Control, Lovecraft in the Modern Day (Patreon)

What if I told you about an organisation whose behaviour is clandestine and secretive, whose rituals are obscure and ceremonial, and whose reach is far and wide? This organisation has ties to other clandestine organisations, such as the Freemasons, and uses its power and corruption to let its members get away with crimes freely. The members of this organisation go unquestioned and unimpeded as they enter homes, seize property, harass individuals and even kill.

It’s cops, I’m talking about cops.

Enbies, ladies, gentlemen, scoundrels - today I want to take a look at a game that burst out of nowhere and suddenly became literally my favourite game ever, what relation it may or may not have to the most racist nerd ever, and what's generally going on with the themes and meaning, and all that junk. 

Remedy’s 2019 game Control opens on a fable, basically a modern retelling of Plato’s allegory of the cave using The Shawshank Redemption for contemporary reference. See, Plato was a philosopher in Ancient Greece who said that if you abducted a bunch of strangers and chained them up a cave and forced them to watch you do shadow puppets, they wouldn’t be able to do shit about it, and that would suck for them. Smart guy.

Control wants you interrogating your perception of reality right from the outset. What if you were in a cell, and all you had was a poster on the wall to look at, says Jesse, the protagonist, but behind the poster is a hole to the real world, and someday something crawls out of it.

Jesse Faden, the protagonist and best character in the game comes to the Federal Bureau of Control looking for her brother Dylan, who was taken by them after an interaction with an Object of Power, inanimate objects that become possessed with paranormal energy and if bonded to a type of person called a parautilitarian can grant superpowers. Jesse immediately bonds with one such Object of Power which gives her powers but also makes her the Director of the Bureau… somehow?

The building is on lockdown as the Hiss, an otherworldly entity, is trying to take control of something called The Board which runs the Bureau from somewhere called the Astral Plane. The game devolves into a wonderful ambivalence from here on. There is a central narrative and there also isn’t. The details of the world are clear and they aren’t. The game is incredibly obvious about it’s messaging and it’s also completely obfuscated.

Jesse is trying to cleanse the building of the Hiss, and get her brother back, and that definitely drives the player into the world, so they can meet Emily Pope and Helen Marshall and with their help defeat the forces of evil, but the real story is just in exploring the world by reading files and listening to audio logs, discovering the pants-shittingly terrifying kids puppet show Threshold Kids that they produced for the game, and watching instructional videos from Casper Darling, the best character in the game. It’s the kind of storytelling that comes from making a piece of art that is fundamentally about a building.

Physical Space

The first time through, I was playing this game at the same time as SOMA. SOMA, by denying you a map and making you play a lot of the game in the dark, makes you painfully aware of the space. SOMA makes you so spatially aware of its level design that there is a creature that pursues you through a sunken ship at breakneck speed which you can only survive by knowing with no mistakes exactly where you need to go. I got it on my second try, because on my first try I made one wrong turn, but moreover because the game had taught me the layout of the level that well.

Naturally you might conclude from this aha! Maps are evil and ruin the fun! Down with maps! But no you fucking wriggling fool, you twirp, you huckleberry donut! Removing the map can make the player aware of their surroundings better, but Control wants the exact opposite for a really good reason. In SOMA you need to feel grounded, real, and capable of dictating your own fate, because of the ideology the game is driving at, but Control wants you feeling helpless, and small, and lost.

The maps in Control look like this:

The game gives you a map that was designed by three Despicable Me minions standing on each other’s shoulders in a trenchcoat, and then you try to use it to get around, knowing that it should be helping and you don’t know what the fuck is even going on. The fact the game gives you a map that looks like google taught an AI cartography using only images of depressed engineering students lecture notes makes you feel more helpless, not less. The maps don’t help you progress around the Oldest House, they help you get lost, and that is deliberate.

And it doesn’t exactly help that the building the maps describe is changing around you at the same time.

I was discussing the game with a friend, and she said “The first part in control where it changes the hallway and leads you back to the elevator made me instantly fall in love with it” and I just did a double take.

What? No that can’t be right. I was watching really carefully when I played this. That can’t be right, I would have seen it.

So I booted up the game immediately and loaded a New Game, and sure enough in the very first area of the game, you walk up the stairs, past two portraits, down a corridor, talk to the janitor, loop around back onto the same balcony as before and into an elevator that wasn’t there before in between the two portraits.

