The idea of another person controlling my body’s every action keeps me up at night more often than I like to admit to myself. So how about a game on this subject! It’s called Remote Control, and in it you mainly control human proxies to explore an abandoned spaceship and figure out what went wrong.
Remote Control plays out in a strange but brain-stimulating way. When you go on a mission aboard the Pelican, the aforementioned spaceship, you must first choose your human proxy. They have likes and dislikes, you can see how many missions they’ve completed, and unfortunately, because of you, most of the proxies you had before are dead, so this is your last chance in the mysterious (and clearly messed up) company you work for.
At the start of a mission, your human proxy is placed somewhere during the shift, and then it turns into a sort of dungeon crawler crossed with The Typing of the Dead. If you want your proxy to move forward, you need to enter it. If you want him to turn around, or use an item, or inspect something in particular, you have to grab it. It’s certainly a little laborious, but also much more tactile, because you perform the same physical action as the character you play.
You even have to be very careful at times because there are environmental hazards (and apparently something, or someone else) to be wary of. This isn’t even mentioning the fact that they can get sick and die completely, so you have to take care of your proxies as best you can or else you’ll be the one taking over.
This structure will obviously not suit everyone. Even so, I deeply respect Remote Control’s commitment to typing. The experience of playing a game is most often limited by the devices and hardware we play it on, so having something that’s a little more complex than simply tapping a D-pad, even if there’s sometimes frustrating friction, is refreshing.
Remote Control doesn’t have an exact release date yet, but it’s slated for release in the fall of this year. You can try its demo, or just want it, on Steam right here.
