I’ve been trying to dig up all my unpublished work lately, and I found this interview in an old Google Drive folder (how apt!). It was conducted in person during Gamescom 2018 with Control’s Game Director, Mikael Kasurinen. I had just seen a hands-off preview of the game before we spoke. Thanks to Emma Withington for setting it up.
I figured I’d release it from the Dead Letters archive in the, ahem, wake of Alan Wake 2. There are some cool tidbits in here about how Remedy operates and what went into the studio’s last trio of games.
In previous interviews, you’ve spoken about the open-ended structure of Control. Can you talk about what that will involve? Can you get lost inside The Oldest House?
Yes, absolutely, getting lost is great! That’s the world that we want to create, it’s kind of inviting you to do that exploration. Everything that you see has meaning and has a reason to exist. Structurally, that’s very different to games that we’ve done before, and that was a very deliberate choice. We wanted to go ‘world-first’.
It’s all about the world, an interesting and compelling place that you want to be in, and it inspires awe in the sense that it’s fascinating and beautiful but terrifying and dangerous. It has that unsettling unpredictability about it. You have to survive here, but investigating and exploring it is the core of the game.
The main thing I took away from that is that it’s very… you know Twin Peaks? I feel it’s very inspired by Twin Peaks, right?
Which season?
The Return, maybe? All of it kind of, but there was that bit with the overlay of the face, and like, the idea of a bureau and a service weapon and an agent. Lots of recurring motifs of bureaucratic Americana. I’ve not seen many games that drink from the well of David Lynch so it was really awesome to see that. Could you say it was an influence?
Absolutely; I mean, in many ways, I think Control is an ultimate Remedy game because its core idea is to be able to encapsulate concepts and things that we’ve dealt with in the past. Like if you take Alan Wake, you can see the Stephen King and Twin Peaks influence. This idyllic town and so on.
Here, especially when you look at Twin Peaks Season 3, which is part of our overall inspiration of “The New Weird”, you know. We have influences like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and the classic novel Roadside Picnic or Tarkovsky’s Stalker.
They are dealing with things beyond human comprehension, the surreal, utterly alien, but also at the same time captivating, and you kind of yearn to find out more.
That’s exactly how I felt at the end of the demo!
That’s exactly what we’re going for! Twin Peaks and Season 3, primarily, has got to be one of the most mind-blowing things I’ve ever seen.
And what’s the key thing you draw from that?
Whilst I don’t think anyone can really say how David Lynch works, it is about embracing a certain kind of… it’s really hard to explain, but you need to find a balance between establishing the strange, but there needs to be an element that needs to be relatable. There’s a sense of a connection. You don’t want to be on the nose. It’s something we’ve struggled with, as we don’t want to be like, random, you know.
I would say a key part of our thinking is that we’re excited by contrast. The mundane meets the strange. We have this very bureaucratic organization in the game, doing research and everyday work using science to understand the supernatural. It’s a mundane environment that lies with the strange.
My favourite scenes from the Control demo were those where I couldn’t comprehend what was happening. I don’t think a lot of games lean into that freedom, that surreal, absurd side.
I think a huge part of that is also what we set out to do very specifically with Quantum Break. We wanted to go as far as possible with cinematic storytelling – using different mediums to tell a story.
Yet, with Control, we have creative freedom where we can go all the way. We don’t have to compromise. We’re not looking at this game as something that is necessarily for everybody, and accepting that on our side has been a huge thing. We want to create an experience that is captivating and mysterious. For some people, it might be hard to get into, but that’s OK!
I believe that you have this creative freedom now because of Remedy’s reputation for creating unique narrative games—story-led, single protagonist-driven stuff. What do you think it is about Remedy games that purvey that sense of melancholy? Alan Wake has it; Max Payne has it…
I think it’s a desire to find a human element in the world of games. Human elements are something you rarely see in your everyday show, and so on. When you look at True Detective, they find elements in life that are subtle and complicated and maybe sometimes bizarre, and that’s what we strive to find, and it feels real because it’s something that you don’t expect.