Right from the first area, right from the first scene, it’s fucking with you.
This game is fucking with you. This building is fucking with you.

The only way around this building is going to be by knowing your way around but the building is actively resisting that. Not just by changing your environment but by making so much of it look the same. The Oldest House, based on 33 Thomas Street in Manhattan, is of course a brutalist skyscraper, so the interior is a warren of concrete corridors.

Brutalism, the architectural school that said “what if concrete is really cool actually” is representative of an era when architects really sincerely believed they could solve a lot of society’s problems by design, or if not by design alone, then at least by providing the right built environment for people to flourish within. In that way, Brutalist architecture is a physical metaphor for the design of society, for people telling you what to do and how to behave. Today, so many of the brutalist buildings you are familiar with will be government buildings, or schools, or universities or government built social housing. This style has come represent authority - and control - in the public consciousness. Ben Wheatley, who made High-Rise, a film about a brutalist tower block that is actually a metaphor for society, said "I'd been to a hotel in Denmark where the room had had a pillar in the middle of the room and a load of beams, in the architectural plan they had to put these pillars in to make the structure worked but they didn't give a fuck about that room, so someone was going to suffer and it was the poor bastard who had to stay in that room." For Wheatley, brutalist architecture is a style of building that “doesn’t care about the people inside it.”

I quite like brutalist architecture though. I think it’s misunderstood and underappreciated, and I think a lot of the reason that people hate it isn’t because of an actual aesthetic assessment, but because of their feelings about the institutions housed in brutalist buildings. It also doesn’t help that these buildings often don’t get the money to be cleaned, and then people hate the dirty concrete buildings, and then they get even less funding because everyone hates them…. I can’t even be a good contrarian here though, because hating brutalism has become so incredibly commonplace that even going against the grain and liking brutalism is its own cliche. God, mom, just let me hip! Ugh!

I think Control shows with fantastic finesse though, that brutalism can in fact, look cool as hell - being one of the most visually impressive games I’ve ever played - while at the same time it captures that spirit of why people hate brutalism: because it represents authority. It’s literally hostile architecture.

Not “hostile architecture” as in spikes in the floor to stop homeless people sleeping there or benches designed to tip rough sleepers off (although those are also really often done in brutalist styles) but architecture that literally has a sinister agenda. The Oldest House is a physicalization of the hostile relationship between the public and institutions of authority.

The building is the main character, or perhaps the main antagonist of the game in many ways. When you spend long times trying to figure out where to go or get back from your spawn point to the mission you were on, the game is very deliberately making you spend time with its most valuable asset: the building.

The building fucks with you right from the start, as I mentioned, but the ways it does this get more obvious as you progress. Right at the start, the building is strange, and twisted, and full of creepy bullshit, but it’s mostly just an office block. The Executive Sector is, for the most part, just a bunch of offices, at least until you get to the Hotline Chamber. Trench, the previous director of the FBC had a magic phone, and when you bind the phone to Jesse - i.e. absorb its magic powers - you have to enter an enormous chamber that’s basically the plastic Magneto jail from X-Men 2 which I will eventually have all YouTube game reviewers sealed in. Your powers can’t help you in here Jim Sterling!

The sheer vastness of this room is one of the first unsettling things about the building, simply because of its size. You’re starting to clock that the inside of this building couldn’t possibly fit inside the outside of this building.

Not to mention that to actually reach the phone you have to “traverse the Oceanview Motel”, a dingy motel that exists in some liminal space between the real world and everywhere else, and in many cases in between one part of the Oldest House and another.

So it actually feels pretty natural - not to detract from the fact it feels breathtaking - when you move from the power plant to a huge open air quarry under a star-flooded sky, supposedly inside the same sector of the building. The building’s internal geometry just gets bigger and bigger, from housing a Magneto Jail to a power plant to apparently just the whole universe.

Language

The fact the building, which is so clearly brutalist and therefore no older than 20th century, is called “The Oldest House” is great because of the obviousness of the lie. It gets your imagination ticking over - what claim does this place, this space, this institution have, to being the “oldest”. What ties it back further than the building, further than the Bureau, further than America, than countries, than houses? The answer is of course, in the name: Control.

