Operation Backlog Completion 2026

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Control

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  12 Responses »  Tagged with:
Oct 182024
 

After all this time, I’ve finally finished Control.

If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you might remember my Control tale of woe. I started the game shortly after it came out but encountered a game-breaking bug that made it impossible for me to continue. My only choice was to start the game over from the beginning, and the thought demoralized me.

They eventually patched the bug, but it was too late for someone who had already triggered it. So I let Control sit until last October, when enough time had passed that it felt fresh enough for me to restart.

I actually played most of Control last year, though not in time for Celebrating All Things Spooky 2023, and then followed it with the AWE expansion. Then I took a break. A few days ago, I realized I still hadn’t played Foundation, so I played that for this October and finally brought Control to a close.

Control is not a horror game, but it undeniably has a creepy and sometimes unsettling atmosphere. It’s set at the Federal Bureau of Control, a secret government agency that monitors and contains supernatural phenomena. When Jesse Faden arrives at the Bureau while searching for her brother, she is unexpectedly chosen as the new Director and finds herself fighting mysterious entities known as the Hiss who have attacked and possessed most of the people in the building.

It’s an action-adventure game, with third-person shooter combat that also makes use of special abilities you learn as you play, such as using telekinesis to throw objects in the room at enemies.

It’s fun, challenging at times, and has a great atmosphere that blends eerie creepiness with an off-beat sense of humor. When you pick up a document (of which there are many, along with audio logs and other pieces of media), you never know if it’s going to be a disturbing tale of people falling prey to powers beyond their comprehension or a letter from someone who thinks their potted plants are giving them coded messages.

Most of these supernatural incidents and objects you learn about just as part of the background lore, although you interact with some directly (sometimes to get new powers). Of course, as a big Alan Wake fan, I was delighted that the Bright Falls incident was among that lore.

So I really love the lore, background details, and the general tone of the game.

The story… is confusing. By the end, I understood it better, but there are still a lot of cryptic and unclear points. Intentionally so. It’s a surreal experience.

Now, the AWE DLC takes a step further in tying Control directly to Alan Wake. As you might imagine, this means it’s even more confusing. It’s a great DLC, and I loved how it tied the two games together, although the final boss fight was unfortunately frustrating. Story-wise, it left me quite confused.

Foundation is a bit more straightforward in terms of story and serves as an epilogue, so I’m glad I played it last. It also seems to set the stage for a sequel, and we know Control 2 is in development.

Overall, Control is a game filled with creepy, disturbing, and sometimes surprisingly humorous supernatural elements. It’s not quite like any other game, and it’s definitely worth playing, even though I’d struggle to explain parts of it. And if you love finding little pieces of lore as you play, you’ll probably love Control.

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Corpse Party: Sweet Sachiko’s Hysteric Birthday Bash

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  13 Responses »  Tagged with:
Oct 162024
 

Three years ago, we discussed the Corpse Party remake.

Last year, we moved on to Book of Shadows.

And so for this October, I played the next game in the series. Which, as I mentioned near the end of my Book of Shadows review, is not Blood Drive but rather the comedy midquel Corpse Party: Sweet Sachiko’s Hysteric Birthday Bash.

The usual Corpse Party horrors are temporarily put on hold as the cast is gathered together in one place to celebrate Sachiko’s birthday (whether they want to or not)! Now they have to put on a cultural festival, with a variety of strange and sometimes deadly activities on the schedule.

While Book of Shadows combined adventure game elements with a visual novel presentation, this one is a pure visual novel. Occasional choices will determine if you clear a given chapter or get one of its numerous, often hilarious bad endings, but most of your time will be spent reading.

It’s definitely a dramatic change in tone, albeit still with a Corpse Party flair. You might get a bad ending where a character gets a kidney cut out, for example, except it’s played for laughs. Or maybe a character will go insane and fall into despair, but for ridiculous reasons.

Oh, and the lighter tone means the fanservice is also cranked up way past its usual levels, with some very awkward moments.

