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Now Playing: Control | Best Games Of 2019

It’s a bit of a whimper for a great game to go out on, as AWE feels more like a teaser for another game you’ll have to buy at a later date, rather than a satisfying expansion of (or conclusion to) what we’ve seen in Control so far.

AWE represents Remedy elevating Easter eggs found in Control and its other games (namely Quantum Break) to shared-universe territory. Alan Wake is a character in Control’s universe, and what’s more, he’s now directly impacting on protagonist Jesse Faden’s story. A spectral Alan guides Jesse to the Investigations section of the Oldest House, the living office building where Control is set. The Investigations section was sealed two years earlier after a huge horrific monster rampaged through it and killed a whole bunch of people. Wake’s messages send Jesse to investigate, and unsealing the section gives the monster the opportunity to escape–so it becomes Jesse’s job to hunt it down and kill it before it can get into the rest of the Federal Bureau of Control and start munching on the survivors.

So most of AWE is about Jesse wandering through the Investigations section, hunting the creature. The twist is that the monster is Emil Hartman, a character from Alan Wake (the game, not the guy). The Darkness, the evil force in that game, has turned Hartman into a monster, and the interference of Control’s Hiss has made him even worse. Merging the two games lets Remedy add Alan Wake mechanics to Control’s combat to create a new wrinkle: Hartman is invincible in the dark but afraid of the light.

That creates some of AWE’s best moments, where you pursue or are pursued by Hartman in heart-pounding, deadly interactions. Again and again, you’ll face Hartman in situations where you either have to run from light source to light source to avoid a distorted, 15-foot-tall, teleporting killing machine, or you have to flip switches and maneuver power sources to blast that killing machine with light and drive it away. The entire DLC campaign is a series of encounters with a creature that’s genuinely scary, and in its coolest parts, AWE taps into Alan Wake’s horror and filters it through Control’s superpowered lens.

It doesn’t always work, though. All of these encounters with Hartman aren’t really fights, since you can’t hurt Hartman while he’s in the dark. They’re more like a series of fast-paced puzzle encounters, and some of them–like a chase where you have to blow down walls in order to reach the next pool of light before you’re snagged in the creature’s huge, gnarled arms–are more exciting than others.

The evil Darkness in AWE mirrors that of Alan Wake: In the 2010 game, standing in a pool of light would heal you of wounds you received out in the black. In AWE, standing in the dark saps you of your ability energy, quickly limiting the superpowers you can use, while getting under a light restores them. That means that when you’re sprinting from light to light, you’re slowly losing the ability to effectively sprint from light to light.

On paper, that sounds like it would create a lot of tension, but in practice it just adds a limitation to your combat capabilities that can compound frustration. Control already can be a slog at times thanks to its health system, which requires you to hurt and kill enemies to restore yourself. The game is built to give you powers like super-speedy dodging and telekinetic shields to help you save yourself when you get hurt too badly. But fighting enemies in the dark also robs you of your superpowers. It helps create situations in which you’re not only struggling to keep your health up, but also scrambling to move to or stay in locations that strengthen your powers. In a few fights, like one where you slowly dismantle your light sources in order to power a much bigger one, this quickly puts you into situations where if you take too much damage you’ve pretty much got no chance to heal yourself, and need to start over.

The pendulum swings between fun, tense, scary fights and frustrating fights would be more forgivable if AWE felt like it delivered on the promise of its title, though. In Control, AWEs are Altered World Events, situations in which the supernatural bleeds into the real world. Exploring the area where the Bureau investigates those events feels like it should mean this DLC is overflowing with weird, inventive stuff–but it isn’t. There are only a small handful of side-quests and Control’s extra-cool altered items to encounter, and they’re extremely underwhelming, mostly consisting of momentary busywork. One is a train car where you need to interact with items in a certain order to piece together the story of how it derailed, which reveals next to nothing. The other is an encounter with a sentient NASA space suit that you only interact with through a door and never actually see in person. As a follow-up to encounters with items like a sentient rubber ducky and a refrigerator that murders people in the main game, or a movie camera that puts you in a Hollywood-style chase scene in The Foundation DLC, these AWE ideas are pretty lackluster.

