Max Brain

Control is Remedy’s most bizarre and possibly best game yet.

- James Davenport

The omnipotent Finnish janitor of the Federal Bureau of Control really wants to go on vacation, but can’t until I’ve vanquished his old nemesis, The Clog. In what we’ll call the ‘bottom’ of The Oldest House, an impossible building in the middle of New York that’s infinitely larger on the inside than the outside, The Clog takes up residence near the coolant pumps, a swirling mass of brown slop that moans like a T-Rex roaring bubbles into a glass of milk.

I shoot the wriggling tendrils peeking out of the body and the shit monster disappears down the drain to the tune of a toilet flushing. It’s never explained, but I like it that way. It helps keep the mystery alive.

Control is an acrobatic third-person shooter set in an amorphous concrete dimension infested by the sanitised office culture of a 1960s-era government bureaucracy. Aside from a poo beast, you’ll discover new powers and revisit areas of The Oldest House to find upgrades, secrets, and side missions, throwing bullets and random objects at bad guys in Remedy’s best combat system yet.

The studio’s taking a harder thwack at weird fiction than ever before. Despite a few weak characters and plot threads, it’s a success. In Control, every conspiracy theory, ghost encounter, and alien abduction happened, just not quite for the reasons you’d expect. It’s a collection of stories about seeing through the banality of everyday life, a story about language, mass media, and statecraft delivered with a dry sense of humour and no tether to reason.

I still don’t understand it. But I don’t need to. God bless this mess.

INEXPLICABLE