Been playing for about 14 hours and this game encapsulates everything I detest about AAA games these days.
High production values, with abysmal aesthetic orientation, pretentious but hollow. The writing and dialog are embarrassingly childish and cliched beyond belief, and the voice acting is terrible. The character cast is woven of uniformly predictable caricatures and stereotypes: the detective genius endowed with cunning intuition, and can 'see' into the mind of the criminals, much to the awe of her dim-witted colleagues, but who is also a mom... the cultish-pagan sectarian mystery evildoers, guttural metal-voices and all. And progressive nods toward the supernatural, and Aliens, of course.
The level design is generic and uninspired; every setting feels like a series of narrow corridors of highly cluttered visual detail with nothing to do. Dead ends everywhere without purposes, invisible walls keeping you on your tracks God-of-War style, environments that are essentially utterly non interactive except select points, making the experience feel not just linear, but empty.
The 'profiling' and case-solving system consists essentially of dragging photographs into these moronic flowcharts, having Hannibal-like 'intuition' into the minds of the criminal by literally just clicking options from a menu and watching a cutscene, listening to monologue insights and scattered recordings. The game requires you to keep accessing the 'hub' to paste photographs in the wall building automated flowcharts and get cutscenes. The puzzles are so woefully stupid they feel like chores more than clever challenges. Lots of reading comes your way, all of it bad. Gunplay is relatively sparce, enemies are spongy but easy, the designs are boring, and the controls are standard.
Mechanically, the game overall thus feels extremely dated and unoriginal. There's enormous pacing issues. The game starts almost as an insufferable slog that takes literally hours before you do anything resembling gameplay. It's an interactive movie with trite dialog, cutscenes, and an exhaustingly long-winded tutorial-introductory segment that drags on forever, resembling a point and click adventure for 10 year olds.
Frankly, this game is a symptom of everything wrong in the industry: uninspired attempts to emulate a big 'Hollywood' production, that is at its core dumb, derivative, and ugly. That this can be lauded for its 'originality and ambition' (Gamespot, IGN...) in a world where games like Disco Elysium, the Witness, or Obduction exist is baffling.
This is an enormous step back from Control, which is overrated but very fun to play regardless.
