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Control is on my backlog list. Thanks for the writeup. Now I know what to expect.

Using cheats for 1 player offline games is 100% OK in my book. I am an adult with so much responsabilties and little time to game. Sitting for 2 hours frustrated on something and not progressing is just not my idea of fun. Nudging yourself through with the help of cheats, easy mode or anything else is totally valid.

I have done this with a few games. Disgaea games come to mind… I know most of the enjoyment of those games comes from the grind to level up and get stronger to then grind some more… But I just couldn’t make myself fight the same level 25 times to earn enough XP to upgrade so I memory edited the values just enough to simulate me grinding for 2 hours in 5 minutes. Not enough to break the game but enough to get me through the grindy parts.

And any offline 1 player game that tries that shit will get memory edited right away.

Of course I will always try to do it the intended way, as long as it’s not annoying to me.

I loved it and also found it surprisingly difficult in places. I think the use of mixed media is brilliant, like the various flavors of video clips and music you stumble across. A couple boss battles were very challenging. One in particular, but you can finish the main storyline without beating it.

The section of the Oldest House that opens up into a vast maze of hallways is totally epic, IMO. The soundtrack gets metal in a cinematic way right there (Old Gods of Asgard, I think, from Alan Wake? Plus Porcupine Tree!)

I enjoyed the dark and yet whimsical vibe, if you couldn’t tell.

I got it for free on Epic a year or two ago. I love everything about Control - and I can’t stand the game.

Never quite figured out why. I think part of it was the controls feeling a little too “arcadey” for me? I just don’t know. Great story that I couldn’t stay into. Great level design which I kept losing track of. Fun puzzles that got on my nerves.

I played most of the game in Assist mode because I don’t like hard action. I quickly got sick of dying. But that didn’t affect my love/hate of the game. Perhaps if it had the “magic action balance” where your’e constantly challenged but never seem to die… but perhaps not, too.

I think in part it got sorta tedius.

I’m not a fan of Control overall, the story is pretty weak and the combat is alright at best.

I really wanted to see more of the building shifting around like it does in the intro and the maze, they had such a cool idea going and then barely used it in favor of a pointless semi-open world design.

Honestly felt it was pretty doable so long as you suited your tactics to the situation. This means you also have to build the skill of sizing up an encounter and selecting the right tool for it.

My problem with it was the thing that spit clocks. Took me forever to troubleshoot that issue and it was a hard crash to desktop type situation. Why that would be allowed to persist years after release is beyond me.

I made it to the mezzanine fight an hour or two in and realized that the NPC-s are just dumb high DPS bullet sponges and the PC is a low DPS squishy. The worst way to ramp up difficulty. Trying to fight tactically from the cover didn’t work and I lost interest. Too bad, I liked the atmosphere and even forgave the 3rd person only camera (normally I disqualify a game instantly if it doesn’t allow 1st person view).

I had a lot of fun with Control but the narrative fell flat for me. It got to the point where I didn’t really care why I was running around and killing things anymore, I was just having fun doing it. Same for Alan Wake 1 for that matter. Was definitely invested in Max Payne 1-3 however.

For a game that made me break my own rules? I have been getting into more difficult games for a while, and Elden Ring was the one that started that a few years back. The deaths less frustrating as I learned not to just swing wildly as actually learn enemy moves and use dodge and parry effectively. After beating Elden Ring, making my way through most of Returnal, Bloodborne, beating a handful of other difficult games and rising to the challenge I was starting to “get it”.

Until Dead Cells. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t translate that same strategy to 2D. I got far but found myself really spinning my tires after a while, then had to use assist after I got stuck, and my prior strategy of “leave it, come back later when you’re less frustrated” didn’t work several times in a row, but I really enjoyed the gameplay. I too had to use the assist mode for this one. It was just too difficult and I couldn’t get my head around it in 2D.

I think I blame my lack of experience with Metroidvanias. I never took to them, and though I played a lot of side scrollers, it’s a different, but similar, set of skills.

It baffles me that they create a great setting with a compelling story and then go “Nah, too easy, let’s push the difficulty to eleven, leet players only amirite?”

