Control (Incl. Foundation DLC)

A brutalist federal skyscraper becomes a living labyrinth where office corridors bend, rooms vanish, and mundane objects carry impossible power. Control casts you as Jesse Faden, an outsider who arrives at the Federal Bureau of Control searching for her missing brother, only to become the agency’s new Director amid a supernatural siege. Its mood blends eerie conspiracy fiction, paranormal horror, and deadpan bureaucratic absurdity, with cryptic documents and strange experiments filling every corner of the Oldest House. The Foundation expansion pushes deeper beneath Bureau headquarters, revealing the unstable bedrock that supports its shifting reality.

Combat revolves around Jesse’s transforming Service Weapon, which changes between firearm forms, and an expanding telekinetic toolkit. You hurl desks, concrete, and explosive debris at possessed agents, raise shields from loose rubble, evade through the air, and eventually levitate above chaotic firefights. Missions send you through interconnected sectors, but optional cases, environmental puzzles, collectible lore, and hidden boss encounters reward thorough exploration; Control Points act as checkpoints and let you upgrade abilities, weapon forms, and personal mods. Difficulty can spike during crowded battles, though the game’s assist options make the demanding encounters far more adjustable without removing the spectacle.

Remedy’s strength lies in making its setting feel both comprehensible and deeply wrong: fluorescent offices, abandoned research wings, and black-rock caverns all hide stories worth reading and places worth revisiting. Destructible scenery is more than decoration, turning every fight into a storm of flying furniture and shattered concrete, while the Foundation adds new crystal-based powers and terrain-altering puzzles. The narrative occasionally prefers mystery over clean answers, but that ambiguity fits Jesse’s increasingly confident journey through an institution built around the unknowable. Fans of Alan Wake, Max Payne’s kinetic action, or the unnerving architecture of Twin Peaks-style fiction find plenty to enjoy, while newcomers get a polished single-player action adventure with a distinctive world and flexible combat.