written by Sam Moore, edited by Deep Hell

There are lots of things that come to mind when playing Control. The basement rooms, overrun with foliage and yet with TVs still running, are reminiscent of the art of Nam June Paik; the very existence of the Federal Bureau of Control (FBC) – and the Oceanview Motel that’s attached to it somehow – are echoes of the The Twilight Zone. But what feels most strange and striking about it, is the puzzle-box nature of the Department of Control itself; a building that constantly unfolds on itself, revealing the depths of its magic and uncanniness as the story progresses.

From the outside the Oldest House, the home of the FBC, is as anonymous as a building could be: a large, featureless, brutalist skyscraper, more of an eyesore for the skyline than anything else. The building itself is strange, shapeshifting, and, like the objects that it houses and protects, takes the every day and makes it strange, uncanny, supernatural. The shapeshifting, and sometimes physically unraveling nature of the Oldest House becomes a reflection of the mind of Jesse Fayden, the game’s protagonist.

Jesse is drawn to the Bureau as a way to try and set right one of the tragedies of her past: her brother being taken away from her after a supernatural event rocked their hometown, the appropriately named Ordinary. The brazen lack of subtlety in calling this town Ordinary when something far from it is what defines the place in Jesse’s memory goes to the heart of what makes the architecture and world building of Control so compelling. From the beginning, the Oldest House is tied to Jesse’s mind – not only her past but her future – as she’s compelled to find answer, and finds herself imbued with the power of being the Director of the Bureau: everyone will follow her lead at a moment’s notice; she’s able to communicate with the ghostly Board in strange, liminal spaces.

When it comes to the latter of these points, whenever Jesse unlocks a new, reality-bending power (from telekinesis to flight), she makes contact with an Object of Power – an everyday object like a slide projector or refrigerator – that’s been imbued with supernatural powers. This takes her to a liminal space, white backgrounds and black building blocks, where she hears the voices of the Board, ghostly and distorted. The “real world” facade of the Oldest House becomes an extension of Jesse, just as she becomes an extension of it; the same is true for the more otherworldly parts of the Bureau, from these strange spaces in-between, to the Ocean View Motel (Control thrives on this liminality).

By so explicitly linking the psyche of its protagonist and the ever-changing architecture of its setting, Control becomes animated by the idea of psychogeography. Mental and physical landscapes become intertwined, a mental geography – of memory, trauma, and (possible) futures – becoming real through a landscape that brings them to the fore.

Home and the memory of it – what it used to, how it changed, and what the Bureau ended up taking from it – is what drives Jesse forwards through much of the story, and so it makes sense that home, both physically and psychologically, should recur throughout the Bureau. In the basement of The Oldest House is the town of Ordinary, recreated in painstaking, granular detail, as the Bureau try to make sense of the Object of Power that went haywire there – the Object that led to them taking Jesse’s brother Dylan to the Bureau for observations from which he never returns. This ghost from Jesse’s past doesn’t (physically) appear until near the climax of the game, as she descends deeper into the building as if she were going down through pits of Hell. But by putting this reflection of her journey so far from where she’s come from, the recreation of Ordinary captures something integral about the journey that Jesse goes on. That, even when you’re literally walking among the ruins and recreations of it, you can’t go home again.

Home, and the (in)ability to return to it is also echoed in Returnal. Somewhere between a sci-fi drama and a procedurally generated rogue-lite, it tells the story of Selene; a stranded astronaut trying to understand a world that shape shifts around her as she’s constantly reborn.

The most constant piece of architecture in Returnal – after all its biomes are procedurally generated every time you launch a new run – is The House. Described on the game’s map as a “mid-century American house,” it is, on the surface, exactly that. But the front door isn’t always unlocked; and only after certain points of progression is Selene able to return to the house.  it’s when this house becomes available, that the strangeness of Returnal is most pronounced and powerful; when the everyday becomes most uncanny. The House and Selene have a history; every time she returns to it, more fragments of a past that might be her own return. Whether it’s fragments of a news broadcast that tell the story of a car accident, or the silent, looming figure of The Astronaut that stares at her through the window. This silent, haunting figure is an echo of something else in the game; an Astronaut Figurine that Selene is able to pick up (one of the few ways to respawn midway through a run), described in the inventory as a “Personal item. It will not let you go,” creating a tenuous link between Selene and the strange, contradictory versions of home that animate Returnal. The alien planet itself is a sort of home for, if not Selene, then versions of her. Fragments of audio diaries exist throughout Returnal’s biomes, and each one lets Selene listen to a different version of herself. As if the transforming, endlessly returning biomes themselves are a mirror up to Selene’s mind – each time she returns, a slightly different version of her emerges from the wreckage of her ship.