The more interesting part is all the story AWE teases, although most of it presents cool possibilities for things that don’t actually appear in the game. Wake himself is around, and we get a little info on what’s going on with him, which suggests there’s more to find. There are other threads with Alan Wake characters, including his wife, Alice. And we learn about a very potentially cool aspect of the FBC’s mandate: dealing with “paracriminals,” people who try to use supernatural Altered Items and Objects of Power for crimes, or who try to actually create Altered World Events. A game about dealing with those people sounds like it’d be pretty compelling, and AWE gives the sense that that might be the direction Control goes, as a franchise, in the future.

But for now, you’re mostly just solving puzzles in Investigations so you can turn on lights to chase Hartman. You continue to fight the Hiss, but even with the introduction of a new flying enemy, it’s pretty much business as usual. There are some new power upgrades for Jesse’s arsenal–specifically, the ability to telekinetically throw three objects at a time instead of one–and the new Surge grenade launcher gun, which fires sticky bombs you can remotely detonate, give you opportunities to create new combat strategies. They combine well with what’s already on offer in Control, but none offer inventive new ways to address combat situations or exploration the way The Foundation’s additions do.

AWE is the story of expectations not quite meeting reality. It’s exciting to see Alan Wake become a full-fledged addition to the Control universe and to catch up on different aspects of Remedy’s growing universe. But this feels much more like a taste of what might come in future games than a strong addition to what’s been built in Control. AWE is a missed opportunity for Remedy to really embrace Control’s deep weirdness, and it’s a missed opportunity for it to really expand on the story of Alan Wake after so much waiting. It’s the unfortunate side effect of the idea of a shared universe–in teasing the next installment in the growing story, AWE doesn’t do much to serve the story it’s already in.

Now Playing: High On Life Video Review

At this point, it bears acknowledging that this is 100% a Justin Roiland project, complete with all the hallmarks of his comedic philosophy. Rapid-fire monologues, fart jokes, demolition of the fourth wall, ad-libs, dark comedy–it’s all intertwined within the game’s narrative and presentation. If things like Rick and Morty, Trover Saves The Universe, or Solar Opposites aren’t your cup of tea, this won’t be either. That said, I have a very high tolerance for this sort of goofiness and I found myself laughing throughout the 10-hour adventure.

I got a kick out of the fact that Squanch Games licensed four full-length schlocky B-movies for players to “enjoy” simply because it could. Every time a voice actor in clear ad-lib mode would laugh in the middle of a diatribe, I would also laugh. The referential humor always got a reaction out of me–particularly mentions of other video games, like the full-throated endorsement of indie darling Donut County by Kenny the pistol.

There’s a genuine charm in all of it. Sure, some of the jokes don’t land, and the ramblings of the gun in my hand can sometimes go on too long, but it’s clear in every attempt that the development team was having fun making High On Life. I never knew what was going to happen as scenes progressed, and that lack of predictability enhances the experience. Honestly, this unruly approach is the only way certain jokes work–which includes, for example, an entire scene that plays out in “Space Applebee’s,” complete with waiter interruptions as you order food.

However, Squanch Games also knows this brand of humor isn’t for everyone, and it provides the option to tone down banter so those turned off by constant chatter can still enjoy the game. I left my settings to “Frequent” banter and didn’t think it was too much–in comparison, I didn’t find the banter to be as egregious as what earned Horizon: Forbidden West criticism earlier this year. This could be because the characters weren’t speaking out loud about the puzzles in front of me, which made the dialogue feel more natural for the setting.

Once you get past the goofiness and focus on the game itself, High On Life delivers a solid 3D shooter experience that emulates the exploits of Samus Aran. Each of the different biomes I explored were brimming with secrets, from living chests filled with gold to random NPCs offering a quick zinger or brief side quest. As the game progresses, vertical movement is introduced thanks to finding a jetpack, and that opens up exploration even more.

