Control’s AWE expansion isn’t Alan Wake 2, but it is a cool setup for it
Games Features What Are You Playing This Weekend?
Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?
AWE, the final downloadable expansion for Remedy Entertainment’s excellent Control just dropped recently, and with it comes a more explicit connection between Control and Remedy’s earlier cult hit Alan Wake. (Not to mention Remedy’s Max Payne, though the serial numbers have been filed off in that case since publisher Rockstar owns the Max Payne license.) In the process, it creates a Remedyverse of sorts that any of the studio’s future games can then build off of. I’m going to break down how that works, since it’s pretty cool—but doing so will require spoiling Control and Alan Wake and AWE. If you haven’t played all of them, and intend to do so someday, you’re better off skipping down to the comments and talking about whatever you are playing right now. (Also, if you haven’t bought Control and/or its expansions, maybe hold off a bit until you can get the better version that will take advantage of all the bells and whistles on the new consoles, so you don’t get screwed over.)
Before I get to the spoilers, though, I will say that AWE is both pretty cool in its own right, and an exciting tease for future Alan Wake-related stories—but it is not any sort of definitive conclusion to that game, or its very good cliffhanger ending. If you’re curious about anything happening in this new Remedyverse, though, it’s worth checking out. And now: Time for spoiling.
First, let’s recap: In Alan Wake, you played as a successful novelist struggling to come up with a follow-up to a series of crime books about a hardboiled detective named Alex Casey, who is definitely supposed to be Max Payne, but can’t be called Max Payne for legal reasons. Wake’s wife takes him to a town called Bright Falls, Washington, which has a reputation for refreshing and inspiring creative types. As it turns out, though, that’s because Bright Falls contains a portal into an evil shadow universe controlled by an entity called the Dark Presence that feeds on creative output and turns people into shadow monsters, with a therapist in Bright Falls named Dr. Hartman trying to study the Dark Presence by bringing in struggling creators like Wake for “treatment”—a.k.a. “forcing them to create spooky things that make the darkness stronger.”
Wake’s wife gets captured, and in order to save her, he gives himself up to the Dark Presence and takes her place. The Dark Presence essentially chains Wake to a typewriter, forcing him to write forever and feed it with stories and ideas. Meanwhile, the things Wake writes for the Dark Presence can also magically influence what happens in reality—which is how he’s able to save his wife—and so the idea is that if he comes up with the perfect story about how he escapes from his terrible shadow dimension, it’ll come true.
In Control, meanwhile, you play as a woman named Jesse Faden, who experienced a supernatural event as a kid that involved a bunch of people dying and a mysterious government organization called the Federal Bureau Of Control kidnapping her brother. At the beginning of the game, she finds the FBC and inadvertently gets appointed as its new director, at which point she’s tasked with flushing out an evil extra-dimensional entity called The Hiss that is infecting everyone and turning them into monsters. AWE (which stands for “Altered World Event”) starts with Jesse getting a telepathic distress call of sorts from none other than Alan Wake, whose disappearance was mentioned previously in the game as an Easter egg. Wake tells Jesse to go to an area of the FBC headquarters that has been closed off because of some terrible threat inside, and when she arrives, she discovers that the threat is none other than Dr. Hartman from Alan Wake—now super-corrupted by both The Hiss and the Dark Presence.
Stopping him from escaping and spreading his multiple corruptions into the outside world is the main plot of AWE, but like the base game of Control, the best storytelling comes from the supplementary reading materials you can find scattered around its abandoned offices. One memo mentions an FBI agent asking for materials that the FBC has collected about Wake, a request that would typically be ignored or denied—but the agent’s name happens to be Alex Casey, the same as Wake’s detective character (who, again, is Max Payne). Essentially, it seems that Wake’s creations are coming to life and trying to find out how to help him, which is worth remembering later on in AWE when you find script pages revealing that Wake wrote for a Twilight Zone-style horror anthology. The script mentions a government organization tasked with investigating supernatural events that gets invaded and corrupted by a terrible force from some alternate dimension—which happens to be the basic setup for the plot of Control itself.
Control had some really good storytelling—and AWE wisely doesn’t beat you over the head with this—but the implication from that and some other comments that Wake makes when you get little glimpses of him in his personal hell dimension is that, through his writing, he consciously created the Federal Bureau Of Control in order to find someone like Jesse Faden who could figure out how to save him—and that he created The Hiss in order to teach this person how to fight an extra-dimensional force that takes over people and forces them to do its bidding. After all, the darkness-infected enemies of Alan Wake and the Hiss-corrupted creatures in Control are awfully similar, and in fighting the-thing-that-was-Hartman, Jesse gets experience dealing with both at the same time.
