When did video games become too lazy to actually teach you how to play them?

It’s become increasingly common for me in recent years: Designers apparently completely skipping out on basic documentation of in-game features, presumably on the grounds that the video game guides industry—or just other players who don’t want to have their own runs dragged into the garbage by the ignorant—will do the work of educating. Why bother writing a manual when the internet can be the manual?

I ran into this with Elden Ring: Nightreign, too, although in that case I at least had a reviewer’s guide—essentially a short strategy guide that laid out a lot of info about classes and bosses that I never would have worked out otherwise—to smooth over the edges in a pre-“guides are clogging YouTube” environment. The trend feels like it’s at least partially a function of games becoming increasingly “living” artifacts: When a feature can be patched into an entirely different form a week down the line, why bother writing down words that will just have to be changed with every shift? Internet’ll get it. At the same time, it contributes to the feeling that these games are afterthoughts: Part of a slate of new spin-off titles of existing franchises that were designed to be low-maintenance, IP-friendly efforts to get a player base hooked for long enough to drop $30 and then eventually move on.

It’s not like Firebreak needs a lot of help in getting me to ditch it. A three-person riff on “do objectives, shoot monsters, do more objectives” games in the style of Left 4 Dead (or, more recently, Vermintide or Back 4 Blood), the Control follow-up is a genuine oddity. For one thing, it’s a first-person shooter, from a studio that has almost exclusively worked in—and helped to define and refine—the world of over-the-shoulder combat. It’s also multiplayer-exclusive, while Remedy’s output has been focused relentlessly on single-player. And, most damningly, it neglects the quality that has made the Alan Wake games (and the original Control) impossible to ignore, despite their often glaring frustrations: The focus on innovative, bold storytelling. The game might throw the occasional quirky puppet show at the player, or drop, in random dribs-and-drabs (notably through too-brief-to-read loading screens, fighting with the vital tooltips for your attention), a few pieces of lore about the current state of the Federal Bureau Of Control. But there’s no craft to it, none of the vitality that made the showstoppers of the studio’s previous games so incredibly memorable. (What’s especially frustrating, meanwhile, is that there are still traces of the fun “creepypasta-come-to-life” vibes that made Control such a breath of fresh air back in 2019. Being sent into the Oldest House’s ’60s-style offices to clear up a massive infestation of self-replicating sticky notes, building on a brief dollop of weirdness from the original game, only to end up facing down a massive monster made of the things hoping to bury your characters in paper, is genuinely cool. And the House itself is still a gorgeous setting, one that can be well-appreciated from a first-person view.)

The point is, the game already has me with one foot out the door before I realized how inadequately it was teaching me how to play it. (There’s a whole mechanic centered on haunted objects that impose harsh mutators on your play, and which can only be destroyed with special weapons tucked into the corner of the game’s ammo supply points, that was completely baffling until I went hunting around on Reddit to find the solution.) That’s before you get into the PlayStation 5-soft-locking glitches, random griefing from fellow players, or the repetitiveness of its five basic mission types. The least Remedy could do would be to peel off a writer for a day to bang out some detailed documentation to help the basic process of playing the game make sense. Games work when everybody knows the rules going into them; offloading that work onto the internet only demonstrates how little you care about the product you’re shoveling out.