The Walls of Control

The walls of The Oldest House are a veritable pressure cooker, a place of almost unbearable unknowns

Remedy has accomplished something so many before have failed to do: craft a world that feels consistently inconsistent, a place governed by a set of rules far, far beyond our mortal comprehension. Rules we can feel but never truly know.

That feeling — that sense you can nearly almost define the world of Control but not quite — is the enigmatic engine that drives Remedy’s latest.

On its cold, angular surface, Control is a typical third-person shooter with some throwy-throwy bits and an endless cacophony of grey. But things aren’t what they seem. The straight, structured edges of Remedy’s concrete world bely a place that’s wobbly, unstable — a mask that hides its near-infinite possibilities with a stoic, imperial veneer.

Its pointed shapes and tort angles are a jigsaw Remedy re-arranges at will — a half-filled canvas waiting for us to paint the rest. Its grey panels are something on which you want to project your own interpretation of the world — the mental equivalent of a child’s scribblings, as they try to map a place that’s infinitely larger than they could ever hope to comprehend.