That’s as definitive as things get in AWE. You don’t end up saving Alan Wake, and no more light is shone on the other lingering mysteries of Control (including the intriguing stuff set up in the previous expansion, The Foundation). But we might not have to wait too long to get some answers. In the final moment of AWE, with the supernatural threat finally dealt with, an alarm goes off, indicating that another Altered World Event is happening… in Bright Falls, Washington. To steal the Twin Peaks quote that Control can’t resist dropping alongside this reveal: It is happening again.
So that’s where AWE leaves Control, Alan Wake, and the Remedyverse. Alex Casey/Max Payne is out there somewhere, the FBC knows that something is up in the town where Alan Wake disappeared, and Jesse Faden has some idea about how to fight the Dark Presence—not to mention that the events of Control may have been completely shaped by Wake himself. The table is set for something new to happen now, whether it’s Alan Wake 2, or Control 2 or both, and it’s all very exciting.
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Hoo boy it has been a few weeks er months, hasn’t it? Right off the bat I’m coming down off the disappointment of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles being botched. I’m glad I didn’t pre-order and only fumbled around a little bit with the free trial. Maybe at some point I’ll try it solo, but the whole point was to enjoy the fun times I had with multiplayer. I was one of those people who had GBA cables so everyone could come over with the GBAs and we’d have a blast. This feels like a game that needed a few more months in the oven (this was after it was delayed last year, then again in January). I will say there hasn’t been a better time to get in on Final Fantasy Record Keeper. Yeah, it’s a mobile gacha game, but it has a surprisingly deep and challenging combat system that’s evolved over the course of more than 5 years. Right now they have a crossover with a much scummier Final Fantasy gacha game, Brave Exvius. As a result they are giving away a ton of free draws that should set you up pretty well with a party that gets you deep into the game. I’ve “finished” Rogue Legacy 2 for now. It’s in Steam Early access and came with a discount for owners of the first one. It has one section and a chunk of another one. I managed to open up all of the tree options that are available for now. I haven’t beaten the boss of that area yet because he was clearly designed to keep people busy until the next big update in roughly a month and a half. It handles fairly well and I’m excited to see what else comes out of it. I’ve heard good things about Crusader Kings 3, which might be enough to get some playtime out of me. Haven’t played any of the previous ones, but it’s free on Gamepass, so why not give it a shot? I tried the tutorial last night, but quickly realized it was closer to my bedtime than I thought and I couldn’t quite get through it. It’s not the game’s fault, it was more the late hour.
I picked up Horizon: Zero Dawn after not playing it for…2 years? to knock out the hunting grounds challenges, the one or two side questlines I was missing and finally tackle the final mission. I was immediately reminded why I put it down when I did – the backstory was so good and so well told that it immediately overshadowed the Cloud Atlas future-primitive tribal conflict stuff, and that once I finally discovered exactly how the world wound up in the state it was in (And was brought down by how it, naturally, wraps up on such a terrifically bleak note) that I had lost interest in fighting robot animals with the kinda clunky combat system.
Guerilla put a heavy emphasis on approaching the robots very deliberately, planning ahead and laying traps and the like. It’s intriguing early on but a lot of the late game encounters see multiple beasties coming at you from multiple directions, often heavily armored and prepared for a battle of attrition. Combine this with the fact that specialized ammo types are locked to specific weapons – usually dealing lower damage than the gear you currently use – and it just adds up to a miserable experience. Snare them with the harpoon, blow off their armored parts, open inventory, find a weapon with a different ammo type that damages some of their other/newly-exposed parts, retreat and hope the non-existent cover system gives you a second to heal, repeat.Anyhow, I got my Platinum trophy. I give this 4 year old game a 7/10. Still looking forward to playing Forbidden West on PS5 many years down the road, because I know that there will be further developments in the story. Here’s hoping that they refine the combat in that one, though.
I wish more games structured themselves for trophy hunting as Horizon Zero Dawn does. The Arkham series did it too, it’s just that so many other games make the most tedious trophies that I don’t bother. Horizon trophies are just nice markers for completing actual elements of the game, not just grinding tedious collectibles.
