让《Control Resonant》把城市巴士变得吓人

Leave It To Control Resonant To Make City Buses Scary

Consistently haunting me in Control Resonant is an enemy called the Hiss Transporter. Simply put, it’s a demonic-looking bus that hits hard and spawns waves of Hiss Passengers–enemies horrifically fused with bus seats. This recurring miniboss is not only a long slog to fight, but it’s also terrifying. 

It consists of the front end of a city bus, floating vertically and emanating a threatening red glow. Its hull shakes erratically, as do the Hiss Passengers sticking out of its windows, appearing forcefully crammed halfway in, forever bound to a fate of damnation. As the noise of its loud, distorted horn rings through the city streets, it slams into the ground to damage you with shockwaves, while overwhelming you with additional Hiss Passengers. You’ll have to dispose of the Passengers exposed on both sides of the bus before executing this Transporter in a glorious and fulfilling explosion.

Despite my hatred of these bus fights (pun intended) from a play perspective, I can’t help but love the idea and imagery. The Hiss Transporter is a simple concept that is executed majestically, and it’s only one of many examples of how developer Remedy Entertainment turns familiar objects and items into something fantastical.

The first Control game established the concepts of Altered Items and Objects of Power, which are essentially ordinary objects imbued with special (and often dangerous) properties. It’s an idea that goes all the way back to Alan Wake and the Clicker, an ordinary light switch that becomes all-important to the story. One of the more famous Altered Items in Control was the center of a side quest, which followed an agent who had to continuously stare at a refrigerator that would become dangerous when it wasn’t observed. The main story also features a seemingly normal floppy disk that becomes corrupted by the Hiss and leaves a trail of death before being pacified. Prominent in the backstory of Control protagonists Jesse and Dylan Faden is a slide projector that opens doorways to other dimensions–an ability that often foments chaos and havoc, as it did when it released the Hiss into the Oldest House.

Control Resonant focuses less on these artifacts compared to its predecessor, but you’ll still find mundane items used for hostile purposes on the streets of Manhattan. The game’s first boss is a great example of repurposing the familiar for violent purposes, with the Artist Resonant surrounded by street signs and chunks of concrete, while utilizing stoplight poles as elegant battering weapons.

There is a method to Remedy’s apparent madness, and it’s not just that it’s hilarious to see domestic appliances and office supplies become tools of destruction. This practice of recontextualizing the ordinary into something sinister is a technique in the horror, surrealism, and “new weird” genres that Control inhabits. By depicting recognizable, everyday objects in a new light, with changes to their appearance, behavior, and function, practically anything can approach uncanny territory. Your familiarity is challenged, and you’re confronted by the discomfort that what you usually know isn’t what you’re currently seeing and experiencing.

The late David Lynch was a master of this practice in his films and television shows. While Lynch was generally tight-lipped about the meanings behind his dreamlike works, many academics and movie enthusiasts have defined “Lynchian” as juxtaposing the mundane with a dark surrealism. In many cases, Lynch achieved this feeling using common items or household appliances. Think of the radiator in Eraserhead, which contains a miniature dreamlike world, or a ceiling fan in Twin Peaks signifying the presence of a malevolent entity. 

Lynch frequently used electricity as a motif in his works, and he described his fascination with this power source and phenomenon on a few occasions, providing rare insight into his artistic decisions. In 2006, Lynch described how electricity “runs many things in our world, and it’s beautiful. It’s sometimes dangerous, but it’s magical.” Electricity is a well-known concept, but it’s powerful and still has a degree of intangibility and ambiguity.

In other words, there is a fear of not knowing what something familiar is fully capable of, and the forces it may contain.

Remedy Entertainment–in particular, creative director Sam Lake–has made it no secret that Lynch is a major inspiration behind the studio’s work, and that shows in the aesthetics, tone, and themes of Alan Wake and Control. The studio also utilizes this technique of uncovering forces within something that appears innocuous. When it came to the Objects of Power, Remedy found inspiration in the real-life utility of floppy disks to operate nuclear missiles, and the idea that mere everyday objects can lead to destruction, giving them meaning beyond their basic appearance and function.

So what makes the bus in Control Resonant so scary? We’re used to buses serving as (hopefully) reliable means of public transit, and a bus arriving at a stop is usually a relieving image. But seeing this twisted image of a bus puts it in a new light–the imagery of the passengers stuffed through the windows incites a feeling of claustrophobia and panic that an overcrowded bus might provoke. Its brutal ground-pounds remind me that buses are hunks of metal that can be absolutely lethal at high speeds, with the horn turning into an omen of inevitable disaster. 

Every time I see one of these buses out in the open, I’m instilled with a sense of dread–and that means Control Resonant is working.

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