The first hour ofControl is a woman walking into an office. There is a janitor with a Finnish accent, a reception desk, a directory board, and a pyramid of concrete overhead that goes up further than the building’s exterior allows. Remedy Entertainment released it on 27 August 2019 — PC via the Epic Games Store for its first year, plus PS4 and Xbox One — under director Mikael Kasurinen with Sam Lake writing alongside Anna Megill and Brooke Maggs, and published by 505 Games. Six years on it is the studio’s most complete piece of world-building, and the reason is architectural rather than narrative.

The Oldest House is the best level in any game of its decade, and it is a level about bureaucracy.

The building is the design document

Brutalism is a real aesthetic argument: the structure is the ornament, the concrete is left showing, the building declares its own systems. Remedy took that literally. The Federal Bureau of Control occupies a mid-century concrete government block, all board-marked walls, terrazzo floors, wood panelling, green-shaded lamps and an internal mail system, and then the building starts behaving like an Object of Power. Corridors reconfigure. A stairwell delivers you somewhere geometry says it should not. The Ashtray Maze rearranges itself faster than you can walk it.

This is a very specific horror, and it is the reason the game sticks. Haunted mansions are exhausted; a hauntedadministrative facility is not. The dread inControl comes from paperwork — a redacted case file describing a rubber duck that killed six people, a research memo written in the flat voice of a civil servant who has stopped being surprised. The building’s uncanniness is legible only because everything around it is so aggressively ordinary. You believe the impossible pyramid because the noticeboard next to it has a poster about workplace ergonomics.

The lineage is legible and Remedy has never hidden it: the SCP Foundation’s clinical containment prose, Mark Z. Danielewski’sHouse of Leaves for the building that is larger inside, Jeff VanderMeer’sAnnihilation for the New Weird tone,Twin Peaks for the FMV inserts and the Finnish rock band. What Remedy added is the thing prose cannot do: youwalk it. A house that is bigger on the inside is a conceit on the page and a spatial fact in an engine.

Why the combat holds

The Service Weapon is the second-best idea in the game. It is a single pistol that reconfigures into five forms — Grip, Shatter, Spin, Pierce, Charge — with no ammunition, only a recharge, so the weapon is a tool you select rather than a resource you manage. Beside it sits Launch: telekinesis, on a cooldown, which tears a chunk of the building loose and throws it at somebody.

The reason this feels good is Northlight, Remedy’s engine, and specifically the destruction. The Oldest House is built out of debris waiting to happen. Every desk, chair, filing cabinet, monitor, partition wall and potted plant is a projectile, and a serious fight in the Bureau’s open-plan offices ends with the room reduced to particulate. The combat loop therefore runs: shoot to build energy, Launch to spend it, watch the office disassemble. Levitate, added later in the ability tree, lifts the whole thing into three dimensions and turns the atria into arenas with a Z-axis.

The real ancestor here sits outside Remedy’s own catalogue. It isPsi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy (Midway, 2004), which built a whole third-person shooter around telekinesis and physics objects and which nobody bought, alongsideHalf-Life 2’s gravity gun (2004), which taught a generation that a physics object in your hands is more interesting than a bullet. Both games arrived when physics middleware was new enough to be the selling point, and both understood the same thing: the pleasure of throwing a filing cabinet is that the cabinet was furniture a second ago.Control is the first game to give that idea a budget, an art director and a building worth destroying.

Where it fights itself: the enemy variety is thin. The Hiss are men in hard hats and body armour, floating, chanting, and by hour twelve you have seen the roster. The encounters escalate through numbers and health pools, which is the least interesting axis available to a game with this much physics under it.

The ability tree compounds it. Jesse’s powers arrive on a schedule tied to Objects of Power, and each is excellent on arrival, yet the game rarely builds an encounter that demands two of them together. Seize — turning an enemy to your side — is the clearest waste: a mechanic with real tactical depth, deployed against enemies who die too quickly for the investment to matter. Remedy built a sandbox and then mostly asked you to clear rooms in it.

