Weeknotes 58

I took Friday off work, which was amazing. Four-day work weeks are great. Let’s all do that.

Over the long weekend I played a lot more of Control. It’s mostly good!

I got off to a rocky start because I generally don’t like combat in games and always have to remind myself that it’s put there on purpose and is supposed to be fun. I’m finding Control’s combat more tolerable now that I’ve earned a few upgrades, and I’ve got good enough at pressing the right buttons to make it challenging rather than just frustrating. It does still make me sad that the core gameplay demands that combat situations must spawn everywhere at all times for no reason; when you’re exploring you’re never allowed to have quiet moments of discovery and wonder because you’re constantly being interrupted by more enemies appearing out of thin air. I’d like the game more if you could disable the constant background noise of these encounters and save the combat for scripted situations where it’s meaningful for the story.

The Metroidvania structure works really well in a sprawling office building and I’m enjoying the feeling of exploration and adventure. There are some brilliant set pieces and one-off ideas, and the incremental reveal of new powers makes progression feel rewarding. As usual there’s too much text to read (and the font is too small as required by law) but the video & audio recordings you collect are interesting and well-performed. It’s a cool setting.

The biggest downside is that it suffers from Tenet syndrome: the presentation is very slick and thrilling but there are no characters to care about and none of the people you meet have an actual personality. Even Portal 2, which was set in a completely deserted corporate headquarters, managed to get a ton of mileage out of Wheatley and Cave Johnson through good writing. The world of Control feels much lonelier in comparison even though you’re surrounded by other people.

I haven’t played much of Super Mario 3D World yet but I like it so far and am having fun being Cat Mario. I’ll save Bowser’s Fury for later, as a treat.

I finished the first season of Arrested Development and I’m warming to it a bit. Overall it still feels more “yes, that’s a funny idea” than actually funny — the famous “it’s one banana, Michael” line is a good example — but I did laugh out loud for the first time at a scene in Let ’Em Eat Cake where Gob says “beads?!” incredulously. If future episodes contain more scenes where someone says a funny word in a funny way then we could be onto a winner.

Is that it? What else? Working and baking and eating and sleeping. The daffodils died, as daffodils do. Life goes on.