These worlds are large, as well, which the game tries to counter with a waypoint system that allows me to see in which direction my objective lies and how far away it sits. Sometimes this system gets its wires crossed, and reaching one waypoint somehow turns into me returning to the waypoint I just came from, but more often than not, a simple tap of the D-Pad points me in the right direction. The waypoints also became something of a crutch in the later parts of the game, as not using them sometimes led to me traveling to the wrong part of the map and getting lost. It’s not a perfect system, but the waypoints are helpful more often than not.

The Gatlians each stand out from one another, both in their quips and how they’re used in combat. Kenny is the resident pistol, Gus is a shotgun, Knifey is the… uh, knife, and Sweezy acts like the Needler from Halo. The most interesting of the weapons is Creature, which acts as a sort of Pikmin device, launching small creatures at enemies for damage over time. All four are potent in combat, as they possess advantages over certain foes and make it essential to switch through guns during a fight.

Each gun has a second power that aids with traveling and environmental puzzles, which slowly opens more of the world to me as I progress. Kenny shoots blasts of thick slime which will hit designated obstacles and allow you to pass. Sweezy can fire a shot that slows time in the area around where it lands, making her the perfect choice to get past fast-spinning fans that would otherwise cause damage. These special shots can in a fight as well–Kenny’s slime shots will launch opponents in the air for extra hits, for example–which gives me even more options.

Using the Gatlians in battle is a lot of fun, and the enemies I’m facing fit right into the weird and silly aesthetic of the rest of the game. The bad guys are each covered in a sort of yellow goo–the origin of which I will not spoil–and as you deal damage, the goo wears off, exposing their gray bodies underneath. While strange, it serves as an easy visual aid for how much damage you’ve done to a certain enemy, and it also allows you to create your own weak points. If an enemy is hiding behind cover, but there’s a patch of gray skin exposed on its arm, target that spot and the enemy will fall quickly. It’s an ingenious idea of showing combat damage on enemies without giving them health bars or something similar.

That said, most of the enemies I encountered are dumb as rocks. I could run up to any one of the normal grunts and either shoot or melee them to death without taking a lot of damage. There were times I’d be overwhelmed and have to retry a battle, but those were more due to my being overzealous rather than enemies outsmarting me.

Sure, some of the jokes don’t land, and the ramblings of the gun in my hand can sometimes go on too long, but it’s clear in every attempt that the development team was having fun making High On Life

Boss fights aren’t much better, as the majority of them boil down to simply shooting and dodging. Some of them shake things up a bit, whether they implement the special shot of the Gatlian you’re about to rescue–Krubis fires large discs you can reflect back at him, which it turns out is the power of Gus the shotgun–or give you multiple bosses to fight at once. At their core, however, it’s more of the same combat you get from grunts, just with bigger baddies.

While overall combat is fun, where it becomes tedious is the length of some skirmishes. Each encounter tends to play out in waves, with two or three sets of enemies coming out before the battle is over. Some of them stretch far longer than that, to the point where Kenny the pistol says, “Oh my god, MORE?!” and I’m feeling exactly the same. These fights become a test of patience as much as a test of skill. Boss fights don’t have this issue for the most part, but some of them fall into their own issues–one fight in particular still makes me angry just thinking about how difficult it became in its final stage.

Ultimately, High On Life is, in its own weird way, a take on what a modern Metroid Prime game could be, through the lens of Justin Roiland’s comedy antics. There’s a similar sense of exploration mixed with fast-paced moments of combat, only here it’s also swelling with expletive-laden jokes and sometimes incoherent rambling. The story, off-beat as it may be, is told incredibly well, with characters and moments I’ll be referencing for a while. Even if you’re not a fan of the kind of humor High On Life presents, the game that’s here is worth the trip.