The map is a genuine failure

I take the map seriously becauseControl takes navigation seriously and then sabotages it.

The Oldest House is a Metroidvania — gated sectors, clearance levels, ability locks, backtracking — and it ships with a map that does not rotate, does not sensibly express vertical relationships, and is close to unreadable in the multi-level sectors it most needs to explain. In a game whose entire subject is a building that will not hold still, being lost is thematically perfect and practically miserable. CompareMetroid Dread, where the map is the interface the whole game is played through.

The launch checkpointing was worse and Remedy fixed it. Control Points were sparse, and a boss death could send you on a long walk back through cleared rooms; the studio patched in additional checkpoints — including around the Anchor fight and the mould sequence — after the complaints landed. Base-console performance was rough at launch too, and theUltimate Edition in August 2020 brought ray tracing to PS5 and Xbox Series consoles, though existing owners on older consoles found the upgrade path handled badly enough to become its own small scandal.

The verdict

Control is a game whose ideas outrun its systems, and it is worth playing for the ideas. The Oldest House is a genuine achievement of environmental design — the rare fictional space you could navigate in your head years later — and the Bureau’s tone, that mixture of cosmic horror and departmental procedure, is Remedy’s most original register. The physics give the combat a texture nothing else quite matches, even when the enemies opposing you are dull.

What it does not have is a second act with the confidence of its first. The Hiss are a weak antagonist for a building this strange, and the mid-game settles into a rhythm of side missions that ask you to clear a room with the same three enemy types you cleared the last room with. The Ashtray Maze is the correction — a scripted, musical, twelve-minute sequence where the level design and the soundtrack take over completely — and its presence in the last quarter is a reminder of how much more the building had left in it.

The Foundation (March 2020) and AWE (August 2020) expansions are worth taking. The second folds Alan Wake into the Bureau’s case files and turns Remedy’s back catalogue into a shared universe, which they then cashed in properly withAlan Wake 2: Remedy’s Swing at the Fence. Remedy bought the fullControl rights back from 505 Games in 2023 and a sequel is in development, which is the correct outcome for a studio that finally built a world worth owning.

Play theUltimate Edition on PC or a current console. It is cheap, it is everywhere, and there is nothing else like the Oldest House.

What to play next:Alan Wake 2 for what Remedy did once it stopped apologising for being strange, andSignalis: The Survival Horror That Reads Like a Poem for bureaucratic dread on a fraction of the budget and twice the compression.

Spoilers below

The Ashtray Maze is the game’s high point and it is instructive to say why, because the sequence works by taking things away. For twelve minutesControl removes navigation entirely — the maze folds and unfolds itself, you cannot get lost because there is no choice to make — puts Poets of the Fall’s Old Gods of Asgard over the top of it, and hands you a corridor of fights to walk through while the building performs for you. Everything the game has been fumbling (pacing, legibility, the sense that the Oldest House is doing this deliberately) snaps into focus the moment the player’s agency is narrowed.

Which raises the awkward question:Control’s best sequence is the one where it behaves least likeControl.

Jesse’s internal monologue — the second voice she has been talking to since childhood, revealed as Polaris, a benign Object of Power riding along — is the structural gag that pays off the FMV inserts and Dr Darling’s increasingly unhinged research films. Trench’s suicide, delivered as the game’s opening beat and understood only later as a man refusing to become a vector for the Hiss, is the sharpest piece of writing Sam Lake has done. And Dylan, the brother, is the Bureau’s real indictment: an agency that studies children as containment risks and calls the paperwork ethics.

The ending withholds resolution deliberately — Jesse is Director, the Hiss are contained rather than defeated, the building keeps its secrets. That was a sequel hook in 2019 and it looks like patience in 2025.

There’s a moment, some way into Alan Wake 2, when the game stops being a game and becomes a music video — a full-blown, choreographed, live-action rock number with the studio’s own creative director hoofing about in it, staged inside a survival horror published by the company that makes Fortnite.

Nobody made Remedy do that. That’s the whole review, really. Alan Wake 2 is a studio taking the biggest swing available to it, with somebody else’s money, on a sequel to a game from 2010 that most publishers would have quietly filed under “fondly remembered”.