Language is persistently tricky in Control, partly because it is a tool of control, partly as it exposes the themes of the piece and partly just contributing to the general uneasiness of the space. The mission descriptions written in the present tense like TV guide episode descriptions like “Jesse helps find the head of security” or “Jesse and friends learn a valuable lesson about trust” don’t appear to have more than superficial aesthetic relevance but they certainly contribute to a feeling that everything you’re doing is out of your control, and has already been decided for you.

Meanwhile the way that The Board speaks to you is deliberately formatted like a Bureau official document or maybe more like a legal contract, with fun parallels and comparisons like “bound for life/become best friends” “you/we wield the gun/you” “They are minor threats. Squash/Tell Off them”. It’s a source of entertaining quirkiness but it also brings up parallels between things that weird media nerds like me love to obsess over.

Control does something here that Twin Peaks, a clear inspiration to it also does. One thing and another are somehow, metaphysically linked, and also somehow the same thing. In Twin Peaks there are doppelgangers all the way down, the owls aren’t quite what they seem, and in general, language is treacherous.

Speaking of Twin Peaks, Remedy also made Alan Wake, a story about a city-boy outsider coming to a small logging town in Washington state where there are spooky goings on and bikers and a 50s themed diner and an old lady with secrets who talks to her pet inanimate object. It’s redundant even saying Oh I get it, it’s Twin Peaks, when it’s so obviously meant to be Twin Peaks. It simply is. What’s more interesting is that Alan Wake is in the same fictional universe as Control and people really need to be talking more about that! Get hyped, guys, I want Remedy to produce tonnes more games in this universe so I can pivot to exclusively Alan Wake Expanded Universe content.

The idea in Twin Peaks and also Control that two things could be metaphysically linked ties back to Jesse’s prison cell poster fable, or if you prefer, Plato’s kidnapping lawsuit. The same object might cast two different shadows in what we perceive as the real world, and we would think of those shadows as separate objects, but they’re actually the same.

A perfect example comes in with Ahti the janitor, the best character in the game, who refers to you consistently as the Janitor’s Assistant, not the Bureau Director. When you arrive he says you’re here to interview for the Assistant position, right before you pick up the gun and become the director. He gives you missions that mostly involve killing enemies you need to kill anyway (as well as one to just talk to the potted plants to cheer them up) and you realise that the action of killing the enemies and ridding the Oldest House of the Hiss is actually a kind of cleaning.

Then there’s Dylan, your twin brother, who finds it funny that both his name and your name are unisex. Then there’s the bit where Jesse wonders out loud to the player if the director position is “a kind of cell”, if maybe being a cop and being a prisoner are both actually zero-agency positions in a restrictive system that removes freedom from all indivi--

I’m getting ahead of myself.

Mysteries

There’s this spooky thing where Ahti responds to Jesse’s internal monologue, and it’s fantastically unsettling, like what the fuck did you just read my mind? She thinks to herself about how a friendly face is comforting in a faceless organisation and he laughs to himself “imagine that, a man with no face”

It’s these unconfronted mysteries that really make this game, and the little details that add a mysterious quality too.

The use of live-action footage, for example using the actors that the characters in the game are modelled off, intercut with the 3D-models is deeply excellent. It’s something they did back in Alan Wake but since that was 2011, the characters in the game looked like horrifying Action Man flesh puppets and the live-action footage largely just seemed quite out of place. In Control on the other hand, the characters look real enough to be the same as the footage, and just unreal enough that when the live-action footage cuts in, you feel like you’re seeing a realer reality - another plane of existence.

You encounter so much bizarre shit and you’ll never know whether this will be something that has an answer, something that’ll never have an answer, or something that’ll never need one, that the game just put in there to wig you out.

Like:

Clocks. Just clocks. Just endless, endless clocks.

Whatever the fuck is up with Ahti the janitor.

These huge bridged chasms in some massive space inside the bureau called “firebreaks” that connect you to the weirdest parts of the game, and then when you explore “The Foundation” in the DLC, the cave system underneath the Oldest House you see a space just like a firebreak but naturally formed, like the Oldest House is this living thing just taking a modern form as a sort of disguise.

Whirling around an infinite hotel lounge called the Ashtray Maze as it warps and reconfigures itself, listening to Glam Metal power ballads canonically created by these two weird old dudes from Alan Wake.