Yes, the only trophies I think I really had to go out of my way for were knocking down the wooden grazer dummies and doing the “All Blazing Suns” hunting ground challenges. Everything else I picked up pretty naturally in the course of play. I think all of the half-dozen or so games I’ve earned Platinum in have been like that, where normal play puts me juuuuust short of 100%, compelling me to chase down those handful of weird/obnoxious achievements that you’re unlikely to pick up during standard play (Knocking over thousands of bollards with a carriage in Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate; some of the Shadow of Mordor challenges based around defeating a Nemesis enemy under very certain circumstances, etc.)
Yeah. I’m very slowly going through Assassin’s Creed 2 (and the whole damned franchise eventually) and there’s just so much pointless busywork if you want the trophies. I don’t need flags and feathers, just let me shank renaissance dudes.
Passed a big plot point in Dragon Quest XI. And it means saying goodbye to one particularly strong character (probably my favorite), in a way that was done quite well. The game’s ability to pull off good non-maudlin emotional moments isn’t really surprising anymore but it is remarkable.I gotta admit the Disc 2 section of Final Fantasy IX was pretty frustrating overall, like the story’s good but the gameplay felt kinda halting and linear. But now we’ve discovered the Outer Continent and it’s opening up a bit. In retrospect what frustration I’ve had with the game boils down to two things- the fiddliness of actually navigating the pre-rendered maps (I do wonder why they dropped FFVII’s feature of a button that shows you where the exits are), and the goddamn camera on the world map seriously stop spinning I have gotten lost so often. I find myself using the Safe Travel option a lot just so I can catch my bearings. But yeah I’m enjoying it now, there’s a world to explore and a town to use as home base and this I can handle.
I’ve had so many playthroughs stall when I got to Lindblum because I just wasn’t looking forward to the next half a disc of drudgery, but all the things you can do when the game lets you do them are pretty fun. I like the game’s core mechanics and most of its sidequests, but the section of the game you just got through is why I never list FF9 as one of my favorites.
Video gamesStarted Sherlock Holmes: The Devil’s Daughter and I quite like it. Sure, the frequent minigames can be annoying and/or near impossible, but the game is smart enough to let you skip them if you want. The QTE’s are also a strange choice in this type of game, but I don’t mind them since I enjoy the rest of the game enough. Especially the deduction system is great.Board gamesWe played Robinson Crusoe after a long break because of a disastrous previous game. However, this time was as punishing as last time despite trying a different scenario. But according to people on BGG these two scenarios are considered the most difficult ones (Cannibal Island and Family Robinson). I’m afraid my husband is a bit fed up with the game though. Maybe we should try to make it a little easier by adding the Dog, or we should just stick to the other scenarios…
Overall, I liked Sherlock Holmes: The Devil’s Daughter as well. Superjankey and cheap at times but the deduction system was great. You can actually end the case on the wrong deduction which helped give it all weight.
I’ve played Robinson Crusoe five times, and the first event card has taken away my wood three of those times. You can’t do anything without wood. I’m feeling your husband’s frustration.
I really couldn’t wait anymore so I splurged on the Deluxe edition for Avengers.
Only to have life intervene and give me a busy personal and professional week. So I only got to play on Tuesday for a couple of hours. But really loving the campaign so far. Looking forward to diving in on Sunday for a whole day of lazy couch superheroing. Kamala Khan is the stand-out character and centering the campaign around her is smart and pays off with letting the player warm up to these new interpretations of these heroes as they’ve become synonymous with the MCU characters.
This expansion sounds very cool, and a solid deepening of the weird ephemeral plot that made Control so appealing. I’m grateful to finally have a Remedy game I enjoy!
As for me, this weekend I’ll likely be playing moon and Lair of the Clockwork God. Both are relatively relaxing adventure-style games, which are out of the ordinary for me, but both are pulled along by gorgeous visual design and top-notch writing.
If I need something a little more action-y, gotta go with Evergate. I’m in its third world and it feels like the puzzle-platformer of the year so far.
Finished the Control DLC this week and liked it a lot. It was a bit short, but the setup for Alan Wake 2 is pretty good. Also playing THPS 1+2 all weekend
I forgot THPS was out this weekend when my wife went to WalMart Friday, dangit! I want a physical copy so I have to wait for her to go back to the store. Between that and the 3D Mario collection coming out to days before my birthday, I am apparently going to celebrate turning 35 by playing my favorite games from when I was 12 and 14. In fact I remember using my birthday money from when I turned 14 to buy Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1 the day it came out after playing the Warehouse level on a demo disc all summer long.
After months devoted to Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey and Animal Crossing, I’m moving on to clear my buildup of games from the PS Plus deals- I’m playing through the MW 2 remastered campaign this weekend. I’ve also nabbed the deal for Cuphead, so I’ll have some proper side-scrolling torture for the next while too!
