Oldest House Party

[utilitymonstergirl]

"games are special.... because we... have stories to tell..."

*montage of third person combat in unreal engine 5*

—Tumblr user cdigoddess, 6/6/25


The two monologues that open Half-Life 2 are a brilliant pair of counterbalances: a surreal personal address from a man outside of time, and a recorded spiel from Earth's most spineless collaborator.

Control wants very badly to be Half-Life 2, just as much as it wants to be the SCP wiki and House of Leaves and Annihilation. We open with an overcooked monologue from the protagonist, then a fantastically sharp and clever in-universe document that never gets a satisfying followup. The tone is set early.

I originally had Roadside Picnic in that list, but I took it out when I realized that its absence is the problem - having clear inspirations is fine, but it's so incurious about what made them work or inspired them in turn. It doesn't care about Picnic's reflections on race-to-the-bottom exploitation. It doesn't have Half-Life 2's slow-burn atmosphere of an ecosystem ruined by both biological warfare and pure neglect. It gathers the vibes of a dozen better stories in a sleek midwit package that feels like a forgotten straight-to-Netflix show.

...I know this is a harsh opening, but the game was still compelling enough for me to finish it in under a day. There's a lot to like; I love how the only qualification to become the Bureau director is winning the approval of a supernatural shapeshifting gun only called 'the Service Weapon'. I love how being chosen by the Mandate-Of-Heaven Glock still doesn't actually give you any security clearances. I love how The Board's dialogue is only given in uncertain multiple-choice translations of wildly varying tone and implication. I love the decision to make the wise mystical janitor the most Finnish man of all time.

The above details sound like the bones of a great deadpan dark comedy, but it's held back by three central problems: the refusal to let anything funny, mechanically weird, or politically biting take center stage. There's a missed opportunity for a hat trick right at the start: as soon as you get the Service Weapon, painted portraits of you appear throughout the building. I thought this was setting up a thread about how the current director retroactively becomes the only director the Bureau has ever had, and you'd have to bluff your way through discussions of institutional lore while untangling the death of a man whose existence is known only to you. But no; the other staff accept your authority simply because they know how the succession process works, not out of any supernatural compulsion.

Scattered documents hint at a Dr. Strangelove-style farce about clinging to jargon and procedure and petty office politics at the end of the world, but none of the characters we speak to summon much of that feeling. The panopticon manager is kind of a schlub, Ahti the janitor is wizened comic relief, but that's about it. Our protagonist gets a few deadpan gags, like wondering to herself if Ahti is Swedish, and only remembering at the game's end what movie she was trying to recall in the opening monologue. The live-action clips of lead scientist Casper Darling have a charming goofball-science-teacher energy, but the premise of "Bill Nye being deeply complicit in black-ops atrocities" never gets developed much.

Speaking of, the game is shockingly apolitical for being set in a branch of the US government devoted to shady off-the-record shit in a world where Jungianism is objectively true. I don't need it to go as grim as The Department of Truth, plumbing all the most rancid implications of Alex Jones being a stakeholder in the fabric of reality, but I wish it did something with the Bureau being shaped from below and ruled from above by hateful paranoiacs. There's one slightly-kooky radio snippet, one genuinely-really-funny Havana Syndrome gag, but the main antagonist is an absolute nothing and the hints at the Bureau's own faults feel pretty toothless. The Bureau isn't good, but its failings don't feel like indictments of anything beyond itself.

The gameplay reaches new heights of Perfunctory; the firefights got quite tedious even with the "enemies all die in one hit" setting active. (And honestly, I feel that my Excalibur-Beretta should be able to one-shot anyone anyway.) You get showered with finicky little upgrade-baubles and crafting currencies at every step, like an online looter-shooter but single-player and with no microtransactions. I held out hope that this was part one of a brutal deadpan joke, that this unimaginative toolkit is completely unprepared to deal with the Oldest House, but the only mechanical swerve comes as too little, too late. In a sequence right before the finale, you're plunged into a personal Hell where you have to perform a few rounds of tedious gofer tasks as a disrespected intern, but then it's right back to gunplay for the final fight (and, as qntm pointed out, it isn't that much more tedious than some of the actual sidequests).

All in all, a game about the inscrutable never risks letting you be confused; much is made of the Oldest House being a shifting maze, but it never changes behind your back and the map screen remains perfectly accurate. The developers are so God-damned impressed with their multimedia storytelling no matter how clumsy it gets, and I suspect they'd be much better off making films or movies rather than letting thoroughly bland gameplay take up so much space. But I must commend them for this: Control's frustrations have burrowed deep enough in me that it's practically an infohazard.