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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   2907 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 9, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Control is more a blended mix of New Weird stuff, but the giant complex with a singular evil entity that's more of a force of nature than a person, the twisting and manipulation of normal-but-never-familiar spaces, so on. Decent game, little twitchy for my tastes.

Non-standard variants:

Portal and especially Portal 2 are kinda prototypes; underneath the humor and the claustrophobic testing chambers, the scale and scope of even the smaller bits of the larger complex you see get kinda staggering.

The Liminal Experience is a Minecraft Modpack, and both an example and an (unintentional?) sendup of the genre. It is the first level of the Backrooms as a skyblock/stoneblock-like, that's the joke, full stop. But it's also in Minecraft. So at first you've got nothing, and you're going to get easily lost, and probably starve to death wandering endless halls filled with useless cruft while foreboding sounds buzz through the air, and the rare (and buffed) monsters will shove your face in. But after a few hours, you can start making out paths to and from your base with chalk, you can funnel monsters into lava, and a lot of the random detritus is now useful resources. There's still some interesting decisions going on, like having to break lights and/or explore further and further away for fresh resources, but eventually the bizarre infrastructure and dangerous machinery is just you.

Chromaticraft's Lumen/Chroma Dimension is... weird. It's meant to be a magical, exploratory, novel place. It's also meant to be abandoned, alone, solitary, and a bit of a trap for the unwary explorer of knowledge. Can't really explain in more detail without spoiling, though.

I thought the concept of the directorship of a federal admin agency being a King Arthur sword in the stone type thing was really funny.

Doubly so when it's a King Arthur sword that a) isn't good at its job, and b) likes to make those who attempt to use it An Hero themselves.

Control is too Finnish to be plausibly American. Call me a chauvinist but I just don’t like when especially European game developers try to create authentically or quasi-authentically American spaces, they just can’t do it. It’s fine for Grand Theft Auto because it’s inherently a foreign satire of America, which is fine, but not for things that try to be a little more sincere.

They should have set the game in Finland, which would probably be even more interesting. Hogwarts Legacy suffered from the same problem in reverse, it was clearly created by Americans.

Typically I would agree, but for Remedy games it only adds to the slight Twin Peaks-esque unreality of it. The only one it really hurt was Quantum Break.

What's un-American about Control?

Control's trying to be about an FBI-by-way-of-X-Files, but there's a number of bits that don't really match how americans see the place. Ahti the janitor/god would have been hispanic-themed (or actually Coyote) in a US-work, the Board doesn't really match American oversight concepts, FORMER seems too inspired by the formori in form and concept. The Oceanview Motel is supposed to come from late-80s Montana, and it's hard to separate how much of it's weird because of the whole shared dream subconcious thing going on, but the lack of air conditioners is not especially plausible. The Oldest House's exterior comes by way of a specific (probably NSA) construction that exists in real-world New York, but the interior is a blend of every brand of brutalism ever, and that's necessarily going to include a lot of non-American influences.

I think it works out for the better -- it's supposed to be subtly weird in a way that just cloning a Best Western and the Hoover Building wouldn't -- but I don't have the same tastes as 2rafa.

and it does make the whole 'Alan Wake invented this' bit harder to bite.

the Board doesn't really match American oversight concepts,

A disembodied extradimensional alien hive intelligence doesn't match American oversight concepts? I mean, true, but unless I'm not up to date with what's going on in Finland these days...

FORMER seems too inspired by the formori in form and concept

I assume you mean the Fomori? Maybe in the sense that FORMER is large and the Fomori are giants, but the Fomori are supposed to predate the Tuatha Dé Danann whereas FORMER is an exile. In any case, FORMER looks more like a HL2 strider than an Irish sea giant.

but the lack of air conditioners is not especially plausible

Is... Is the claim here that it's obviously not an American game because they didn't put air vents in the transdimensional liminal space?

the interior is a blend of every brand of brutalism ever, and that's necessarily going to include a lot of non-American influences.

Of course, there's plenty of brutalist American federal buildings. Given that the building itself is essentially an SCP, it seems fitting that it isn't constrained only by American styles or even any extant brutalist style in particular.

Fair point. I'm more motioning around decisions that American writers (and artists, and developers) wouldn't make, that the devs of Control did, but it's naturally something that's going to involve tea-leaf-reading unless @2rafa has a more overt example than I can bring.

I mostly agree with you, the dialogue is obvious too, weird slang.

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