Control

It’s rare for a game to feel new. Not just a refinement of a known quantity, but a startlingly original vision. Remedy Entertainment, a studio that has long flirted with the paranormal in titles like Alan Wake and Quantum Break, has delivered its most fully realized work of weirdness with Control. This is a confident dive into a subgenre of fiction—the “new weird”—that games have seldom explored with such conviction, built on a third-person shooter foundation. You are Jesse Faden, a woman searching for her lost brother, an odyssey that leads her to a featureless skyscraper in New York City. This building is the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Control (FBC), a clandestine government agency that acts as the nation’s janitor for the paranormal.

The timing of Jesse’s arrival is, to put it mildly, inopportune. The Bureau has been overrun by a hostile, resonant entity known as the Hiss, which possesses agents and twists the building’s architecture into unrecognizable, hostile forms. In the game’s opening minutes, the Bureau’s Director is dead, and through a bizarre, quasi-metaphysical process, his service weapon binds itself to Jesse, anointing her as the new Director. What follows is a desperate, reality-bending quest to restore order to a place where the laws of physics are merely a suggestion. Control positions itself not as another action franchise-in-waiting, but as a bold, cerebral, and unapologetically strange piece of interactive art. It respects the player’s intelligence, refusing to hold their hand as it pulls them deeper into its concrete labyrinth.

• Kinetic, Supernatural Combat: This is the core of Control. Players wield a single firearm, the Service Weapon, which morphs between different forms (pistol, shotgun, submachine gun, etc.). This is paired with a suite of telekinetic abilities—like launching debris with explosive force—that operate on a cooldown, forcing a dynamic, aggressive rhythm of play that feels utterly distinct from its cover-shooter contemporaries.
• The Oldest House: The game’s setting is its best character. A triumph of Brutalist architecture, this “Place of Power” is a shifting, non-Euclidean labyrinth. Entire rooms reconfigure themselves, new areas are hidden behind redacted documents, and the environment itself tells a story of decades of paranormal research gone awry.
• Deep, Esoteric Lore: The narrative extends well beyond what happens on screen. Control‘s world is built through hundreds of collectible files, research notes, and multimedia logs. From reports on altered world events to corny but deeply unsettling internal training videos, the game layers its mystery, rewarding the curious with a universe far richer than the main plot alone.

The Combat Loop

Control‘s combat is a rejection of the modern shooter’s stop-and-pop caution. There is a cover system, but the design treats it as a trap. The Hiss are aggressive, numerous, and attack from all angles. Survival depends entirely on constant, fluid motion and the interplay between the Service Weapon and Jesse’s supernatural abilities. This is the game’s central, and most brilliant, design choice.

Your gun requires ammunition, but your powers—like Launch, which lets you telekinetically grab a chunk of the environment and hurl it at an enemy—run on an energy meter. This meter recharges quickly, but it forces a tactical choice in every moment. Do you unload your Shatter (shotgun) form up close, then retreat to let your energy recharge for a powerful Launch attack? Or do you hang back, using your Grip (pistol) form to pick off weaker enemies while your energy returns for a defensive Shield? This push-pull creates a combat loop that is relentlessly engaging. It turns every encounter into a kinetic puzzle where the environment itself is your primary ammunition source. The design promise of ripping a fire extinguisher off the wall and blasting it into a cluster of Hiss-possessed soldiers is a hook that never wears thin.

World-Building and Exploration

The Oldest House is an architectural marvel and a narrative masterstroke. Remedy’s artists and designers deserve endless credit for committing so fully to the Brutalist aesthetic. The stark concrete, oppressive geometry, and cold, institutional lighting create a mood that is at once awe-inspiring and deeply unsettling. But it’s more than just a visual theme. The building is alive, a conscious entity that Jesse must cleanse and navigate.

Exploration is driven by curiosity and security clearances. Finding a new keycard opens up vast new sectors, each with its own distinct flavor of paranormal disturbance. The world is dense with secrets. The true story of the Bureau isn’t told through cutscenes; it’s pieced together from redacted documents, audio logs from the lead scientist, Dr. Darling, and even a bizarre puppet show called “The Threshold Kids” that explains complex parascientific concepts in the most unsettling way imaginable.

However, this is where the game’s most significant point of friction emerges: the map. It is, to be blunt, poorly conceived. A layered, 2D representation of a complex, overlapping 3D space, it often hinders more than it helps. In a game that otherwise excels at making the player feel powerful and in control, a map that fails to convey verticality or simple direction is a recurring design flaw that temporarily breaks the sublime immersion.

Visually, Control is a statement piece. The art direction is impeccable, blending the mundane office environment with surreal, reality-breaking impossibilities. The Hiss’s resonant red glow and the visual “glitching” of possessed enemies create a clear and threatening visual language. When the action ramps up, the screen fills with an astonishing particle soup of exploding concrete, splintering wood, and swirling psychic energy. On PC, this is one of the foundational showcases for ray tracing technology. The reflections in the polished marble floors and glass-walled offices don’t just add realism; they fundamentally change the feel of the space, grounding its otherworldly nature. A game this effects-heavy is demanding by design, and weaker hardware will need to make compromises to keep it running smoothly.

How you experience Control is heavily dependent on your platform of choice.

On Steam (PC), you are getting the definitive version. The precision of a mouse and keyboard is perfectly suited to the fast-paced combat, and the ability to push the graphical settings, particularly ray tracing, delivers the artists’ vision in its purest form.

The Nintendo Switch version, however, is a massive compromise. It runs as a Cloud Version, meaning the game is streamed to your console from a remote server. This is not the game running natively. The immediate implications are significant: input lag, visual compression artifacts, and the absolute requirement of a persistent, high-speed internet connection. For a game that demands twitch reflexes and revels in its visual fidelity, this is a deeply flawed way to play. Any lag, however minor, can be the difference between dodging an attack and a frustrating death. It exists as a technical curiosity, but it cannot be recommended as the primary way to experience this game.

Control is a major achievement. It’s a game built with a rare and potent combination of high-minded intellectual curiosity and the raw, kinetic thrill of a great action game. While a frustrating map and a story that sometimes prioritizes mystery over clarity can act as minor blemishes, they do little to diminish the strength of the core experience. Remedy took a massive creative risk, trading the comfortable language of mainstream game design for something far stranger, and the result is one of the most memorable games of its era. It is a masterwork of mood, a symphony of destruction, and a world worth getting lost in. We rate it a clear recommendation, with real reservations around its map and its Switch version.