New York offices, Jesse finds herself
promoted by means of a paranormal
selection process that means the title
of director, and a personal service
weapon known as the Director’s
Pistol, becomes hers. All this just as
the Bureau has become the focus
of an invasion by some kind of evil
transdimensional beings. The Bureau
exists to collect, catalogue and
indeed attempt to control Objects
Of Power, sources of supernatural,
paranormal, otherworldly forces – and
it keeps it all here at its New York
office. This office, it turns out, is
considerably larger and more ancient
than its ordinary office block facade
would suggest. This is The Oldest
House, and it’s way bigger on the
inside. This TARDIS-like quality creates
a sandbox world where the mundane
(the usual trappings of a government
agency HQ, complete with office
furniture and oddly vintage-looking
technology) meets constantly shifting
walls and floors, frequent visits to
the Astral Plane and the kind of trippy
visuals you might find still rattling
around inside the brain of a ’60s hippy.
Fortunately the core of the game
is comfortingly familiar – Control is
an open-ended third-person shooter
with Metroidvania-style progression.
But since this is a Remedy game, you
can bet it’s also going to push the
boundaries of just what a single-Remedy’s Espoo, Finland, office,
located just up the road from Helsinki
(turn right past the fifth frozen lake),
is thankfully a little more normal
than that of the Bureau Of Control,
remarkable only for the banks of
state-of-the-art PCs and game
creation tech within, and a mo-cap
studio and VO recording facility in the
basement – an investment that’s paid
dividends for Remedy when it comes
to keeping it all in-house. No, the only
things that are unsettling here are
the shorter daylight hours, due to the
northern latitude, and the shocking
price of a beer in Helsinki’s bars.
Remedy is still guarded on many of
Control’s key story beats, but what
we do know is that, having turned
up for an interview at the Bureau’s
player game can be. Remedy has been
rewriting the book on videogames
since Max Payne, a revolutionary
shooter whose use of bullet-time
turned our heads. Microsoft exclusives
followed later from the Finnish
game studio, including the brilliant
supernatural thriller Alan Wake, in
which your only useful weapon was
the light from your torch; and Remedy
was back pushing unusual game
design again with the time-bending
Quantum Break in 2016.
This time, it’s reality itself that’s
being tested and twisted in Control,
in a story that’s influenced by
‘new weird’ fiction, and involves
central protagonist Jesse using her
newly acquired telekinetic powers,
the surreal environment and her
aforementioned shape-shifting gun
to repel the invasion of beings she
comes to name ‘The Hiss’.Ice to see you
First we watch a brief hands-off story
demo where Jesse must locate and
help a high-ranking Bureau employee
who’s got a problem with an escaped
paranormal research subject, and
we also get to see that guy with the
fridge again, in a demonstration of
how the game’s side-missions will
work. We’d already seen Phillip the
fridge-watcher in previously released
footage, but here we witness JesseABOVE Of course,
Jesse’s
new-found powers
grant her the
ability to fly.046 THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE