Game:

Control (2019)

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Control is a 2019 action-adventure game developed by Remedy Entertainment and published by 505 Games. The game was released for PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One in August 2019, 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.

Control 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 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 was 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 style common for many government buildings created during the Cold War era, serving as a setting to show off the game's destructive environmental systems. The core game includes many allusions to Alan Wake, Remedy's prior game with similar paranormal themes, and Control's AWE expansion is a crossover between the two series, which Remedy has said forms part of the Remedy Connected Universe. Control was among the first games released to utilize real-time ray tracing built into the hardware of newer video cards.

Upon release, Control received positive reviews from critics, with several gaming publications naming it among their top games of 2019. The game was nominated for numerous awards, winning several related to the game's art and design. It sold over 4 million units by February 2024. A sequel, Control 2, and a separate four-player co-operative spin-off, codenamed Condor, were announced in June 2021.

Control revolves around the Federal Bureau of Control (FBC), a clandestine U.S. government agency which investigates supernatural Altered World Events (AWEs). These AWEs are affected by the human collective unconscious and have a variety of "paranatural" effects, including the creation of Objects of Power, archetypal items which grant special abilities to their wielders. Objects of Power are connected to the Board, a black pyramid-shaped entity which exists within the Astral Plane, an alternate dimension. The individual chosen by the Board to wield the Service Weapon, an Object of Power, is considered by default to be the director of the FBC.[5] Control takes place within the Oldest House, a Brutalist skyscraper in New York City that serves as the headquarters of the FBC. The Oldest House is a Place of Power with several paranatural characteristics: it resists being noticed by anyone other than FBC members and individuals with an innate sensitivity to the paranatural, it is larger on the inside than on the outside, and its internal architecture is prone to shifting and rearranging in unpredictable ways. The FBC is able to stabilize portions of the Oldest House for its use by harnessing nexuses of resonance called Control Points.

The protagonist of Control is Jesse Faden (Courtney Hope), who is chosen by the Board as the director of the FBC to replace the recently deceased Zachariah Trench (James McCaffrey). Seventeen years prior to the game's events, Jesse and her younger brother Dylan (Sean Durrie) were involved in an Altered World Event in their hometown of Ordinary, Maine. After discovering an Object of Power in the form of a slide projector, the two children accidentally unleashed paranatural forces which caused Ordinary's adult population to vanish. Jesse and Dylan were rescued by Polaris, a mysterious telepathic entity. Shortly thereafter, the FBC arrived in Ordinary, capturing Dylan and the slide projector while Jesse fled. In the present day, Jesse arrives at the Oldest House seeking her brother's whereabouts.

Other notable characters in Control include missing Head of Research Casper Darling (Matthew Porretta), research specialist Emily Pope (Antonia Bernath), security chief Simon Arish (Ronan Summers), Head of Operations Helen Marshall (Jade Anouka), Panopticon supervisor Frederick Langston (Derek Hagen), and Ahti (Martti Suosalo), a mysterious Finnish janitor.

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