Hideo Kojima in a cameo appearance called “Dr. Yoshimi Tokui’s guided imagery experience”, in which he talks to you in a sensory deprivation tank and helps you to save some trees from being lonely and turn off an evil forklift which is trying to ruin your beautiful love beach.

More like Cameo Kojima am I right?

Fuck.

There’s an Alex Jones-y paranormal conspiracy radio show “for patriots” called America Overnight which is canonically a Bureau op to control public opinion and spread misinformation. It’s not InfoWars style hyper racist christian conservative though, I don’t want to besmirch the good name of America Overnight.

There are so many rich and excellent details, both fantastical details - like the many files you can read about other Altered World Events that have happened in the world of the game, including the one from Alan Wake - and small, mundane details, like the two book reports about the same book by two different agents in the same book club, one praising the book and engaging with its themes and the other saying he thought the space fascists were cooler than the good guys and he thought they should have won because they had cooler guns and it’s just like comparing YouTube comments that come from intellectually curious engaged viewers against ones that come from disgusting unclean swine.

There are details that even to players who’ve spent a lot of time with the game - when you hear them it just sounds like bullshit. Try this one. The enormous power plant in the Oldest House is powered by the previous FBC director before Trench. His powers became too much and he had to be contained in the Maintenance Sector and they just decided to use him as a power source to kill two birds with one stone.

NSC Power Plant. NSC.

Northmoor Sarcophagus Chamber.

There’s even a whole other sector they reference in the files - The Investigations Sector - that you don’t even see in the game.

It just brings in so many fantastic details that the main story of the game feels like a tiny part of an incredibly rich world. You can totally lose yourself in all the extra charming little details that spark your imagination and make you hungry for more stories from the world.

It doesn’t mean that the main story doesn’t have clear direction or themes that it’s incredibly unsubtle about but it packs it out with so much splendid nonsense that the overall impression of the game is about the sheer overwhelming richness of the world.

New Weird

There is a way of using little facts, or moments, that communicates a small glimpse of something quite profound, and if you put together enough of these little moments into your piece, dot these curiosities around the physically bizarre canvas of the Oldest House, you build up a picture, like little tiny taps of a chisel carving a sculpture.
What am I talking about? Here’s a fact: astronomers are worried that vast networks of satellites being put up for commercial projects will make it impossible to practice basic astronomy. This is a real fact, not something a fiction writer wrote, but it’s kind of profound right? It has subtext, actually. You could read into this fact. Capitalist ego driving weird esoteric self-aggrandising projects like Elon Musk’s Starlink could cut us off from the rest of the universe, make us blind, leave us isolated and alone spinning through the cosmos totally in the dark. Elon Musk wants to provide wifi to the whole planet, and not even for free - he wants to charge for it - and in exchange there will be more satellites in the sky than there are stars that are observable to the naked eye.

Did the ennui hit you hard there?
In Control, there’s an agent who is assigned to watch a fridge. The fridge is a dangerous Altered Item and must be observed at all times. Because he was on Fridge Duty when the crisis broke out, our boy is stuck for ours unable to look away. He’s a cop, and he’s trapped by the need to surveil and he has to keep looking at all times - he can’t look away or he’ll die.

This kind of moment is a tap of the chisel. It’s an isolated moment, it doesn’t feed into a bigger allegory, but it communicates on its own a big part of the philosophical conversation that Control occupies itself with. 

This style of storytelling, with these little glimpses into a bigger, frankly terrifying world, is one of Control’s strongest features, and it’s a feature that ties it to some other fantastic modern mystery sci-fi fantasy horror pieces that absolutely slap.

See, Control turns out to be part of an emergent genre, some people are calling New Weird. It’s really handy having genre names like that so I don’t have to say modern mystery sci-fi-fantasy horror every time, and yet somehow I’m not done saying modern mystery sci-fi fantasy horror in this essay yet.

New Weird owes a lot to another genre that could reasonably be described as modern mystery sci-fi fantasy horror, and that is of course Lovecraftian fiction. These are the pieces inspired by the works of Howard Philips Lovecraft. HP Lovecraft was a New England fiction writer born in 1890 who wrote a massive quantity of works almost entirely canonically within the same fictional universe, often referred to as the “Cthulhu Mythos”. It is an impressive body of work, shoutout to the 60 hour collected fiction of HP Lovecraft audiobook from the HP Lovecraft historical society I listened to for research it was a real treat. Mwah.

