054
not-normal, she feels out of place in
everyday situations but venturing into
the Bureau’s world of weird makes her
feel “like she’s returning home.”
However, she is also something of
an outsider at the Bureau as well, an
organisation run by something of an
old boys’ club that paternalistically
feels it knows best when it comes to
unknowable forces and has a particular
way of doing things when faced with
entities that steadfastly resist order by
their very nature. It is thematically
relevant that the Bureau’s director is
killed shortly after Jesse arrives.WEIRD AND WONDERFUL
Exploring the Bureau’s research lobby,
we happen across an elevator that
refuses to shift. Tracing the power
source to the basement, we know we’ll
need to investigate further. A small,
claustrophobic area that’s apparently
been left to the mercy of nature, we
wheel around to see that’s it’s not just
the environment that’s been reclaimed.CONTROL
this world or supernatural enemies
and so on it’s important that we
maintain a certain kind of a gritty real
grounded look to them. So it feels real,
even though it is extraordinary.”
And there’s a lot in a name. “It has
multiple different meanings, that word
in our game. It’s about literally
controlling the environment through
telekinetic powers but it’s also about
controlling minds. And also at the
story level, there’s this theme of losing
control; you’re the director of [the
Federal Bureau Of Control], but it’s
been lost to this strange alien, weird
force that has invaded the place and
taken over and corrupted it – so you
lost control and a huge part of the
game is about regaining control. So
there are story levels, emotional levels,
and physical literal levels as well.”
This leads us nicely into the initial
pitch’s final word on Control’s world:
‘Layered.’ Kasurinen clarifies, “What
we mean by that is that nothing is
really what it seems. Things might
seem simple but once you start to dig
into it, there are slight revelations that
change the way you look at it,
sometimes even contradictions.”
Kasurinen describes protagonist
Jesse as an outsider. Due to her
baseline familiarity with theOF BUREAUCRACY
AND BATHROOMS
We ask narrative designer Brooke Maggs how
the team melded the real with the fantasticO
PM: How do you keep
things grounded and
strike the balance
between dream-logic
rituals and realism?
Brooke Maggs: The
grounding element, from
my point of view, is the
Bureaucracy of
the Bureau.
You still have to
somehow
operate as a
government
organisation
with all of this
very strange,
unexplained
stuff
happening. And
one of the
things [...] we use to
describe it is ‘the mundane
needs the unexplained.’
So people trying to do
their office work in a
shifting building, for
example, is really
interesting. And so you
can say, ‘people are just
like me, they’re just tryingto find the bathroom but
now it’s shifted’ [...] We’re
actually saying that the
amount of bathrooms
adds to the realism as
well. [Laughs]
Yeah, so I think there’s
that. But also in terms of
the narrative,
even though
strange and
unexplained
things are
happening,
people are still
having very
human
problems, you
know, trying to
deal with the
crisis in the
building in a very human
way. Like perhaps making
mistakes along the way
[...] the Bureau has been
trying to control these
things perhaps to their
detriment. I think [it’s]
a very human thing to
control things you
don’t understand.