Control (video game)

Control is an action-adventure game developed by Remedy Entertainment and published by 505 Games. The game was released in August 2019 for PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One, and for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in February 2021. Cloud-based versions for the Nintendo Switch and Amazon Luna were released in October 2020, followed by a version for Stadia in July 2021. Two paid expansions have been released. The game revolves around the Federal Bureau of Control (FBC), a secret U.S. government agency tasked with containing and studying phenomena that violate the laws of reality. As Jesse Faden (Courtney Hope), the Bureau's new Director, the player explores the Oldest House – the FBC's paranormal headquarters – and utilizes powerful abilities in order to defeat a deadly enemy known as the Hiss, which has invaded and corrupted reality. The player gains abilities by finding Objects of Power, mundane objects like a rotary phone or a floppy disk imbued with energies from another dimension, that have been at the center of major paranormal events and since recovered by the FBC. In addition to Hope, voice work and live-action footage is provided by James McCaffrey, Matthew Porretta, and Martti Suosalo, while the band Poets of the Fall provided additional music. Control is inspired by paranormal stories about the fictional SCP Foundation created by an online collaborative wiki fiction project, based on the genre of the new weird. The environments of the Oldest House are designed in the brutalist architecture style, common for many government buildings created during the Cold War era, which served as a setting to show off the game's destructive environmental systems. The core game includes many allusions to Alan Wake, one of Remedy's prior games with similar themes of the paranormal, and Control AWE expansion is a crossover between these two series, which Remedy said forms part of the Remedy Connected Universe. Control was one of the first games released to take advantage of real-time ray tracing built into the hardware of newer video cards.