7th January 2020 A Collection of Game Of The Year Nominations and Wins, "Best Of..." Category Awards, and "Best of 2019 Lists" for Control

Control grabbed a lot of critical attention when it launched last August. With its eery setting, creepy lighting, and ruthless enemies, it quickly became a favourite of 2019. So it's no surprise that as the year ticked over to 2020, it topped a lot of people's Game of the Year lists.

Below is a collection of publications that rated Control as one of their favourite titles last year, either by awarding it with a Game of the Year win or nomination, category win, or by including it in their "Best of 2019" lists.

Congratulations to the Control team, developers both past and present, on the game's success! 

Game of The Year 

Game of the Year 2019
IGN

Control’s ‘Oldest House’ office block setting is also a marvel of game world design, mundane at first glance but absolutely memorable by the end thanks to a shape-shifting structure that makes it consistently fascinating to explore and, additionally, its detail-rich settings a delight to destroy. Then there’s the story itself, a spellbinding slab of supernatural science fiction which starts out weird and only gets weirder, centered around an oddball cast of characters that are each eminently entertaining to interact with. Bombastic, bizarre, and beautiful, Control is more than just another day at the office.

Read the full article, HERE!


Why Control is my game of the year
The Verge (written by Sam Byford)

There’s a moment near the end of Control that is so unabashedly thrilling, joyous, and decadent in its design that it would make most roller coaster creators reflect on their life decisions. To say much more about the Ashtray Maze would be to spoil the giddy surprise. But it’s worth noting that, when it’s over, protagonist Jesse catches her breath and offers her analysis of the mind-blowing events that just transpired: “…That was awesome.”

Read the full article, HERE! 

Stevivor GOTY 2019: Game of the Year

Stevivor

Jesse Faden's story had us the moment we walked into the Oldest House. This is it — the final honour as part of Stevivor’s GOTY Awards for 2019! Surprising absolutely no one, Stevivor staffers have chosen Remedy’s Control as game of the year.

Read the full article, HERE! 

Press Start's 2019 GOTY #1 - Control     

Press Start (Written by Brodie Gibbons)

It’s no surprise that in a year of strong contenders that Remedy Games would produce the absolute highlight of 2019. Having gone from strength to strength in recent releases and with a back catalogue that boasts all-time classics like Max Payne, Alan Wake and the uniquely delivered episodic sci-fi Quantum Break, Control launched a critical darling. Obscure in narrative and brutalist in its art design, Control is a veritable treasury of great ideas handpicked from their existing toolshed, resulting in their most daring, ambitious and technically astounding game to date.

Read the full article, HERE! 

People of the Year

GameIndustry.biz (Written Matthew Handrahan)

Fast forward one year and pretty much all of that had changed. In a striking display of self-awareness, the Finnish company sought to address those very problems by raising money through an IPO. It inked a deal to work on the sequel to Smilegate's CrossFire, one of the most successful free-to-play games in existence. And, to the excitement of many, it announced plans to once again release games on PlayStation hardware, almost 15 years after the launch of Max Payne 2.

Read the full article, HERE! 

"Best Of... " Category

Best Setting 2019: Control

PC Gamer

Tyler: Control's brand of weirdness is familiar—Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, and George Saunders come to mind—and that’s Remedy’s thing: it never hides the influences of its metaphysical playgrounds. But it’d be unfair to call Control pastiche just because it’s smooching on Stanley Kubrick and internet creepypasta so hard. It’s Remedy’s funniest game, bursting with original, creative micro-stories about rubber duck stalkers, redacted catastrophes, and hyper-real motels. Its protagonist isn’t the most interesting person, but every single note found in its '50s office building of cosmic anomalies and interdimensional monsters is worth reading.

Read the full conversation, HERE! 

Stevivor GOTY 2019: Best Narrative

Stevivor

“Control is the culmination of narrative themes and techniques honed at Remedy over the past 20 years,” Sam Lake, Creative Director of Remedy Entertainment, told Stevivor. “A young woman, Jesse, steps inside a strange building to mend her broken family. A mystical pistol held against her head deems her worthy to be the new Director of the Federal Bureau of Control. So begins a story like a bullet through brain. It’s a hallucinatory fever dream. Inspired by the X-Files and David Lynch’s works, it’s a sci-fi story, a horror story, and an agent thriller.”

Read the full article, HERE!

Stevivor GOTY 2019: Best Audio & Sound designStevivor
Stevivor

“Communication and the difficulty to understand are themes. Everyone seems to use their own language. We can hear Jesse’s thoughts, as she constantly breaks the 4th wall to address Polaris, her strange guardian angel, as much as you, the player,” Remedy’s Sam Lake said to Stevivor.

“The Board commands Jesse in messed-up subtitles. The Hiss, the enemy, chants an endless nonsensical litany, almost like an incantation. Ahti the janitor guides her in a broken mix of Finnish and English, and yes, sings a Finnish tango song.”

Read the full interview, HERE!

Game of the Year 2019 – Best Visual Design
The Sixth Axis (Written by Stefan L)

Though there’s an awful lot that goes into making a video game, from gameplay design, to AI programming, sound, scriptwriting and way beyond. But games are also a hugely visual medium, and they can often stun players with their cutting edge graphics or a distinctive style that stands out from the crowd. It’s a mixture of the two that make for this years winner of Best Visual Design.

Read the full article, HERE!

Game of the Year 2019 – Best Single Player Game

The Sixth Axis (Written by Stefan L)

Despite the rise of ‘games as a service’, the last few years have shown definitively that being able to play and savour a game experience on your own is still a huge part of what gamers want. Not everything has to be connected, not everything has to have a dozen other players running around acting like twits, and the purity of taking on a challenge by yourself remains massively appealing.

