Control Review

Remedy finally married its two obsessions, strange bureaucracy and physical action, and the join is seamless. The Oldest House is the star: a brutalist federal complex that edits its own floor plan, keeps case files on haunted household appliances, and hides a corridor that reconfigures itself in time with a rock song. Jesse Faden walks in looking for her brother and walks out with a directorship, and the game explains almost nothing directly, leaving redacted memos, training films, and a janitor who speaks in riddles to carry the load.

The fighting is where it earns the praise. The Service Weapon reshapes itself between forms while telekinesis lets you tear a desk out of a wall and fire it across a room, and because the environment shreds under both, every skirmish ends in a fog of paper and concrete dust. It was also the first proper showcase for ray-traced reflections and still looks the part. Bosses repeat, the map is genuinely confusing, and the last act thins out. The Ashtray Maze alone justifies the whole thing.