I only just finally played Cuphead after it released on PS4 a few months ago and loved it. It’s definitely difficult, but I felt it was a lot more doable than the internet seemed to imply.Small hint: Get the charge shot ASAP. It’s fun and does lots of damage in a single shot so you can focus on evading.
Hope you enjoy it!
Thanks for the advice!I definitely agree on the challenge, it’s one of those games I just put down for an hour after failing too much, only to come back to it to try again.
Well, it’s the comfort food of gaming for me: Star Wars: The Old Republic. I’m playing through as a Jedi Knight currently. I’m officially the Hero of Tython after defeating Darth Angral and a Sith Emperor controlled Kira Carsen (voiced by the always wonderful Laura Bailey *harp noises*).
Now I’m on the planet Balmorra, trying to track down some kind of cloaking device before it can fall into Sith hands. I’m currently infiltrating an Imperial factory to gain more data. I’ve completely abandoned the stealthier approaches of my last two playthroughs (Republic Trooper and Imperial Agent) to just go HAM on everyone with a lightsaber.
To keep the RPG theme going, on the tabletop I was able to play a Dungeons and Dragons 5eone shot that our DM had helpfully titled “Burial Rites and Wrongs.” As the only male player in a party of 6 (and a women DM), it was funny that I was the only one not making bad double entendres as the party were sliding down a long shaft, including a druid wild shaped as an Anaconda. After dealing with zombies and flesh golems in a map loosely based on Richmond’s own Hollywood Cemetery, we confronted a Mummy Lord type entity beneath a pyramid shaped mausoleum.
Said Lord was defeated almost entirely by slapstick means. My trusty Goblin Beastmaster Ranger used a vial of “Oil of Slipperiness” to lube up the shaft, and successfully caused a Grease spell underneath the Mummy.
That combined with the Triton Sorcerer my wife was playing pulling on the mummy’s bandages knocked the creature prone and did a tiny bit of bludgeoning damage. Then our Dragonborn, who was basically Gojira cast Spirit Guardians and finished off the Mummy with what we called the “Mothra Fairies” before it even got an attack off.
Hopefully work doesn’t get TOO in the way of gaming this weekend. Started Dead by Daylight recently for laughs, and while waiting to get in a game as the killer is a hassle, it’s still a fun time waster.
Slowly making my way through Horizon and will probably pick up Tony Hawk for that sweet sweet nostalgia
“AWE” even stands for Alan Wake Expanded.Take that for what you will.
I just finished Spiritfarer which was touching and beautiful but a mixed bag.It’s a resource management game about helping others fulfill their final wishes before moving on, and the art is all very striking, the soundtrack is lovely, and I love the unique story, but hot damn does the second half really double down on the more annoying resource collecting and some of the objectives become super vague. It’s no Stardew Valley, which I felt got more interesting as it went on, but I really enjoyed the concept even if the gameplay got dull for me. Still, if you like really unique concepts and art styles I would recommend at least looking it up.This weekend is all THPS 1 + 2 as a palette cleanser. 20 years ago it was the reason I got into skateboarding. I’m in my 30s now so it’s probably only a matter of years before I hang up my board for good, so I’m looking forward to a fun if bittersweet throwback.
I’ve heard the co-op for Spiritfarer makes the resource management a bit less tedious, did you try that at all or does it seem like that would be the case? It seems like something I might enjoy playing with my wife, but she has a lot less patience than me (except for Animal Crossing, that one she played hours a day during quarantine).
I can’t speak for the multiplayer unfortunately. I do know the second player takes control of another character who follows you around anyway (think Tails from Sonic), but I don’t know if they can perform all of the same actions or not such as watering plants, harvesting, etc.
I definitely saw mention that they can water plants and handle some other time consuming actions, I guess I will have to look into just how much they can do.
