Control has some of the smoothest...uh, controls I've ever experienced. The telekinesis ability always picked up what I wanted. Jumping and floating is perfect. Movement is quick and flowy.

Just good. Satisfying. Sound design is really good too. Also level design. I don't remember ever being lost even though most of the game takes place in grey featureless corridors. Also the music? I really respect what they were going for, which I think was to have no melody or chords or anything. All of it is percussion or odd foley sounds. It doesn't sound like identifiable instruments, so it's this otherworldly clicking and pulsing noises but it's never unfamiliar enough to be grating.

It's so good. Alan Wake 2 is good too. Remedy usually knocks it out of the park, but a consequence of that is their games take forever. They spend a lot of time and polish on everything they do.

my gf's probably-autistic special interest is the Remedy game universe. she fuckin' loves Alan Wake and Control and shit

so maybe go play the Alan Wake series

I played this at release. Thought the gameplay was very mid but visually it's absolutely amazing. Legit bought the game just because those concrete textures looked so delicious I almost wanted to lick them through the screen and the massive spaces were just oozing atmosphere.

This is tangential, but I played Jedi: Fallen Order just before I played Control, and while I enjoyed Fallen Order for what it was, I was shocked at how much more I enjoyed Control. Control was, in many ways, the Jedi Knight power fantasy that Fallen Order wasn’t. Floating around throwing enemies into enemies and then off a balcony, tossing huge objects at people, shooting force lightning, etc. It was more Jedi than the game called Jedi and I will never forget that about it.

I liked the part where they called out Havana syndrome as being fake as hell

I think there are quite a few games that end up holding up really really well because the gameplay is so good.

Fallout New Vegas comes to mind. I really like The Outer Worlds and I think it was released in, like, 2019.

God of War was released in 2018 and that game holds up beautifully.

I've also been playing through Wolfenstein 2 and that was released in 2014.

Dishonored is still amazing, and I think that game was released in like 2012. The art style has a lot to do with the timelessness of that game.

Good games last forever I think.

I was saying the same thing about dishonored (2012/3) the other day. Graphics look dated - low-res mainly - but the art direction makes them still very okay. I remember back in the early-mid 2000s graphics were absolutely progressing every year, with every new game being able to offer a higher fidelity experience as well as bigger worlds, more npcs on screen etc. by which I mean very quantifiable technical achievements. When they started introducing ragdolls to npc bodies the whole world screamed at the sight of what had become possible on consumer hardware.

I can barely tell the difference between a 2019 and 2025 game, aside from there's more animations and they look smoother. They're doing ray tracing and HDR now but if your graphics card can't even do it (which is most of them currently in use I'd wager) you're never going to interact with that. I think they're also doing stuff with sound, but I can't really think of a breakthrough technical achievement that becomes commonplace. I guess if I had to think of one, it's how many NPCs the new hitman games are able to simulate at once... but the reboots started in 2016, 9 years ago.

I felt the same way playing Red Dead Redemption 2 again recently. that game will be 7 years old this year and is still an absolutely stunning, beautiful experience. it is leagues ahead of many titles coming out now, and honestly feels timeless. I agree about the diminishing returns, buying a new game these days is a very hard sell, both because of the ballooning prices, and also because of how gracefully older titles have aged.

I might be mistaken and I don't have any handy examples to back this argument, but I feel like ten years ago, a six-year-old game would definitely feel much more dated than this does

I recently dug an old Xbox out and played around with some of the games from that generation. they have aged like dried dogshit on a hot sidewalk. you are definitely not wrong on this point. that's not to say I don't still enjoy them, they've still got a particular charm to them, but aged finely they have not.

After liking CONTROL a lot I've started to play the catalogue of Remedy that I've missed out on so far and what's interesting to me is CONTROL now feels like it was in the making for 18 years, starting from Max Payne 1, and also probably the reason there isn't a lot like it.

You get the time slowing powers at Max Payne 1 set against a backdrop of slightly pointing at the supernatural. Alan Wake modifies the time slowing powers slightly to be reactive instead of proactive and also picks up all the real otherworldly and other dimension stuff as well as great big honking set pieces and the enviroment throwing huge objects at you. American Nightmare then uses that to put it into a more action focused setting. Quantum Break carries that over more scientififically and gives you superpowers that are strikingly similar to what you have in CONTROL where they go full hog and unite the otherworldly paranatural powers with a more scientific approach á la SCP and it just really fucking clicks.

I've noticed this with a lot. Graphics are the obvious one, but the sound design gets better, too. It's not like Max Payne was bad but they really nailed it in American Nightmare and just carry over from there, the Service Weapon as a pistol in CONTROL is just the sound of the 9mm Pistol from there. The superpowers in Quantum Break feel kind of clunky if you come back at it from CONTROL, this is really obvious in the dodge mechanic which is a 1:1 copy but for some reason it feels like 30% worse in Quantum Break, couldn't even tell you why, probably reactiveness, sound and level design?

CONTROL is really polished to a mirror sheen. The Max Paynes had some gameplay clunkyness and some bullshit hard, Alan Wake 1 is really a fucking slog to play for the first two chapters before it picks up, American Nightmare definitely includes too much pointless walking despite their efforts to streamline it. Quantum Break tends to be too heavy on the story, lacking interactions and the guns feel about 20% too weak. They're all good games, despite Quantum Break being the obvious stinker. And then in CONTROL they just nailed it 100%, start to finish

dude 2019 is like 25 years after the future of course games look that good

I might be mistaken and I don't have any handy examples to back this argument, but I feel like ten years ago, a six-year-old game would definitely feel much more dated than this does. Does that make sense? I don't think games used to age this gracefully 10+ years ago.

Oh, definitely. There's a lot less difference between a 2025 game and a 2015 game than there was between a 2015 game and a 2005 game, or a 2005 game and a 1995 game, &c.

Super Mario 3 was released in 1990, Super Mario 64 was released in 1996

Remember that you can unlock all the PlayStation-exclusive content, including a Hideo Kojima voice cameo mission, by doing a small edit to the game .exe with a hex editor!

Just look up the specific instructions for the Steam version

I'm glad people still feel this way about stuff - I regularly play games from my youth that are 15-20+ years old, and would 100% give them the same sort of praise on all counts - aging, graphics, art, style, lore, etc.

I certainly wouldn't put this down as a ~2019 phenomenon.

I might be mistaken and I don't have any handy examples to back this argument, but I feel like ten years ago, a six-year-old game would definitely feel much more dated than this does. Does that make sense? I don't think games used to age this gracefully 10+ years ago.

I don't think a 2009 game would've felt that dated in 2015, but I definitely think technology has peaked at some point and design elements for certain genres are so finely honed that there's not that much to improve upon any more. I definitely don't think we'll ever see something like the mid 90s again where 3D became mainstream and every genre had to completely change up its design principles.

I started gaming in 2006, so my formative years were 2006 to 2012. Absolutely bonkers gains in graphical fidelity during that time period. But also I'm fine with mid graphics from indie studios, so w/e

(I play stormworks a lot)

i've tried to play that game so many times.. i always just get bored with it after about an hour or two. It looks great and seems like a game I would enjoy, but for some reason I just don't.