Finally started playing Control and I'm blown away

I originally pirated this game on release, but my PC back then couldn't run it reliably. I played it a couple hours and for some reason I can't remember, I just dropped it and never came back.

Picked it up for really cheap recently on Steam because I wanted to give it a second chance with better hardware, and holy fucking shit, how is this game six years old?

Playing in 2025 a game originally released in 2019 really shows me that there's a certain degree of diminishing returns in the games industry, not necessarily in a bad way, but in the sense that I think we've pretty much reached kind of a peak in game development, in terms of tech. As long as you can provide a solid experience, games will still feel great for much longer than they used to.

I might be mistaken and I don't have any handy examples to back this argument, but I feel like ten years ago, a six-year-old game would definitely feel much more dated than this does. Does that make sense? I don't think games used to age this gracefully 10+ years ago.

I can't think of any modern game that just feels this good. Everything is incredibly responsive, the graphics and art style are stunning, the sound design is top notch, the lore is really captivating and it just overall feels like an incredibly polished experience that's leagues ahead of most recent games.

If it were not for the Hiss and all the nightmarish SCP shit going on in The Oldest House, I'd want to live there. I want to touch these gorgeous brutalist slabs of concrete.