Lovecraft’s evocative language, atmospheric and tense descriptions of impossible scenery, and imagination-grabbing stories, alongside the sheer fact of writing so much in the same mythos, allowing the audience to - as I said before - slowly piece together the fictional world from tiny glimpses, inspired so many people that it essentially launched this genre.

The genre is typically defined by a "fear and awe we feel when confronted by phenomena beyond our comprehension, whose scope extends beyond the narrow field of human affairs and boasts of cosmic significance".

Put really simply a horror beyond words.

I said before that lovecraftian fiction could also be called modern mystery sci-fi fantasy horror and I feel that that’s true, the main distinction against New Weird being that the aesthetics of what’s “modern” have changed, so generally now modern mystery sci-fi fantasy horror that was modern when it was written in 1917 has to be considered as something other than modern. I guess that’s the last time I’m saying modern mystery sci-fi fantasy horror in this essay. One more for luck. Modern mystery sci-fi fantasy horror. Beautiful.

As for the modern that New Weird relies upon: It’s generally things that are just old enough to be scary - the dial tone sound in the threshold kids background sound design, brutalism, the bakelite telephone.
Just like the Oldest House with its raw rock caves in the basement, this genre often circles back around to the idea of things that use the aesthetics of relative modernity to disguise something older, bigger, and more powerful.

Quite a bit of New Weird turns its attention to the cosmic, but also to the cthonic. Lovecraft’s word, Cthulhu, comes from the Ancient Greek concept of the underworld, Khthon. Everyone’s always asking why is Cthulhu, nobody ever asks how is Cthulhu?

Between Night In The Woods, Annihilation, Alan Wake and now Control, New Weird, just like the Lovecraft mythos shows the cthonic and cosmic as inherently linked, and usually the link between them is the human psyche, be it through tradition, fiction, fears, or dreams.
Twin Peaks also engages in this exact kind of model of spirituality, although this is more of a convergent evolution than the legacy of Lovecraft, and also feeds into the inspirations for New Weird.

It needs to be addressed, because I know some of you know it’s coming: Lovecraft was extremely, really, very racist. It can’t be understated. I listened to the complete collected fiction of Lovecraft in preparation for this, and stories that aren’t racist in some way, simply don’t contain very many characters, and the ones that are, are so racist. We all know about his cat, who was black, for whom Howard thought of a very witty and appropriate name, but maybe we don’t all know about the sheer volume or breadth of his racism, from anti-black racism to anti-semitism to even prejudice against random european ethnicities - the words “accursed rumanian” really catch you off guard, I’ll tell ya. Maybe we don’t all know about him describing people of colour consistently as “creatures” in his books or calling the long arms of a black man in one story his “forelegs”. Maybe we don’t all know about the story where the man has a portuguese wife who nobody is ever allowed to see except no, no he doesn’t that was a lie, she was a gorilla.

Even seemingly innocuous stories like At The Mountains of Madness have racial undertones in the mythos being uncovered, like the brilliant smart aliens who colonised the universe bringing their dark black pack animals of inferior sentience along with them for menial tasks, only to have the pack animals evolve and mutate and become too smart and start causing problems.

HP Lovecraft, to my mind, was clearly someone who embraced self-actualisation. He put “become world’s most racist man” up on his vision board and - the absolute madman - he might well have pulled it off. Our boy Howard might have been the earliest, or at least most prominent pre-internet example of someone who desperately needed to log the fuck off and go for a walk.

Famously though, Howard Phillips Lovecraft did not, in fact, go for a walk. He was incredibly isolated for much of his early life, due in no small part to an immense amount of family tragedy. His father was confined to an asylum, and his mother and grandfather who raised him afterwards died in the years following. So he did what lots of lonely white boys do when their home life sucks and they haven’t got many friends, and he got way the fuck into sci-fi/fantasy, and to be fair, although he probably should have done so in a setting where he met people and learned that it’s not okay to call people “creatures of abberant mind and mixed blood”, he did develop an incrediby powerful, atmospheric writing style, with vivid imagery and incredibly verbose language.

Dude loved to use colourful and eccentric language: Nothing could ever just be “old” it had to be “hoary”. Things couldn’t simply be “big” they had to be “vast” or “cyclopean”, which is kind of funny because when I think of cyclops, their size isn’t actually the first thing that generally comes to mind, the thing that comes to mind is obviously... elephant skulls.

