Control is one of my favorite games ever. Six years after release, one of the things that sticks with me the most is a pencil.
Within your first few seconds of playing, you happen upon your first memo. It’s located at a security checkpoint and outlines a number of items that are not permitted inside the government building you’ve just entered. These seem expected enough: laptops, weapons, various smart devices, and so on. The final two list items sound much stranger: one being No. 2 pencils.
It sounds almost like a prank. Certainly, I did not expect any payoff for those words, which are located at the end of one of the many memos that populate The Oldest House, the setting of the game. Here is a giant building in the middle of New York, housing a clandestine government agency responsible for managing the supernatural, and a pencil is a problem for these people?
So it was a treat many hours later when I reflected on that seemingly throwaway bullet point, after developing an understanding of the way archetypal items can transform into dangerous objects, and why No. 2 pencils would thus be banned by the Federal Bureau of Control. The fact that the explanation requires you to piece these things together, rather than being overtly explained, makes it that much more satisfying. The Oldest House is full of weird stuff, so it would be easy to forget all about that tidbit from the very beginning of the game, or for it to indeed have been nothing more than a joke.