Read the full article, HERE! 

2019 TechRaptor Awards - Best Writing Award
TechRaptor (Written by Sam Guglielmo)

I love a good mystery, and I think that's what attracted me to Control in the first place. Not just the mystery of what happened to Jesse's brother, although that's a perfectly good mystery as well. It's the mystery of literally everything in Control. Every part of the Oldest House has some sort of mystery and spending time unraveling it is well worth it. Reading documents is a must, and I had a blast sitting down and giving each document in the game a read. shines in its world-building, and there's a reason it's getting the recognition that it is.

Read the full article, HERE! 

2019 TechRaptor Awards - Best Visual Design Award

TechRaptor (Written by Sam Guglielmo)

Everything in Control breaths. I remember this being the first detail of the game that I really noticed. The gun breaths, the wall breaths—everything is alive. Once I understood this simple fact, Control's art suddenly meant so much to me. I know it's based on Brutalism, but it's some twisted living Brutalism that absolutely destroys all perception I had of the architecture style. Watching levels literally shift and distort themselves to entirely new shapes is a real treat, and I came to love every bit of movement.

Read the full article, HERE! 

Best Of 2019 Lists

Best Games of 2019 - Control

Gamespot (Written by Phil Hornshaw)

Remedy Entertainment excels at creating deep worlds with each of its new games, but none is quite so fleshed-out and exciting to explore as the developer's latest, Control. Set in a government office building that houses a department specifically geared at investigating, containing, and understanding paranormal artifacts, Control drops you in a strange and shifting world full of mysteries, and one that's incredibly well-realized--the result of a confluence of writing, gameplay, visual artistry, and singular vision.

Read the full article, HERE!

Game of the Year: Graham's Top 5 PS4 Games of 2019

Push Square (Written by Graham Banas)

Remedy being my favourite developer, I had extremely high expectations for this foray into intrigue and brutalist architecture. Despite those lofty goals, I was blown away by the richness of the world, and the wonder that I felt exploring the ominous, mysterious Bureau of Control. And that’s to say nothing of the incredible music or the extraordinary combat that delivered on what I wanted but didn’t get from Remedy's last title, Quantum Break. Control was everything I wanted and more. Because on top of everything, it might wind up being a stealth sequel to my favourite game of all time; Alan Wake.

Read the full article, HERE! 

Death Stranding, Control and next-gen teases among industry's 2019 highlights
GamesIndustry.biz

You've read our picks for people of the year, heard us discuss our favourite games (and read the accompanying articles we've been running all week), and browsed our many highlights of the past 12 months -- but what did the industry think of 2019? To round off the year, we reached out to platform holders, publishers, developers and more to find out their favourite moments and games, as well as some of the work they are proudest of.

Read the full article, HERE! 


GOTY 19 Countdown #4: Control

GameReactor (Written by Lisa Dahlgren)

Since the early 2000s, Remedy Entertainment has enchanted us with its outlandish, narrative-driven third-person experiences, starting with the phenomenal Max Payne and following up with Alan Wake and Quantum Break. This year, however, the developer severed its exclusive connection with the Xbox brand and released Control on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Read the full article, HERE!

Gamasutra's Best of 2019: Bryant Francis' Top 10 Games
Gamasutra (Written by Bryant Fracncis)

Remedy's Control isn't just an incredible testament to the New Weird, it's video game validation for lovers of the unknown, the haunting, and the unsettling images that hang out at the corner of your vision. "You were right," Control tells you, "there were monsters under the bed. There is a conspiracy at work. All of it is real, and now it is your domain." Control's beautiful aesthetic and whip-snap-boom gameplay make you feel like an avenging angel cutting through a pencil-pushing beaurecratic world, pushed along by a well-crafted narrative that celebrates not only the horror of an otherworldy invasion but the delight of uncovering the cover-up of that invasion too.

Read the full list, HERE! 

 

Game of the Year Nominations

Game of the Year 2019 – Best Narrative (Control Runner Up)
The Sixth Axis

Control’s narrative stood out this year in a sea of games with decent stories. Why? Probably because of how tied up it was in the world that Remedy has created. There’s a story here of Jesse Faden searching for her brother, being linked to a mysterious force, and having power handed to her, yet that just scratches the surface. Remedy created a game where players were encouraged to hunt down the story, piece it together, and draw their own conclusions.

Read the full article, HERE!

Game of the Year 2019 – Overall Winner (Control Runner Up)

The Sixth Axis (Written by Stefan L)

Control should be lauded as a sci-fi great, not just in gaming but the genre as a whole. The Oldest House proved you don’t need wide open worlds to create intriguing environments, and that the pull of the unknown is strong with people. From a main protagonist who was likable to powers that made you feel unstoppable, side characters that were engaging, and stories that drew you in but also indulged in their mysteries, the whole Control experience leaves you wanting more. It’s that feeling that makes it one of the most compelling narratives of this generation.

Read the full article, HERE! 

GOTY 2019 #2: Control

Polygon (written by Russ Frushtick)

Given the outrageous expense of AAA games, the frequency of sequels and familiar franchises makes perfect sense. When tens (if not hundreds) of millions of dollars are on the line, are you really going to roll the dice on something new every time you go to make a new game? Apparently, Remedy Entertainment really likes to gamble. The last two decades have seen the Finnish developer jump from two noir-inspired Max Paynes to the Lynchian Alan Wake to the techno-futuristic Quantum Break, and now Control. Each of these had its own bizarre take on what a third-person shooter should be.

Read the full article, HERE! 

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