It shipped on 27 October 2023 for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, published by Epic Games Publishing, digital-only, no disc. Directed by Sam Lake and Kyle Rowley. It is Remedy’s first actual survival horror after twenty-odd years of making third-person shooters that were secretly about something else, and it is the least compromised thing they have ever put out.

Two games in a trench coat

You play two people.

Saga Anderson is an FBI agent who arrives in Bright Falls to investigate a series of ritual killings, and her half is the procedural: rain-soaked Pacific Northwest towns, a caravan park, a flooded resort called Watery, a lot of walking through woods with a torch. Her signature system is theMind Place, a mental room she can step into at any moment to pin evidence to a case board, connect threads, and profile suspects by sitting in an imaginary chair opposite them.

Alan Wake has been in the Dark Place for thirteen years, writing a story to get out, and his half is a nightmare version of New York where the geometry lies. His system is theWriter’s Room, where he swaps out plot elements — pick a different angle for a scene, and the physical space rearranges to match the new draft. He also carries an angel lamp that can lift light out of one place and drop it into another, changing the whole state of a level between two versions of itself.

You can switch between them almost freely after the opening hours. Two protagonists, two structures, two visual languages, one story that only closes if you’ve been in both.

The reason this works, when it works, is that the two halves arearguing. Saga’s method is evidence: things happened, they can be established, a board can hold them. Alan’s method is authorship: things happen because someone wrote them, and the board is where you decide what’s true. Putting a detective and a novelist in the same plot and giving each of them a corkboard is a genuinely good joke, and the game is smart enough to know it’s a joke and serious enough to build both systems properly anyway.

The Mind Place problem

Except one of those boards doesn’t actually work, and it’s worth being specific about why, because it’s the clearest case in the game of the design fighting itself.

Saga’s case board cannot be wrong. You collect a piece of evidence, you go into the Mind Place, you drag it to the slot that lights up, and a thread appears. The game will not let you connect the wrong things. There’s no failure state, no dead end, no bad theory. It is aritual of deduction rather than deduction — the pleasure of tidying, dressed as the pleasure of thinking.

Compare it withReturn of the Obra Dinn, where being wrong is the entire texture of the experience and the game only confirms you in batches of three so you can’t brute-force it. Obra Dinn treats you as a reasoning adult who might fail. The Mind Place treats you as a reader who needs the plot restated in a nice room.

And yet — I don’t hate it, and here’s the honest complication. Alan Wake 2’s story is deliberately hard to hold, and the case board is where Sagasays out loud what she’s just worked out. It’s a comprehension aid with a lovely UI. As a puzzle system it’s theatre. As a narrative instrument, it’s the reason a plot this strange stays legible for twenty hours, and I’d rather have the legibility than a fake puzzle I’d have looked up anyway.

The Writer’s Room is the better system for the reverse reason: swapping a plot beat visiblychanges the level. The idea has consequences you can walk through. It’s the same trick Alan’s angel lamp pulls with light, and the same trickControl pulled with the Oldest House rearranging itself behind you. Remedy have been building the “the building is the plot” mechanic for years, and here it finally has a novelist in it, which is what it always wanted.

The horror, and the shooting

Survival horror, properly. Small inventory, real ammunition scarcity, save rooms with a locker, enemies that require a light-then-shoot two-step that makes every encounter cost something.

The light mechanic from the first game returns and is finally load-bearing. Enemies wear a shadow shield; you burn it off with the torch, and the torch has batteries. So a fight has a resource sequence — light, then bullets, then run — and the horror comes from the arithmetic breaking down halfway through. That’s a good system, borrowed knowingly from the genre, and the sound design sells it: the Taken don’t shamble so much asmutter, and the muttering arrives before they do.

