I think maybe the number one rule about anything made by David Lynch is that you should never write about anything made by David Lynch. I’m going to break that rule – just quickly I promise – to say there was a moment that felt straight out of the Lynchian playbook in the Control demo I played at E3, and it was wonderful.
Dropped into things a few hours into the game, one of the first tasks I had in my slice of Control was to find a janitor. I tracked him down and found him in a little back room (there is a wonderful simplicity to tracking things down in Control – in fact it’s much of what the game is – but more on that in a moment).
To get here I fought through people and monsters, red reality-distorting fields of light in a windowless, brutalist government building, ripping up walls and floors and office desk chairs as I went. Chaos, by way of Ikea. And after that I opened a door and he just stood there. A janitor, with a mop and a bucket.
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There’s a quick cutscene and – forgive me for describing camera movements but please just hang in there – the camera glides in on him slowly, from just below eye-line, an imperious hero shot of a dishevelled, 60-something-year-old man in a boiler suit. We start talking and it like a bog standard video game cutscene – agonisingly bland, over-the-shoulder angles and all – only I don’t think it is. The janitor speaks with a thick Scandinavian accent, slowly. Almost too slowly. He says something I don’t completely understand and we cut back to an ultra close-up of Jesse’s face (you play as Jesse Faden, the new Director at this Bureau-gone-wrong) and all you can see is her eyes. She’s not saying anything.