It would be one thing if Control were a good game, or if it just had the shape or genre I like to see in stories, but the other thing is that it knits things together. This is pitched right at me as if Sam Lake was sitting, gremlin-like, on my bookshelf for the past few years. How could this not be my number one game of the year? Remedy have made a weird fiction game that leans into all the strange, out-of-sync storytelling that they’ve been perfecting since Max Payne. Kingdom Hearts 3 isn’t any stranger than Star Wars or the Marvel Cinematic Universe now, but I really enjoyed the closure in this volume. Little did I know that shared universes, canonical reconfigurations, and a near-worship of lore continuity would go on the dominate the next 20 years of media production. Kingdom Hearts was powerful at that moment because it pulled all kinds of weird shit together and did something beyond the sum of those parts. I yearned for expanded universes, the Stephen Kings and the Sandmans and Final Fantasys and all the rest, because the very idea that all these unique and powerful stories could be connected spoke to a fragmented, made-up adolescent. I did not feel like I was a part of a culture, but instead I was assembled out of things that I had drawn toward me and that I was drawn toward.
When I was a teenager, combing a combination of print magazines and used books and the early mass internet, I felt like I existed at a specific intersection of the leylines of lived life. I have been fortunate to live in a time when the monoculture was on the wane.
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