Collectibles & Story (Gaming)

by EffortlessFury , Saturday, January 29, 2022, 13:48 (816 days ago) @ Cody Miller

I Don't think it needs to be an RPG, at least not the way I think of how that term is defined.

I mean RPG in the truest sense. A "Role Playing Game". Not something like Final Fantasy or Skyrim.

Except Control was an RPG for me in this sense. I synced with the role of Jesse Faden. Despite aspects of her time in The Oldest House being action oriented due to the present threat, she didn't come here intending to deal with any threat of this kind, she came for answers. The gameplay is actually an obstacle in the way of her purpose.

The gameplay is experiencing the weirdness, but the weirdness doesn't explain itself. If you want to understand the weirdness, you need to learn more about past events of these sort, you need to learn more about the place you're in, how it came to be, what it's used for. Some of that comes across in dialogue with characters (and for some of it you have to voluntarily talk to those NPCs outside of mandatory cutscenes).

You will get exactly as much information as you seek. The gameplay does not require you to understand but understanding essentially requires "research." It sounds boring, and it might be to some, but I was ravenous for that info.

In contrast, as much as I enjoyed Mass Effect, I never read that Codex. It makes sense that such a database of information would be easily on hand in that universe, but I didn't find reading an encyclopedia all that compelling, especially when the extraneous details didn't necessarily add much to the experience. The intricacies of the civilizations in Mass Effect revealed themselves through the experience because it involved social interaction. Control is about the weird. What you see has no obvious explanation and the weird does not tell you much, if anything, about itself. If you want to understand, you must seek it, and it feels natural to do so given the context.