The shooting itself is the weakest thing here, and Remedy know it. The guns are deliberately heavy and imprecise, dodging is a lurch, and after eight hours the encounters stop escalating — you fight the same handful of shapes in the same handful of ways, with more of them. Remedy have made some of the best third-person combat ever built. They have chosen, correctly, to make the combat in their horror game feel bad. The problem is that they didn’t cut enough of it, and a system you’ve deliberately made unpleasant should be rationed like the ammunition is.

The other soft spot is the middle. Alan’s Dark Place chapters are the most inventive material in the game and also the most repetitive traversal — the light-swapping is a puzzle you solve about nine times, and by the sixth it’s a chore with a beautiful skybox on it.

Why the swing lands anyway

Because of the confidence. Alan Wake 2 is full of things that should not survive a pitch meeting.

It has live-action FMV cut into it constantly — Ilkka Villi’s face, Matthew Porretta’s voice, a whole in-fiction talk show, an in-fiction TV anthology. FMV has been a punchline since the CD-ROM boom in the mid-90s, when every studio with a camcorder shoved grainy actors into a DOS game and called it cinema. Remedy have spent twenty years quietly refusing to let the idea die, from Max Payne’s photo-comic panels onward, and Alan Wake 2 is where it stops being a stylistic tic and becomes the actual grammar. The live-action isn’t cheaper than the engine. It’sanother layer of the fiction, deployed because a story about an author trapped in his own draft should keep showing you the seams.

The nearest recent relative isImmortality, which also understood that footage of a real face carries a charge no rendered model can fake. Immortality is the more rigorous experiment. Alan Wake 2 is the one that got a AAA budget and used it to stage a musical.

And the Remedy Connected Universe finally justifies itself. Alex Casey — Sam Lake’s face, James McCaffrey’s voice, a hard-bitten cop from a series of novels inside a game whose protagonist wrote them, played by the man who made Max Payne — is the kind of joke that only works if you’ve been paying attention for two decades. Control’s Federal Bureau of Control is here too, and it lands as a payoff rather than a homework assignment.

The verdict

Alan Wake 2 is the most interesting big-budget game of the year and it is not the mostenjoyable one, and I think Remedy would take that trade every time.

The combat drags, the middle sags, the case board is a magic trick pretending to be a mind. Against that: a studio that got handed serious money and spent it on a wordless twenty-hour argument about authorship, with a rock opera in the middle and a live-action talk show host doing the exposition. It is strange in a way games at this budget essentially stopped being around 2012, and the strangeness is not decoration — it’s structural, it’s the point, and it is worth more than another well-tuned shooting gallery.

Play it in the dark, in chunks, and let Saga’s board do the remembering for you.

What to play next:Control for the same studio building the same idea with concrete instead of ink, andImmortality for the purest version of the live-action gamble.

Spoilers below

The structural gag is that Alan is writing Saga’s story and Saga is investigating Alan’s, and both of them are right. Remedy commit to the loop hard enough that the game’s own chapters start behaving like drafts — the Initiation and Return labels aren’t flavour, they’re the manuscript’s table of contents, and the whole thing folds into a spiral where the ending is a beginning that’s been through a rewrite.

The chapter that makes the case for the whole project is We Sing. You walk into the Old Gods of Asgard material expecting a set-piece and get “Herald of Darkness”: a full musical number, live-action, that recaps thirteen years of a fictional writer’s biography in verse while you’re still holding a torch. It is the most expensive thing in the game and it has zero mechanical purpose, and it’s also the only sequence I’ve seen this year that made me put the controller down and grin at a wall. That’s the swing. A studio with a publisher breathing on it does not make We Sing.

The Dark Place’s rewriting of New York is where the Writer’s Room finally goes from clever to frightening — the moment the plot element you swap starts changing things you didn’t intend, and the tool you’ve been using to escape becomes the thing keeping you in. Alan’s arc lands because the mechanicis the theme: an author whose only power is authorship, in a place that grants it too literally.

The ending is a hinge into whatever comes next, and it’s the one place the ambition cashes a cheque it hasn’t earned yet. Remedy have built a universe and now owe it a resolution, and Alan Wake 2 closes on the confidence that they’ll get to make it. On this evidence, they’ve earned the benefit of the doubt.