An Anteroom to Unreason

The primary struggle in Control is not against the Hiss, the named antagonists you’ll do endless battle with, but against the building that contains them. The Oldest House is a monolithic skyscraper in Manhattan that is invisible to most and is the game’s central character, its primary text, and its most formidable antagonist. Its genius lies in an architectural conceit that transforms environmental storytelling from a passive act of observation into an active, often adversarial, process of interpretation. It is a place where the rigid geometries of human order collide with the fluid, irrational logic of the paranatural. To navigate it is to learn its language, and to survive it is to accept that its grammar is forever in flux.

The aesthetic of the Oldest House is a deliberate and powerful choice: Brutalism. This architectural style, born from post-war utopian modernism, is characterized by its massive, exposed concrete forms, its rigid geometries, and its unapologetic monumentality. In Control, it embodies the FBC’s mission: to impose order, structure, and understanding upon the chaotic phenomena that breach our reality. The building is a physical manifestation of bureaucracy, its stark lines and unadorned surfaces reflecting the institutional desire to categorize and contain the unknowable. The endless corridors of polished stone, the oppressive weight of concrete ceilings, and the grid-like patterns of office spaces create an atmosphere of sterile, soul-crushing order.

Yet, this very sterility makes it the perfect canvas for the supernatural chaos that unfolds. The intrusion of the hostile Hiss is rendered all the more shocking against this backdrop of mundane rationality. Various dead FBC agents hang suspended in the air, their bodies creating a grotesque Calder mobile in the atrium’s grand void. A vibrant, malevolent red light bleeds into the monochrome palette, and the concrete itself seems to groan and shift, corrupted by a force that defies its structural integrity. The building displays its impersonal autonomy with a modern take on the haunted house. Its design uses vast, empty halls and disorienting one-point perspectives, creating an alienating sense of scale that makes you feel simultaneously insignificant and exposed.

The true nature of the Oldest House, however, lies beyond its material surfaces. It is a place of power, a nexus of realities that operates on “dream logic” and is vastly larger on the inside than its external form would suggest. This positions it firmly in a literary tradition of impossible architecture, most notably Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. In his novel, a suburban home reveals an impossible, ever-expanding labyrinth within its walls, a non-Euclidean space that defies measurement and sanity. The Oldest House is the interactive manifestation of this concept. Corridors rearrange themselves behind the player, doors lead to places they shouldn’t, and entire sectors of the building shift and reconfigure in real-time. The map, a staple of the Metroidvania genre that influences the game’s structure, becomes a dynamic and unreliable narrator.

This labyrinthine quality also evokes the universe conceived by Jorge Luis Borges in his short story, “The Library of Babel.” The Argentinian describes a cosmos composed of an infinite number of interlocking hexagonal galleries, containing every possible book that could ever be written. The result is a universe of near-total noise, where any coherent text is buried within an ocean of gibberish. The librarians spend their lives searching for meaning, for a catalog of catalogs, in a system whose scale renders such a quest futile. The FBC’s mission within the Oldest House mirrors this existential plight. They are the librarians of the impossible, attempting to document, file, and understand a structure that is, for all intents and purposes, infinite and incomprehensible. Their case files and research notes, scattered throughout the building, are evidence of this noble, ultimately absurd endeavor. Each new discovery only deepens the mystery, much as each book in Borges’ library only adds to the overwhelming meaninglessness of the whole.

This defines the player’s journey. Progression is dictated by the architecture. Locked doors require higher security clearances; hidden areas remain inaccessible until the right ability is unlocked. Gaining a new power, like Levitation, is akin to learning a new piece of the House’s language, allowing you to read its vertical spaces or bypass its logical fallacies. Victory is measured in both defeating enemies and mastering navigation. This dynamic culminates in the Ashtray Maze, a sequence where the shifting, kaleidoscopic environment finally syncs with your movement: a transcendent moment where you’re no longer fighting the architecture, but dancing with it. The journey through the Oldest House is, in the end, the process of taming the labyrinth, of imposing a single, coherent path through a space defined by its multiplicity.

