Remedy Entertainment built Control around a single strong idea: a government building that should not exist, full of objects that should not work, and a woman who has to run it. The 2019 action-adventure game follows Jesse Faden into the Oldest House, the Federal Bureau of Control’s Brutalist skyscraper in New York City, and rarely lets the tension drop.
It is a shooter that trusts its own strangeness. The publisher’s own description calls it “a visually stunning third-person action-adventure,” and the game’s award count — more than 80 — is the figure the source gives, not this paper’s endorsement.
Trailer, via FX Games.
The Service Weapon and the Hiss
Jesse arrives at the Oldest House searching for her missing brother, Dylan. Within minutes she finds the body of Zachariah Trench, the FBC director, and a voice in her head — Polaris — tells her to pick up his fallen Service Weapon. The weapon moves her to the Astral Plane, where a black pyramid called the Board names her the new director.
Then the building turns on her. FBC agents are possessed by the Hiss, an otherworldly force trying to cross a dimensional barrier into our reality. Jesse agrees to help the survivors reclaim the building and contain the Hiss, on one condition: they tell her where Dylan is.
The Service Weapon shapeshifts between forms. The source lists Grip, Spin, Shatter, Pierce, Charge, and Surge — six names against a stated count of five, an inconsistency in the source’s own text. Players carry two at a time and swap between them. The forms range from a close-range shotgun blast to a long-range sniper shot.
Jesse also gains psychokinetic powers by locating Objects of Power, mundane items imbued with energy from another dimension. They include:
- Launch, which hurls objects from the environment at enemies
- Evade, a quick dash to dodge attacks
- Shield, which pulls rubble from the ground to block incoming fire
- Seize, which briefly turns enemies into allies
- Levitate, which lets Jesse fly
Three of the five base powers are optional. You find them by exploring or finishing side quests. Two cooldown systems govern the gun and the powers, so combat becomes a rhythm of alternating between them.
A Building That Rearranges Itself
The Oldest House is the best character in Control. It is a Place of Power: it resists being noticed by anyone who is not an FBC member or innately sensitive to the paranatural. Its interior is larger than its exterior. Its halls shift and rearrange without warning. The FBC stabilizes sections by harnessing nexuses of resonance called Control Points.
The design choice is deliberate. Remedy used the Brutalist style common in Cold-War-era government buildings to demonstrate the game’s destructible environmental systems. Every desk, pillar and chunk of concrete can become a projectile.
Control is a visually stunning third-person action-adventure that will keep you on the edge of your seat.
That line comes from the publisher’s own copy for Control: Ultimate Edition. It is marketing, not criticism, and readers should weigh it as such.
The Oldest House holds four sectors, explored at a nonlinear pace. Remedy drew on role-playing and Metroidvania games, and the result is more open than the studio’s past work. Players are free to chase side quests and hidden areas instead of the main thread.
The writing comes from Sam Lake, inspired by paranormal stories about the fictional SCP Foundation and the new weird genre. The cast includes Courtney Hope as Jesse, James McCaffrey as Trench, and Matthew Porretta and Martti Suosalo. Petri Alanko and Martin Stig Andersen composed the music.
Three Years and €30 Million
Control was completed within three years on a €30 million budget. The source gives those two figures and nothing about how the money was divided, so this paper will not guess at where it went.
The plot runs on a strong hook. Seventeen years before the game, Jesse and Dylan found an Object of Power shaped like a slide projector in their hometown of Ordinary, Maine. They unleashed paranatural forces that made the town’s entire adult population vanish. Polaris, a telepathic entity, rescued the children. Jesse spends the game trying to reach the brother she lost to that event.
It is a clean motivation, and it keeps the stranger material grounded. Jesse is not a soldier or a chosen one in the usual sense. She is a woman looking for her brother who got handed a job she never asked for.
Control: Ultimate Edition bundles the main game with the “The Foundation” and “AWE” expansions, and it has shipped across a wide spread of platforms: Google Stadia, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, visionOS, PC, iOS, PlayStation 5, Mac, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch.
What Control Gets Right
The combat holds up because it never lets you settle. The gun runs out. The powers run out. You move, you throw, you dash, you fire again. Few games make a single room feel this tactical without a traditional cover system to hide behind.
The Oldest House is the real achievement. It is a setting that justifies every oddity the game throws at you, from the Board to the Objects of Power. When a hallway moves, it is not a glitch. It is the building.
Where this paper parts with the marketing is on the score. The published Metacritic figure for Control is 8.5 out of 10. That is an aggregate of other critics’ verdicts, not this paper’s own, and it should be read that way.
What matters is narrower. Control’s real bet was that a Brutalist government tower, a shapeshifting gun and a missing brother could carry a big-budget shooter. The awards and the aggregate score say the bet paid. The source does not say the budget was small or the pacing sagged in the middle, and this paper will not pretend otherwise.
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