HP Lovecraft would probably be devastated to learn that with the combination of his extremely verbose and eccentric language and his tendency to describe anything bad and scary with some synonym of black that his writing does end up sounding exactly like Pray Tell from Pose.
And above them it rose, vast and fabulous in its cyclopean wonder, resplendent in its onyx magnificence, serving up pure Eldritch realness.

It’s worth untangling Lovecraft from Lovecraftian - like I said in my Cronenberg video, the full collection of an artist’s work is often very different from the few elements people remember as “essentially” them.
For example, a story I would describe as core to Lovecraft’s writing features a man who dreams himself into dreamland where he boards a ship belonging to alien merchants and rowed by unseen dark forces, gets kidnapped by toad-men, then liberated by an army of cats - he meets the king of the cats who likes him because he was nice to a kitten once - then he uses phrenology to track down where the gods live and travels with some ghouls to their palace in the mountains and meets a pharaoh who hires him to track down the gods since he showed how good at it he is with his phrenology skills.

It’s not really what people would consider lovecraftian, it’s much more “extremely racist chronicles of Narnia” but it’s honestly exactly typical for the Lovecraft style and mythos.

Dreams are really super essential to Lovecraft actually. 

Lovecraft wrote a lot of stories about lonely reclusive men who hated their world and the life the lived, and who retreated further and further into the worlds of their dreams until they ultimately abandoned the waking world in favour of the world in their imaginations - I can think of at least 5 different stories he wrote along those lines. 

It speaks to a deeply sad person, and while this isn't the thing he's remembered for, I think it's carried forward. Modern stories inspired by Lovecraft’s writing tend to take that metaphor and make it more literal - the lonely, the outcast, the downtrodden, often become the focus. Even better, the reasons for their isolation or downtroddenness aren’t these characters’ own intense fear and prejudice regarding the outside world like it for was for HPL.

The protagonists of New Weird are isolated by oppressive systems, or complex human emotion. They’re not isolated by the inability to leave the house for fear of seeing a blackman, they’re isolated by their struggles, or the fact of being poor, or young, or queer, or people of colour themselves even, and often the cosmic horror they confront feeds into that through metaphor. The cthonic entity in Night In The Woods represents the town’s inability to move past an idea of itself how it used to be, to the point that the cult of middle class townsfolk who fetishise blue-collar work might just be the only actual thing there. Maybe the entity doesn’t exist at all and the only deep rooted horror in the town is the conservative attitudes themselves.

In Annihilation the shimmer serves as a metaphor for loss and change in a way that allows us to examine how surprisingly value-neutral change can be - maybe we lose ourselves and become entirely different people, but maybe that’s just life’s natural process, sometimes good, sometimes bad, and only working with it can make it survivable.

It’s too late in the process to work this in in an organic way so here’s this: I Am Not Okay With This on Netflix is about a gay girl with superpowers who doesn’t understand she’s in love with her best friend and it is definitely also New Weird and it rules and you should watch.

So what the heck is Control about?

I think the answers are in some of Control’s lovecraftiest elements.

The transmission of knowledge through visions and telepathy is a very Lovecraft thing. It actually happens to someone in one of Lovecraft’s most famous stories, At The Mountains Of Madness.

In Control dreams are also real life. Dylan tells Jesse a dream which comes true, and in many ways characters’ dreams seem to have an unusual level of influence over the waking world.

But probably most thematically important: Control has one very direct crossover with Lovecraft in that it is demonstrated flatly that “secrets” can damage people’s brains if they are unprepared for them. The true nature of the universe may be too much for people to handle, and it may cause them to lose their minds. The key difference is that in the world of Control, the FBC exists to take a more paternalistic stance, controlling the access people have to information about a world beyond their understanding.

And that kind of brings us neatly back around to cops.

Polaris

HP Lovecraft wrote a story in 1918 called Polaris. Polaris is a star. Polaris is also, incidentally what the guiding force that lives in Jesse’s head is called, and northlight, like the Northern Star, the layman name for the star Polaris, is what Remedy call their “storytelling engine”. I’m sure this one will just turn out to be a coincidence though. Definitely reading too much into this one.