The Bureaucracy of the Beyond

If the Oldest House is the body of Control, the Federal Bureau of Control is its strange, malfunctioning mind. The game’s true horror is not just that a monster might escape, but that its escape could be facilitated by improperly filed paperwork. This is made chillingly explicit in the Hiss chant, the mantra repeated by possessed agents. Fragments reveal phrases like, “You gave us the permission in your regulations.” This implies the Hiss is a parasitic force that has learned to exploit the Bureau’s own systems. The rigid order the FBC prizes, its institutional obsession with procedure, has become the vector for its infection.

The conceptual DNA of the FBC is heavily drawn from the SCP Foundation, a collaborative online fiction project that presents itself as a secret global organization tasked with securing, containing, and protecting anomalous objects, entities, and phenomena. Think X-Files reorganized by a crowdsourced, obsessive-compulsive librarian. The tone - clinical, bureaucratic, and matter-of-fact in the face of the utterly bizarre - is lifted directly from the SCP format. This grounding in a pre-existing, internet-age folklore gives the FBC an immediate sense of plausibility. We have been primed by this modern mythos to accept the idea of a shadowy agency that deals with haunted refrigerators and malevolent rubber ducks.

This juxtaposition of the paranormal and the procedural places the game squarely within the “New Weird” genre. Unlike traditional Lovecraftian horror, the New Weird focuses on the surreal intrusion of the strange into our mundane reality. The horror comes from the familiar being twisted: a slide projector opens gateways to other dimensions; a floppy disk grants telekinetic powers. This finds a strong literary parallel in Jeff VanderMeer’s Authority, where a protagonist must navigate the suffocating bureaucracy of a secret agency that has failed to comprehend the paranormal “Area X.” Both works explore the psychological decay that occurs when an institution’s rational methods are met with an irrational universe. The FBC’s Sisyphean task of imposing order on a meaningless universe is the very definition of the absurd.

The story of this downfall is fragmented into hundreds of collectible documents, casting the player as an archivist piecing together the Bureau’s history. This technique of building a world through a collage of disparate texts is reminiscent of John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, which used news clippings and corporate memos to build a holistic portrait of a complex world. In Control, we read about interdepartmental rivalries, budget disputes over a rubber duck, and redacted reports of Altered World Events. This method transforms the narrative from a passive experience into an active investigation, giving the impression that Jesse Faden’s story is just one of countless others that have unfolded within these concrete walls.

Through this investigation, we learn that the FBC’s primary weapon against the paranatural is paperwork. It confronts cosmic, reality-bending entities with containment procedures and incident reports. This is an absurdist act, creating a dark, deadpan humor from placing office politics in direct contact with existential horror. The institution’s obsession with procedure becomes its own form of madness. The true horror of Control is the internal, institutional delusion that such a threat could ever be managed, controlled, or understood through the tools of human bureaucracy. It is the story of humanity’s most audacious and perhaps most foolish endeavor: the attempt to file the universe’s nightmares in a filing cabinet.

Interactivity Sharpens the Weird

The Federal Bureau of Control is an organization built on ritual, a belief that the correct sequence of actions can contain the uncontainable. Yet, when Jesse Faden arrives, the Bureau is in catastrophic failure. Their Director is dead, their lockdown protocols have failed, and their rituals are powerless against the Hiss. The narrative’s answer is simple: you. Through the vessel of Jesse, it is the player who re-enacts and completes these failed rituals. You cleanse the Control Points; you perform the binding rituals with Objects of Power. Your agency is the missing ingredient. In Control, interactivity is not an accessory to the story; it is narratively justified as the catalyst that makes the Bureau’s magic function once more.

Unlike the linear experiences of Remedy’s excellent past games, Control offers a world where the player is the primary driver of narrative discovery. The main plot is just a spine; the true depth is found in the margins (i.e. the side missions, hidden areas, and collectible documents). This design trusts you to become an active epistemologist, assembling a coherent understanding of the world from a fractured collection of data. This structure invites comparison to Disco Elysium, a game that presents a dense cloud of potential stories and ideological pathways. The final narrative is the unique waveform that collapses, determined by player choice. In Control, one player might mainline the story for a simple action-adventure. Another (like me) will spend years in the archives, emerging with a richer understanding of a strange world.