Control takes this idea in unique visual directions; the more the narrative unfolds, and the secrets of the Oldest House are revealed, the building itself literally unfolds, with once sealed off parts of the building opening up. A mirror to Jesse’s increased knowledge and power; the Oldest House is defined by the secret that it keeps, and unique power that they have – through both the supernatural abilities of Objects of Powers, but also the power gained by both the possession of knowledge, and the ability to withhold it. This is given another level of depth when compared to the ways in which these other puzzle box spaces reflect – or outright ignore – the impact of knowledge on both the characters, and the geography of the worlds that they inhabit. Superhot – like Returnal, a procedurally generated game that uses these endlessly changing levels as an architectural reflection of its themes – with its embrace of nothingness, makes every new piece information feel hollow, another reason to hit continue, and try again – it constantly teases the idea of more, and of meaning but the end, but deliberately doesn’t deliver. And the maps mirror this; no matter how far through you go, how many waves of enemies you shatter into pieces, there are no new revelations, the world – physically, philosophically – refuses to change. The walls are still white, the items are still black, and the streaks of bullets cutting through all that empty space are still a vivid shade of red.

But in Returnal and Control, change is inescapable. Whether it’sthe world shifting beneath your feet every time you respawn, or watching a building unravel its secrets, the landscapes obsessively capture the change at the core of the protagonists. Change, however, comes at a cost, and the geography – both physical and mental – captures this. As Selene’s journey seems to continually hint about the loss of something fundamental to her, Jesse’s reveals how tenuous her connection to home has been all this time. It’s no wonder that one of the most important recurring spaces in Control is the Ocean View Motel, which takes an already liminal space and amplifies it to supernatural extremes; a halfway house between the real and unreal, the normal and the supernatural. For Jesse to keep returning here as her understanding of the FBC – and the powers it makes available to her – continues to deepen foregrounds the liminal nature of her journey, that both the Ocean View, and the Oldest House are places in-between, just as she’s torn between the family she came here to save, and the necessity of her role as Director.

It’s these points of tension – between the physical and psychological; past and present; home and what lies beyond it – that animate both the characters and the shifting worlds that they inhabit. By taking root in uncertain places, like how much of Selene’s life she can remember, and what the fragments of memories in The House might be leading her towards, it creates a landscape, both literally and metaphorically, that is full of transformative potential. Both Jesse and Selene undergo physical transformations throughout these stories as well as psychological ones; from the new powers that Jesse wields as Director of the Bureau, to the ways in which Selene integrates her body with the alien technology and relics on the alien planet she’s constantly returning to. The same is true of Superhot; in both the base game and the sequel MIND CONTROL DELETE, the player character changes and gains new powers between levels. But none of these upgrades change the character, their world, or the endless faceless enemies that they come up against. Where a game like Returnal uses its new powers as a way to foreground the power and possibility of change, Superhot presents a version that’s hollow and meaningless.

This is what makes Superhot such a counterpoint; it cares so little for change, and yet has the same pseudo-random, ever-changing (re)creation of space. Darkly comic, a kind of anti-narrative, and anti-change variation of both Control and Returnal. It simply invites – or dares – the player to bring themselves to the fore, and use their own desires to fill up all of that emptiness.

These games take place in worlds that can’t stop changing, inhabited by characters who are constantly torn between what was and what could be. Jesse is constantly at war with what draws her to the Bureau, and what it means for her to now be its Director; Selene is trying to find a way home, even as that becomes less and less likely. The Oldest House shifts, unlocking new secrets that both propel Jesse forward, but also lead her, inevitably, to a confrontation with her past in the form of Dylan, at the bottom of the Bureau, the belly of the beast. Dylan himself becomes a mirror of Jesse’s journey; of what the Oldest House has brought out in her, and fundamentally changed the relationship between the two siblings. And along with it, the way that Jesse relates to her past, all of those small, psychic imprints still lingering on the labyrinthine walls of the building that both of them end up calling their, somewhat unwilling, home.