In Lovecraft’s Polaris an unnamed narrator describes how the north star, which he can see out his window, gives him dreams about an ancient civilisation in the arctic circle, culminating in a dream where he experiences the memories of someone from the civilisation acting as the lookout as a hoard of dangerous barbarians are about to invade the city. Okay - this one is really really racist against native people of the arctic circle. Almost every Lovecraft story comes with pre-packaged racism-roulette, it was going to be racist against somebody. I’m sorry.

The protagonist is about to warn everyone when he looks up at the north star again, and it tells him a magic rhyme that makes him go to sleep and awaken in his present-day life. Frantic and desperate, convinced he needs to wake up and warn his friends in the ancient city, he tries to tell people he knows but they just laugh at him, and he spends the rest of his life convinced he needs to wake up from this nightmare of dull mundanity and rescue his friends.

At the end of Control, Jesse finds the place where the Bureau have been keeping Polaris, that Polaris has been guiding her to, and tries to rescue her from a siege by The Hiss but fails and Polaris is killed. Or maybe Polaris was never there? Or Polaris and The Hiss are the same thing? The ambiguity that’s really made the rest of the game absolutely shines in this moment. 

In a different piece this kind of ambiguity, especially communicated in the way it is, could be seen as unclear art direction. At the end of Nocturnal Animals for example, in the book narrative, Jake Gyllehaal falls on his gun, it goes off and he dies, and I have no fucking clue what just happened. Did he just trip over and accidentally shoot himself, or did he just kill himself in the weirdest clumsiest way possible? Both possibilities are disappointing and weird, so I’m confused and I don’t care. In Control, this ambiguity is great because whether Polaris was killed by the Hiss, never existed or was the Hiss, I’m intrigued and engaged. It works so well thematically with this story where you constantly slide between different realities that the story keeps providing you with possible alternatives and then resolving them in a way that makes it irrelevant which one was “correct”.

We can’t be certain what this ending is, but it’s bad news, and Jesse is devastated, and then the credits roll. But then… fake credits! Blam! Classic! They got you! You look so stupid right now!

Jesse is stuck in a nightmare, that Dylan described earlier, where she works as an office clerk in the Bureau. The missions the game assigns you are to deliver mail, scan & print copies, tidy up coffee mugs, and take a message to Director Trench. You repeat this three times and then you fight back The Hiss from trying to possess Jesse and get back out of this sunken place.

There’s this kind of spooky alternative narrative emerging as you play the dreams though - everything is in muted colours, except of course for Ahti the janitor, cheerful and friendly as ever. Even if you do all the missions quickly, disembodied voices from the other office workers still criticise and deride you for not doing it fast enough or well enough. At the end of the third repeat, in order to wake up, you kill Trench and you can’t help but wonder: is this Jesse’s real life? Does she just, like snap one day and shoot up the whole Bureau?

Lovecraft’s Polaris is fundamentally about purpose. Yes, on the one hand it’s about a cosmic system doing something vast and unknowable that completely ruins this man’s life in a way that it doesn’t give the slightest shit about - that’s kind of the running theme with Lovecraft - but it’s also about being given a glimpse into a life with purpose and meaning. What would you do if you had a dream that showed you everything you wanted from life, and then you woke up? What if everyone just laughed at you when you told them about it? The guiding star is perfectly ambiguous. It could be malevolent or benevolent, ambivalent or indifferent. 

After you wake up Jesse from the dream, she pushes The Hiss out of Dylan and embraces her role as the new Director. Roll credits for real this time, pinky-swear promise, you aren’t being tricked.

I said, in my video about Bloodborne and the Lovecraftian Curse of Capitalism, that if there were a new soulsborne game that was set in the modern day, it should be set in a place like Canary Wharf in London - a grey soulless place that pointedly resists any humanity and is evidence of an intangible cosmic horror that exists in our real life. Control might focus on a different intangible monstrous system than the one I was talking about, but it's still doing exactly what I was describing, from the physicality to the Lovecraft to the metaphor, and that's, I guess, why this game is so exactly my shit. 

The game repeatedly engages in a sort of hegelian dialectic: the thesis and antithesis of the police and prisoner, the point being that the one is defined by and dependent upon the other, but through the Lovecraftian tone and themes of Control, the game also relates this antithetical relationship back to the Shawshank Redemption poster/Plato’s Cave idea. The two separate things are different shadows of the same. They are extremes of a system, the jailer and the jailed, and most people just exist within that system while being neither.