This same agency allows Control to translate abstract concepts into tangible, embodied experiences. To gain a power like Levitate, you must locate the Object of Power, approach it, and “bind” it. This transports the player to the Astral Plane for a tutorial challenge, an interactive ritual of “find, bind, master” that makes the accumulation of power feel earned and significant. You do not simply witness Jesse’s journey; you perform it.

This sense of embodiment is powerfully reinforced by the game’s physics and sound design. The Oldest House is remarkably destructible; concrete shatters, desks splinter, and papers fly. The “Launch” ability turns this destructibility into a core combat mechanic, allowing you to feel the raw power of ripping a chunk of concrete from a pillar and hurling it at an enemy. The sound design makes this power intoxicating, using a shared library of organic, unsettling sounds - from an Aztec death whistle to a piano set on fire - to give every supernatural ability a visceral, tactile weight. This fusion of mechanics, physics, and sound creates a powerful feedback loop, making the fantastical feel real. This is why the game’s triumphs are thus fundamentally tied to its medium. The experience would be diminished in a passive format because its central themes of discovery, embodiment, and control are made manifest only through player agency. Your presence is the key that unlocks the House. You are not just a witness to the story; you are the essential, missing component in the world’s underlying logic.

The Sisyphean Knot

The narrative arc of Control is one of empowerment. Jesse Faden enters the Oldest House a confused outsider and grows into the supremely powerful Director, a being who bends reality to her will. The combat system, however, tells a completely different story. This creates an apparent ludonarrative dissonance: the story proclaims, “You are becoming a god,” while the gameplay mechanics whisper, “You will always be fragile, always just a few hits away from death.” This is a fundamental contradiction that undermines the game’s central theme of gaining control, subverting the player’s journey at every turn.

The root of this dissonance is a flawed approach to difficulty. Control originally launched with a “one-size-fits-nobody” auto-balancing system, which makes enemies weaker as the player dies and stronger as they succeed. The practical effect of this is pernicious: it actively punishes players for improving and prevents them from ever feeling a true sense of mastery. As a player’s skill increases, the game’s algorithm simply escalates the challenge until they are forced back into a cycle of dying. The one aspect of the game where you should feel most in control is the one where the design works hardest to deny you that very feeling. This lack of mastery makes the core gameplay loop feel one-dimensional and shallow. The loop—using the Launch ability until energy is depleted, shooting until it recharges, and repeating —fails to evolve. While spectacular at first, it becomes a monotonous grind. Other abilities like Shield or Seize exist, but the overwhelming utility of Launch renders them situational at best. The combat system feels less like a dynamic dance of supernatural powers and more like busywork, a sentiment echoed by players who found it boring after the first few hours.

Perhaps the most damaging effect of this grind is the way it systematically dismantles the game’s own atmosphere. The Oldest House is designed to be a place of “weird sense of isolation and dread.” This atmosphere is constantly shattered by the sheer frequency of ambushes in nearly every new room. The thrilling question of “What’s behind this spooky door?” is replaced by the weary certainty that the answer is another fight. The combat ceases to be a thrilling punctuation mark in the exploration and becomes a persistent, unwelcome noise, drowning out the game’s more subtle and interesting frequencies.

And yet, this is the point. This profound, frustrating contradiction - this Sisyphean chore - is not a design flaw. It is the game’s final, most brilliant, and most honest argument. The combat is not dissonant from the narrative; it is the mechanical enforcement of its true theme. Ultimately, Control is a sustained working-out of philosophical absurdism. It presents a universe that is irrational, chaotic, and fundamentally hostile to human attempts to find inherent meaning or impose lasting order. The FBC’s century-long mission is a Sisyphean task, a constant struggle to push the boulder of reason up a hill of cosmic madness, only to have it roll back down again. Jesse Faden is the absurd hero. Her triumph is not in solving the universe’s mysteries or in permanently defeating the Hiss. Such a victory is impossible in an absurd world. Her triumph lies in her rebellion against this meaninglessness. Faced with an irrational reality, she consciously chooses to create her own purpose. She accepts the impossible, paradoxical role of Director. She finds meaning in the struggle itself, in protecting the people who depend on her. She builds a home in a place that is, by its very nature, unhomely. She forges an identity out of her own rootlessness. And she finds control, not by dominating the universe, but by accepting that some things will always remain beyond her grasp, and acting with clarity and purpose nonetheless.

