Control

Control is the strangest and yet most self-assured game Remedy Entertainment has made to date. Jesse Faden arrives at the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Control, a secret agency investigating objects and phenomena that break the laws of physics, and within minutes the search for her missing brother turns into the job of director. The building itself, known as the Oldest House, behaves like a living place: corridors rearrange themselves, rooms lead to places that weren't there before, and the agency has been overrun by an entity called the Hiss, which turns employees into muttering attackers hovering near the ceiling.

Combat combines the Service Weapon, a shapeshifting sidearm that changes form depending on the chosen mode, with telekinesis. The player rips chunks of concrete, office desks and forklifts off the walls and hurls them at enemies; levitation and mind control are added later. The environment is largely destructible, so after any major clash an open-plan office is left in ruins, full of drifting paper. The structure is metroidvania-style: new powers open up further sectors, alongside side quests, cryptic documents, live-action footage and puppet-show training films that flesh out the world and give it its dry bureaucratic humour.

Visually the game rests on brutalist architecture, red light and the tilting of ordinary office spaces into nightmare territory; combined with sound design full of whispers and rhythmic music, it creates an unusually dense atmosphere. The high point is the Ashtray Maze sequence set to music, one of the most frequently mentioned moments of the entire generation. On Xbox One the game occasionally loses smoothness during big fights, but otherwise holds its quality and offers a sharp image. Reception was very good, and the title picked up numerous awards for its art direction and sound design. Today Control stands as proof that even a big budget can accommodate an unusual, almost literary idea, and that a mystery doesn't have to be explained away completely by the end.