Control (Ultimate Edition) Review

Control is the game Remedy was always building toward. Alan Wake had the narrative weirdness but not the budget. Quantum Break had the budget but lost the weirdness trying to be a TV show. Control finally got both, and the result is something singular. The Oldest House, the Federal Bureau of Control's headquarters, is the star of the show. It's a brutalist government building that bends space and logic. Floors don't connect to where they should. Doors lead to the wrong rooms. The building actively doesn't want you to understand it, and the maze-like verticality creates an atmosphere that no horror game has really replicated. Walking through a concrete corridor while the Hiss chant in your earpiece is one of the most unsettling experiences in recent gaming. Then Jesse launches a filing cabinet at someone's face and the game becomes an incredible physics playground. The telekinesis feels exactly right, heavy, powerful, genuinely destructive. Combat rooms get completely demolished across a fight, with chunks of ceiling suspended mid-air, desk drawers embedded in walls, and a light layer of debris across everything by the end. It never gets old. Courtney Hope plays Jesse with this specific energy, slightly detached, quietly terrified, deeply competent, that makes her one of the better player characters in recent memory. Her internal monologue adds dry humor to the horror without undermining it. Okay, the map. It's a 2D floor plan for a building that exists in three dimensions simultaneously. It is, without exaggeration, useless. You will get lost. You will wander in the wrong direction for ten minutes only to discover the room you wanted was above you this whole time but the map didn't show that. This is the one genuine flaw. Everything else we'd call a quirk. The map is just bad. The Ultimate Edition bundles both DLC expansions, both of which are worth playing, The Foundation goes underground and gets strange, AWE ties the universe to Alan Wake and is excellent if you know the lore.