Viewed through this lens, the combat is not a flaw; it is the theme’s ultimate expression. The “one-size-fits-nobody” auto-balancing system that “prevents… a true sense of mastery” is the absurd universe pushing back. It is the game’s system itself acting as the indifferent, irrational reality. The game denies you traditional mastery because the Absurd Hero’s journey is not about mastery. It is about the struggle. That “persistent, unwelcome noise” of combat is the sound of the boulder rolling, once again, back down the hill. What first appears as ludonarrative dissonance is, in fact, a perfect, terrifying resonance.

This process of acculturation-through-struggle is woven into every layer of the game’s design. Jesse Faden’s own personal history is a powerful allegory for this. A Third Culture Kid (TCK) is an individual who has spent a significant portion of their developmental years outside their parents’ culture. After the Altered World Event in her hometown of Ordinary, Jesse spends her life on the run, belonging to no community, an outsider to the mundane world she hides within. When she enters the FBC, she is once again an outsider, a hidden immigrant who looks like she should belong but whose perceptions and experiences are fundamentally alien to the Bureau’s rigid culture. TCKs often grapple with a sense of rootlessness and restlessness, feeling as though they do not fully belong to any single culture. Their identity is not tied to a geographical place but is instead forged in the spaces between cultures. Jesse’s journey reflects this perfectly. She does not find her place by assimilating into the FBC’s culture; she finds it by embracing her unique status as an outsider and building a new community from the Bureau’s remnants with the other survivors. The Oldest House itself becomes her “third culture”: a dynamic, multicultural, and perpetually shifting environment where she is finally able to belong, precisely because it is a place defined by its inherent otherness.

At its deepest level, this is a spiritual allegory. The lore of Control is built upon the concept of resonance. The game posits that different dimensions and planes of existence vibrate at unique frequencies, normally imperceptible to one another. The Hiss and Polaris (the benevolent entity residing within Jesse) are presented as two competing resonances, each seeking to impose its own frequency upon our reality. The Hiss is a resonance of chaotic, mindless repetition, while Polaris is a resonance of clarity and order. This framework can be interpreted through the philosophical system of Advaita Vedanta, a school of Hindu philosophy that posits the ultimate reality (Brahman) is a singular, undifferentiated consciousness, and the phenomenal world we experience (Maya) is an illusory superimposition upon that reality. In this reading, the Hiss represents the ultimate form of Maya: a corruption of the mind that leads to a false identification with the ego, external chaos, and the endless cycle of desire, trapping consciousness in a repetitive, meaningless loop. The possessed agents, floating and chanting their nonsensical mantra, are souls lost in this illusion. Polaris, conversely, represents the higher consciousness within, the silent, guiding presence of the true Self (Atman) that is one with Brahman. Jesse’s final triumph is looking inward and realizing that Polaris is not a separate entity but an integrated part of her own being. She achieves control by transcending the illusion and grounding herself in her true nature.

This exploration of consciousness connects thematically with Peter Watts’ science fiction novel, Blindsight. Watts’ novel questions the evolutionary value of self-awareness, presenting an alien species that possesses massive intelligence but lacks consciousness. The Hiss-possessed agents in Control are a similar form of philosophical zombie - they act with purpose and tactical intelligence but are devoid of any inner self. Jesse’s unique, integrated consciousness is what allows her to perceive, resist, and ultimately control the forces at play. When the game begins, you’re dropped into the bewildering new culture of the FBC, with its own arcane language (acronyms, redacted files), bizarre social norms (talking to an inverted pyramid), and incomprehensible history. The player, like a TCK arriving in a new country, must learn to navigate this alien environment. They must piece together a new worldview from the cultural fragments they find scattered in documents and audio logs. The feeling of being an outsider, of not quite belonging, of being constantly confronted with tantalizing but inaccessible parts of the world, is central to both Jesse’s narrative and your experience.

Control is not just a story about an outsider finding her place; its design makes the player undergo a process of acculturation. The gameplay loop of confusion, gradual learning, and eventual mastery is an interactive metaphor for the very process of identity formation that the game so brilliantly explores. The very structure of the game forces you into a simulated version of this journey.

The House is the world, the Bureau is the culture, and the player, like Jesse, must find their own way to control the chaos.