How redefining the ‘Remedy game’ led the Finnish studio to reinvent itself

By Alex Spencer

THE MAKING OF ...

Format PC, PS4, Xbox One

Developer Remedy Entertainment

Publisher 505 Games

Origin Finland

Release 2019

Some where in the depths of the Oldest House, Control’s sprawling universeinside-a-building setting, sits a rubber duck. You’ll likely stumble across it early on, maybe rifle through the documents and recordings that describe how this seemingly innocuous bath toy imprints on a person and follows them, quacking, until they’re driven to the point of madness or - in the case of one poor researcher - cardiac arrest. But it’s sealed behind a wall of glass, and actually getting your hands on that ducky won’t be possible for hours.

This style of Metroidvania design - where a player encounters an obstacle, makes a mental note until they’ve unlocked the relevant ability, then finally returns much later - was completely new to the team at Remedy Entertainment. Before Control, the Finnish studio had spent the best part of 20 years, from the original Max Payne through to Quantum Break, refining what a ‘Remedy game’ looked like: action games with a narrative that led you through a string of tightly designed set-pieces. Games in which, as senior level designer Joonas Kruus puts it, “once you go past a sequence, you never return there.” Control totally changed that, dropping the player into an interconnected world inspired by the team’s love for the Dark Souls games. “And now there’s always a possibility to return to the same location multiple times, from multiple different angles, with different missions. That was definitely a big challenge.”

“We simply hadn’t worked like that before,” game director Mikael Kasurinen agrees - and he’d know, as a Remedy veteran who joined all the way back in 2001. But breaking away from a linear structure wasn’t the only complication for the studio. There was also the matter of the player’s ability set. As protagonist Jesse Faden, you gradually unlock a suite of superpowers ranging from mind control to levitation. The latter is the ability you’re meant to use to reach that rubber duck, by floating your way up to a gap in the ceiling, but creative players were able to find their own solution, using a power you gain much earlier: telekinesis, known in Control as Launch. “If you are patient, you can stack boxes for five minutes and get there without levitation, even at this point,” senior level designer AnneMarie Grönroos says. “And many people did.” Remedy games had always handed players physics-warping powers, but giving them the freedom and sandbox to mess around with those powers? As communications director Thomas Puha says: “That wasn’t something that you did in a Remedy game before.”