If Jesse is the thesis, and Dylan the antithesis, Jesse in her dream is the synthesis. Office-worker Jesse is us, purposeless and mundane, existing in a system that contains these extremes, and the main plot of the game is like the guiding star giving us a glimpse into a life of purpose, or at least a better vantage point from which to understand the system. Office-worker Jesse meanwhile is clearly no freer than cop Jesse or prisoner Dylan, she’s just not technically in jail.

The great socialist leader and union organiser Eugene Debs famously said “while there is a lower class, I am in it; and while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” and I think that is the messaging this game is reflecting.

I mean, I say I think, but...

Control is intensely unsubtle about its messaging. For starters, it doesn’t just have a prison, it has a panopticon - a conceptual kind of prison based on total surveillance devised by bad-ideas-haver Jeremy Bentham. I had to see his corpse every day at university, I get to call his ideas bad!

The two strongest Objects Of Power in the game are a slide projector and a television, and in the DLC, an old movie camera, which alongside Jesse’s bargain-bin allegory of the cave shoves us strongly toward the conclusion that media is used to make us conform and comply. The TV teaches you to “fly like a superhero.”

The game repeatedly sets up the Bureau itself as kind of a creepy and sinister institution. As you progress deeper into the Oldest House, you’ll repeatedly hear monotonous chanting, always slightly out of sight, always just off in another room, and what’s brilliant about it is that from a distance it could be satanic cult chanting, but it could also be people saying the pledge of allegiance, or the Lord’s Prayer, or swearing in as agents, or any other mass chanting we treat as normal behaviour because it happens in an institution we’re supposed to trust.

There’s an episode of Threshold Kids where Meg is being taught about how people’s capacity for different things determines which jobs they get and they have no choice in that. When Mr. Bones tells Meg that people with all the abilities could be selected for the Big Chair, Meg asks what if you don’t want the big chair and Bones immediately shuts her down, declaring “EVERYONE WANTS THE BIG CHAIR MEG!”

The mission where you confront Dylan and then find out that you are part of the same program as him is called “The face of the enemy” which is great because as twins, Jesse and Dylan have - yeah - basically the same face.

All those are points before I get to the point that game is fucking called Control. It’s not being subtle about this!!

Control is a fucking fantastic name by the way - everything about this game is about control, and it fits so well in with the lovecraftian “New Weird” ideas, because control has been a crucial theme of the genre since the beginning - acknowledging total helplessness in the face of immense power, struggling for control, losing control but realising you like it. Lovecraft: it's for bottoms! 

So you’ve got the Panopticon, named for an idea which fundamentally is a thought experiment about how people will self-police when they feel watched. You’ve got the allegory of the Shawshank Redemption poster, about the illusory version of reality that we perceive and act upon, and the ways that that perception can be manufactured for us with certain objects of power. 

Control is describing the way our society institutionalises power, and while it honestly wears its themes right out on its sleeve, the way that it pieces its messaging together from many disparate parts instead of one allegory feeding you its central thesis makes this system of control seem like an immense and incomprehensible phenomenon.

Lovecraft, and now New Weird, are at the very most basic supposed to be about indescribable phenomena - horrors beyond words. What’s a horror beyond words to most people in the modern day? Well if you ask Bernie Sanders:

There are lots of systems that occupy this exact space of intangible, ungraspable, indescribable vastness and horrible consequences on the real world, and I think that Control, in looking at that kind of system, is New Weird working perfectly, like a well-oiled machine. 

I don’t think Control is particularly challenging as an art piece - I don’t think any cops are playing it and thinking oh fuck Hegel was right how will I be able to face my commanding officer at Krispy Kreme tomorrow morning but to be fair I don’t think that’s really the point. I think the game just wants to appeal to our fear of authority, of hierarchical power structures, and ultimately of not having as much control as we tell ourselves we have.

The journey from a lonely shut-in so overwhelmed by his own mean-spiritedness that he once introduced a character by saying “most people who looked like him would kill themselves” to a whole genre of media that is playing directly to the worldview of the oppressed seems ironic, but it makes sense. If only Lovecraft had understood the sinister systems of power that really exist in the world, he could have made Night In The Woods a hundred years ago! On whatever games consoles they had in 1920 - the Sega Genesis I guess.

So New Weird took a little while to get where it was going - oh well, I’m glad it’s doing its thing now, at least.