivalry with my melee berserker, Linda, who wears heavy armor and beats people with a mace.

Doc Red doesn't care much for clothes, aside from his trusty helmet.

Then there's my colony's surgeon and doctor, Red; a medic with superior skills in medical and plants, but who is also a nudist, and is very unhappy unless he's treating his patients and tending his crops completely naked save for a steel helmet, in case of bandit raids (he switches to a winter hat when it's cold, but still prefers to be otherwise naked—even at temperatures of -5 celsius).

Or how about my father-and-son duo, Kaito and Dunc. They're two of my best colonists; they have some of the highest skills and are the most reliable workers. But despite being father and son, they have a pretty strong rivalry. They got into a fight in the workshop once, during which time Dunc bit off his father's ring finger. This was such an event in the colony that a separate colonist later built a wooden dresser with beautiful artwork depicting this fight and the climactic finger-biting.

The infamous Father vs. Son fight was a noteworthy occurrence in the colony.

Or, the colony Labrador retriever, Saffron, whom I mistakenly walled off from her kibble supply, which meant that she was forced to eat drugs to survive. Eventually, she developed an addiction, and then got pregnant with puppies. So now we have a drug-addicted, pregnant dog roaming the premises, constantly high and vegging out in the middle of the hayfields we grow for the horses.

The random events, which are variable in how frequently they occur, can be challenging and sometimes impossible. They add another layer to the lived-in feel of the world. I captured a promising native woman with a great skillset and successfully recruited her, only to have her brother and his friends come and attempt to raid me later on as retaliation. The fact that they were related, and that I was given time to get to know the woman before her brother appeared, made this such a more compelling episode than if I had simply been randomly raided by warlike natives.

These kinds of emergent stories are what make Rimworld so special. They somehow feel real and handcrafted despite their randomness, which is a really incredible accomplishment. You get a different story with each colony, and the options allow you to craft them to be as chill or as brutal as you like via the bevy of difficulty settings provided. You can turn off nearly all the challenge and just relax and build a nice colony, or you can crank them up and wallow in misery as your colonists experience firsthand the futility and hopelessness of building a colony on a rimworld full of deadly dangers such as death robots, cannibalistic raiders, and monstrous insects eager to consume their flesh.

And, of course, it goes without saying that the systems at work with the basebuilding are exceptional; the tech tree is very in-depth, the economy guiding your progress is stout and gives you a sense of 'earning it', and the supplies you must keep stocked are extensive enough to be challenging but not so overwrought as to be overwhelming. The caravan system, which I didn't even dig into until after 50 hours of playing time, also adds a mid-game system which is surprisingly deep and well-crafted itself. The Priorities system is incredibly addictive, and probably where I spend most of my actual gameplay time; there's something so compelling about endlessly tweaking my colonists' activities to try and gain the most efficiency possible.

If I did have a knock against this game, it's perhaps that it's got a steep learning curve. If you've played a game like this before, you're probably already halfway to learning its systems. I, however, had not, so I had to grind out the first 8 hours or so before I had a grasp of what I was doing, and I was often frustrated as I learned how things work by making drastic mistakes. My first colony starved to death due to my inexperience.

So, is it worth a purchase? Well, Rimworld is notorious for never going on sale, but that's not a huge deal in my opinion because it's such a compelling, deep, satisfying experience that it's worth the purchase at full price in my opinion. If you feel overwhelmed at the beginning, just push through. Soon it'll start clicking for you.

Or, you know, don't. And stay far away from this damned game. Because it's unbelievably addictive... Seriously. It's swallowing my life. Some people have heroin... I have Rimworld.

⭐⭐⭐⭐