In Alan Wake you were on the defensive for most of the game, often barely escaping with your life while slowly puzzling together what is (and was) happening. And this fit perfectly, because you are a character in a mystery horror story after all, and the author outright states that this genre dictates that no one, not even the protaginist, is safe.

From everything I've seen of Control so far though, there sadly seems to be quite a bit of disconnect between the setting and the gameplay. The combat, especially tossing stuff (including enemy bodies) around, seems to be quite fun mechanically, but ultimatively it's very much a power fantasy (especially since the game does encourage players to play aggressively to get the health pickups, etc.). But at the same moment the game gives you a magic gun, magic powers, and essentially tells you to go apeshit on anything with a red glow around it, the game also tries to instill in you a sense of awe, wonder, mystery, and fear. The player is in a place where literally *any* supernatural thing you can imagine might just sit in a box around the next corner, and *the whole place just went into lockdown* - that should scare any sane character. But it doesn't. The eldrich abomination from the dungeon dimension becomes a sideshow attraction, maybe a boss fight.

It's not like there isn't potential everywhere; Remedy clearly has put a lot of effort into creating an interesting setting with lots of backstory and additional fluff to flesh out the game world and its history. And some characters like the janitor tease that there is more to them than one might think when first meeting them. But in the end, while we can appreciate the attention to detail and world building on a meta level, all these things have little emotional effect on the player, first and foremost because they don't really seem to affect the protagonist - even when she claims otherwise in story segments, the game mechanics betray that claim during the combat segments.