Control

Developer Remedy Entertainment

Publisher 505 Games

Format PC, PS4 (tested), Xbox One

Release August 27

The opening line of Control could serve as a sort of motto for the entire game. “Fair warning,” says a disembodied voice you soon learn belongs to lead character Jesse Faden. “This is going to be weirder than usual.” You’re picking up with Faden at the end of a decades-long quest: tracking down the mysterious government agency which, after a childhood experience with the supernatural, took away her brother. This is the FBC, the Federal Bureau Of Control, whose New York offices she is now wandering into unchallenged. Inside Faden will find the bodies of office workers, floating above their desks. She’ll meet an inverted black pyramid, speaking in subtitles, which oversees all Bureau operations. Later she will gain the power of telekinesis from a floppy disk loaded with Soviet nuclear launch codes. So when Faden warns us at the outset that this is going to get weird – well, she’s not wrong.

But let’s try presents all of this information in typically sideways fashion, but it adds up to a fairly standard-issue videogame premise: you are the chosen one, tasked with protecting the world.