I found it to be a pretty funny game. I wasn’t sure about it when I started, but I ended up being happy I played it, even if it’s not quite the usual Corpse Party fare.

Click for Sweet Sachiko's Hysteric Birthday Bash spoilers
Honestly, I felt sad at the end when everyone was crying and Sachiko started to have second thoughts, only for everything to reset. It felt like a glimpse of what could have been a happy ending before it was torn away.

The only thing that bugged me was that there didn’t always seem to be a natural narrative flow from one chapter to the next, but that can probably be excused as Corpse Party weirdness.

A bonus chapter at the end takes on a more serious atmosphere, potentially setting up more things for Blood Drive. I remember reading that the reason this entry is important is because it introduces characters who appear in later games, although I’d also add that there’s also just something nice about seeing these characters together in a less intense situation.

At the end of the game, you also unlock messages from the voice actors again, and I love hearing their thoughts on the script, the series, the recording sessions, etc. I wish more games did that.

Overall, Corpse Party: Sweet Sachiko’s Hysteric Birthday Bash is not a scary game, and it doesn’t really advance the Corpse Party storyline, but it fits the bill for spooky comedy. So if you’re just here for the horror, this probably isn’t the game for you. But if you like the characters, enjoy (or at least don’t mind) the fanservice, and want to see some wacky comedy antics, it’s worth taking a look.

Meanwhile, the upcoming Corpse Party II: Darkness Distortion has been delayed to 2025. I’d been wondering why we didn’t have a release date yet, and now we know. At least this will give me more time to catch up on the series with Blood Drive before it comes out!

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Kwaidan ~Azuma manor story~

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  8 Responses »  Tagged with: ,
Oct 142024
 

For our next spooky game, let’s face off against more yokai – excuse me, Yoki – this time in a survival horror game.

Kwaidan ~Azuma manor story~ is inspired by the classics, complete with fixed camera angles and the option to play with either tank controls or modern controls.

I played the Switch version, although it’s on PS4 and PC as well.

You play a young woman training to be a Hoshoshi, someone who drives off evil spirits. When she and her mentor learn Azuma Manor has been overtaken by Yoki (why they didn’t call them yokai remains a mystery to me), they head in to handle the problem.

Now, Kwaidan has one weird quirk, which is its inclusion of point-and-click adventure controls. For the most part, you run around and fight enemies like you would in any game with 3D exploration, but when you want to interact with something in the environment or your inventory, you have to hover over it with a cursor first instead of just pressing a button. This is unnecessarily awkward, particularly since you need to be right by an object to interact with it anyway.

Your inventory also remains on-screen at all times, and you use the cursor to interact with it as well. While you have a limited inventory, resource management never really comes into play.

Combat in Kwaidan is a bit unusual for the genre. You have three weapons, one to attack right in front of you, one to attack enemies low to the ground, and one to attack enemies in the air. The latter two consume energy, which you can build up again by defeating enemies or defending against attacks. This makes it tilt slightly more toward action, a bit closer to Onimusha than Resident Evil.

Enemies respawn, which I found annoying at first, until I realized it’s almost a necessity because of the small game world. While it has the usual sorts of item-based puzzles I love from this genre, with backtracking requires to unlock doors and solve puzzles once you find the key items, it’s pretty small-scale. If enemies didn’t respawn, you’d soon spend most of your time in safety.

Most of the puzzles are straightforward, although one requires you to run around the manor to to look at spots in a first-person view to work out a code told to you in a document in a completely different location, which felt tedious. I would have preferred to have that information recorded in memos.

But my bigger criticism is that you only have one save slot. As such, if you save yourself into a situation where you really could use more healing items, you’d need to either start over or try repeatedly until you manage to scrape through.

Overall, the occasional frustrations in Kwaidan ~Azuma manor story~ weren’t enough to stop me from enjoying the game. The developer’s next game is about luring devils up a railway to seal them away, which sounds significantly different, but I’ll be interested in seeing what it’s like.

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