I just added Control to my Steam wishlist earlier this week. I remember there being glowing reviews when it first came out, I remember it sounding like just my thing, and I remember saying, “I’m totally getting that once I have a computer that can run it.” But it’s been long enough since its release that I don’t remember all the specifics. Which is cool! I’m ready for an essentially blind playthrough of it. Plot twists and interesting game mechanics have more impact when I don’t know/remember to expect them.Board GamesI tried Robinson Crusoe again this week – my first game since winning the first scenario a couple months ago. I scrutinized the win condition (build crosses on each of 5 island tiles) and the scenario-specific fuckery (half of all events cards fogs up two tiles, which makes everything take longer and blocks you from inventing) and came to the very obvious conclusion that the explorer and carpenter would be the strongest choices. We need to uncover more island tiles, and we need build things on those tiles. Pretty straightforward.Already being familiar with the carpenter and her abilities to use less wood and add more workers for building/inventing, I defaulted to playing as her. I spent my entire first turn exploring to open up the map and give me some inventions to work with, and I made the rookie mistake of trying to work out a basic strategy of making a plan in Robinson Crusoe before flipping the “lol ur fukt” card at the beginning of the second turn. Not only did it generate two tiles of fog, but it took away my wood *and* gave my character two damage. And it wasn’t even the same card that took away my wood from the second and third games I played. What the fuck, game? How many “you lose your wood and can’t do anything this turn” cards are there in the deck?So I decided to answer that question by looking through all the unused cards. I’m not familiar enough with the game to figure out what’s in my event deck by looking at what got left out, so I figured I wasn’t spoiling anything. And I counted only one other card that took away wood. And only one other card taking my wood away doesn’t sound like that bad of odds.Except that…… it wasn’t the forest fire card that immediately fucked up my second and third games. Which meant it was in my fucking event deck again.I quit. I packed up my game at the beginning of turn 2 because it was already clear that no amount of strategizing could overcome luck this rotten.I’m growing tired of trying to give this game a chance.On the flip side, I played a quick game of Pandemic on my lunch break at work one day this week. Things looked desperate. I thought I won for a second before realizing I’d included the purple disease in the game and I needed to either clean up all the purple cubes on the map or get the cards to cure it, and there were several sections of the map I’d neglected because I thought I knew exactly what turn I would win on. But because it’s Pandemic and not Robinson Crusoe, I was able to scrap together a desperate plan to win in another three turns, using all three of my characters’ abilities together to engineer a satisfying strategic victory. For all the games I’ve played over the past two years, Pandemic’s probably still my favorite to solo. I’ve played over 100 games of it, it still challenges me every game, and winning still feels awesome. I should probably try out the other expansions, but On the Brink just added the perfect amount of role diversity and difficulty customization.I wonder if another expansion is just going to be a hat on a hat.Video Games All Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age all the time at the Kappa household. I recruited all of the espers, found all the magic and techniks in the game, hunted down all the rare monsters, and conquered all the superbosses, meaning I rounded out the bestiary in the meantime as well. At this point, all that’s left to do is clear trial mode and bang my head against a wall trying to get the perfect Mist combo to trigger Black Hole – which is like 90% luck and 10% reaction time.I feel like I could stop right now and feel like I’ve already experienced everything worth experiencing in this game – trial mode is just going to make me beat the superbosses again, maybe throw together a few interesting combinations of monsters that are difficult to handle together, but Yiazmat and Zodiark and Omega Mark XII aren’t fun. The strategies I had to use to best them in the main game weren’t satisfying.Yiazmat is just a long-ass fight where you debuff him to minimum stats, set up gambits to keep all of your characters constantly buffed/revived so that you can occasionally chip away a couple life bars during streaks where he either doesn’t use his insta-kill move or said moves fails… and you just leave the fight running for an hour on 4x speed.Zodiark plays nice for a couple minutes, then goes invincible and spams a bullshit attack, so you just go all-in on brute force to kill him before he can get to that point in his script. Omega Mark XII only has one move, which it uses constantly, and the only way to survive it is to use reverse, which makes damage heal and healing damage. But the buff doesn’t last very long at all, so the entire fight is just keeping one damage dealer lured/reversed while everyone is prepared to go into emergency mode to revive him and anyone else who gets hit by the attack when reverse drops – which happens constantly.I’m sure there’s some flexibility to come up with slightly different strategies on these fights, but I’m also 100% certain that no version of these fights is fun. They’re like the Robinson Crusoe of boss fights. Still, all this is just shit I did last night. The negative aspects of the post-game content don’t dominate the experience. The other three weeks of the game have been an amazing experience. I expected this to be a low point in the series, but while most of the FF games didn’t age as well as I expected, I was shocked how consistently satisfying FF12 was.That’s going to free me up to start something new this weekend. I don’t know. I’m feeling puzzly. I’m not sure if that means the logistical puzzles of SpaceChem, the linguistic puzzles of Heaven’s Vault, the narrative puzzles of Elsinore, or I’m going to drop a modest $15 to pick up Murder By Numbers and spend the weekend solving murders with hecking picross. Neither Just Cause 3 nor Final Fantasy 12 were even remotely cerebral, so I think a brain-forward game is just what the doctor ordered.This concludes my weekly novel.