People who play for fun, to enjoy a moderate challenge and a good plot are prevented from doing so. I know about the “assist”, but the point is I should not have to google “why is Control so damn hard” to find out about it, nor should I have to dig in the menu system for help.

Games have been using difficulty settings since before Wolfenstein 3D, where “normal” is a balanced difficulty that an average gamer can handle. Experienced gamer can go for “Difficult” or “Nightmare”. What is gained by overpowering the player and preventing from enjoying the rest of the game?

I know this is nothing new, a lot of 80’s games were vicious, but when your game was 10 levels long and had to fit in 16KB, you had to make it challenging to keep the player playing. But in the mean time technology evolved and developers learned new ways to make engaging games that don’t rely on simple dificulty++ gimmicks. Or at least I they should have learned.

Maybe I’m simply bad at shooters? I don’t think I am, I’ve been playing for ages and I’m still quite good at it.

Ok, rant over. I’d love to love Control, but I can’t because it is not for me.

Fwiw I share your comments pretty closely, just finished it myself a few weeks ago. Navigating the map was unbelievably tedious especially with random trash mob spawns whenever you took a wrong turn. I also found myself totally apathetic about the side missions or random task missions and just focused main story the whole time. It took me a long time to finish for those reasons but did really enjoy the plot. Gameplay I just built myself into a rock chucker like you and ignored all guns. Certainly a very neat concept, just wanted waaaaay more map help. Hardest part for me was the theme song bit through the shifting map thing (maybe that’s what you were referring to?) But enjoyed the music there so was alright with all my deaths. Rest was easier by comparison

I started playing Control a couple of weeks ago and I’ve found it to be a lot of fun so far. I’m currently at the power plant so I may not be to the frustrating point yet. I definitely see your point about getting lost. Even with all the signs and the map it can be difficult to navigate at times, though it is becoming a bit easier as I am more familiar with navigating the game.

I am about to reach that point with Resident Evil 4 (2023). I’m at one of the first levels in the village and I’ve spent probably two hours trying to get past this one level, only to die every attempt so far. I think I’m up to at least ten attempts now and it’s driving me nuts.

I played it. Gun play’s fun. Ran into adifficulty wall. Read in a wiki that I was missing a certain ability. Got that ability. Continued easily until I came to a point where I had to git good. Game felt grindy. Turned on cheats. Flew through the rest of the game and kept thinking: this would have sucked hard without cheats and the story would not have been worth it, for me.
This was however the first shooter I played with a controller instead of mouse and keyboard.

Tldr: had some fun, used cheats, deprived myself of half of the game, no regrets.

These days I play games after work to relax. I found it difficult to relax while playing Control, so it took me a few months to complete. But I did overall enjoy going into it blind after picking it up on sale due to people’s recommendations.

Nah, Control was gameplay wise jank. I see in fact more and more modern games with terrible takes on encounter design. I grew up with frame tight games. They were at times brutally hard and speed runs do end there with deaths to normal mechanics. However you could systematically learn the timings, patterns in a pleasant way until you got it right. You might fail at them crushingly, but you know quickly a no-hit run would be possible and truly unfair situations are quite rare even on the highest difficulties.

Not so the past few years it seems. The gamer press lets many games get away with actually terrible game design. Off camera attacks, bad tells, awfully tight frame windows, multiple enemies which can on a dice roll attack unfairly together into undodgeable situations and so on. And while I do think the extremely tightened game design I prefer limits creativity, I do expect from those games who make it a bit wonky at times that they know their place about it and loosen the demand on the player.

Quickly the criticism on this gets drown out by the hardcore “git gud” crowd which probably never went past half the game. And then there is another fraction of players, who learn to cheese the systems as in exploiting high DPS outputs to reduce the interaction with the encounter design.

Back to Control, yes, I was similarly very frustrated by some gameplay sections and the story doesn’t pass a basic writing course test. It sets up this wonderful intrigue in the beginning and then forgets that a story needs something like stakes and tension. And towards the end it just drips along until it ends.