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Control is a 2019 action-adventure game developed by Remedy Entertainment and published by 505 Games. The game was released in August 2019 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, and for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in February 2021. A cloud-based version for the Nintendo Switch was released in October 2020, and for Stadia in July 2021. Two paid expansions were also released for the game.
The game 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 in order 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, further voice work and live-action footage is 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-fiction project, based on the genre of the new weird. The environments of the Oldest House are designed in the brutalist architecture, common for many oppressive governmental buildings and which served as a setting to show off the game's destructive environmental systems. The core game includes many allusions to Alan Wake, one of Remedy's prior games with similar themes of the paranormal, and Control's AWE expansion was a crossover between these two series, which Remedy said formed part of the Remedy Connected Universe. Control was one of the first games released to take advantage of real-time ray tracing built into the hardware of newer video cards.
Upon release, Control was met with positive reviews from critics, with several gaming publications naming it among their top games of 2019. The game was nominated for numerous video game awards, winning several related to the game's art and design. An unnamed sequel and a separate four-player co-operative spin-off, tentatively called Condor, was announced in June 2021.