Remedy Entertainment’s Sam Lake Says Control Is in the “New Weird” Genre
There’s no denying that Control has seen some great success since its release in August. It was the winner of this years Critics’ Choice Award at the Golden Joystick Awards and is currently nominated for a whopping eight awards for the 2019 Game Awards. In a new interview Remedy Entertainment’s Creative Director and writer, Sam Lake, discussed bringing forth Control as a brand new type of game. In fact he called it the “new weird” genre.
Sam Lake spoke with GamesBeat about his work on Control and how he was inspired by this “new weird” genre. As such, they took a different approach to the game so that it would land squarely within this new literary genre. He describes the process in detail saying, “What was really interesting to me as an idea for Control — we were taking the genre of the “new weird,” this literary genre, which takes this approach that we’re dealing with things we don’t understand fully. It can’t be explained satisfactorily and handed to you like, ‘Here’s the answer and this is what it’s all about.'”
He continues, “Balancing that, you still have a very strong idea yourself that it’s about these things. But then having that constraint of never spelling things out. Walking that tightrope so everybody has enough to piece together and form a theory, but not so much that we take away the opportunity to do that and just hand the explanation to you. That, in some ways, excites me in the genre of new weird, reading these stories. I find my interest sparked when something is well-made and it feels to me like I’m not quite smart enough to understand everything.”
Sam Lake stated that the team wanted to find a good balance between the confusing and the well thought out whilst of course still being made to tie everything together. “I almost come to a point where I don’t even need to figure out the exact meaning. I have this safe feeling. Life confuses us, confuses me, many times. There aren’t always ready right answers in life. I feel that in art, you don’t need everything spelled out to you, as long as it’s well-made. The badly-made version is that it pulls you out of it and you start to doubt that it means anything. There are enough mistakes that it doesn’t add up. Then it collapses and it’s ruined. It’s a careful balancing act. That’s very much what we were trying to do in Control, to create a feeling like that.”
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