We want to find that rawness in humans and in Control; even what the bureau does, you could easily see it as an evil thing that uses dangerous powers, but it’s way more complicated; there are human stories behind that. We want to show these weird stories, and that’s what makes it human.
Another favourite example I draw from is No Country For Old Men, which deals with a certain aspect of life where you’ve had it, you can’t take it anymore, and you choose to walk away and leave that world behind. It’s a human thing we see very rarely, the in-between.
Specifically, with the open-ended setup, how will you pack the same narrative punch while maintaining a Metroidvania framework? Are there any new features you’re adding to help with that?
OK, this is a tricky question, and I want to answer it carefully. So, in our previous games, there’s this mentality we often have where you understand what’s happening and why. And you can take all of that and internalize it and have a full understanding of what’s going on.
That’s great, but at the same time, it required us to think about the story in a really linear way. This kind of structure that we have in Control we obviously have to look at it in a different way. We want to retain that sense of depth and richness of the world, but we have to express it in a different way. It needs to be handled through a different way of thinking.
We need to be a bit more restrained, a bit more subdued and rely on subtext, and through that, we invite the player to pay attention, investigate themselves and find out.
We’re not spoon-feeding or hand-holding anymore. You have an overall understanding of who you are and what’s at stake, but how do you go about it? That’s on you, and you need to figure it out and pay attention. To fully understand the entire world, you have to go off the beaten path.
You can run through the campaign if you want to, but I don’t recommend that. You’ll find secrets and stories we want to tell through the environment. It will paint an interesting and complex picture of the Bureau.
Could you talk about the state of the in-world society that has led to the Federal Bureau of Control?
So, in all of our games, we’ve always had the same strand. We always want to establish a relatable world, but we add something supernatural or strange to it. Even with Max Payne, it’s a relatable world, but we told it via film noir, so it has this strange feeling to it. With Quantum Break, you could say we chose to be a bit more mainstream with these elements.
With the Federal Bureau of Control, we still have a relatable world, but it is so important to us that the Bureau feels like our everyday US agency. You could hear that name in real life and think it’s something to do with infrastructure.
That was so important to us to make it feel real; we spent a long time designing the logo, focusing on its clunkiness and ugliness, the procedures and bureaucracy; it’s all injected into this world so it would be like a real bureau.
That’s what I think makes this whole thing work: the conflict of the mundane and the strange. If you scratch the surface, what they’re doing is weird, but it’s an everyday agency with real people and real jobs.
It captures the vibe of going to pick up a driver’s license or heading to a council building to pick up a form: You notice something strange in the corner, and you’re like, “Hmm, what’s that?”
Yeah, like there’s a building shifting or something odd is happening, but surrounding it is this bureaucracy that obscures that.
Was there an internal prototype where you created something and were like, click – that’s Control?
After Quantum Break, it was important to me that where we go next has to be world-oriented, and I’d always been captivated by Telekinesis. It’s something interesting that I want to explore further. That was the basis of the first prototypes we made.
Previous games have done telekinesis, Psi-Ops, and Jedi Knight, but they handle it in a kind of game-istic way. You can only pick up certain objects; you know which ones you can grab, and the world feels like a stage set up for your abilities.
I wanted to break that thinking, and the world revolves around the idea of Control, controlling the environment. Everything is destructible. You can use any object you want, gather objects to shield yourself, and every door is real. Nothing is a backdrop, and all is connected and thought-through.
That was the basis of the core idea. Another thing that I thought was important was to focus on the player’s questions. It’s not about looking at the environment and asking, ‘Should I use the chair or the table?’ That’s a meaningless choice. The bigger question is, ‘Do you want to attack that enemy?’
We worked on our algorithm so that the selection of the object is not really important; what is important is what you choose to do and at what cadence and pace. We built a system to allow players to make decisions like this in a snap second, and that is the basis for the combat experience.
It’s fast-moving, fluid, and physics-based. You might use TK or your transforming service weapon, and the enemies can do that, too, destroying parts of the environment using the sandbox. This is an action game at the end of the day; it’s about conflict, though there are puzzles and intrigue and mystery, so we had to make that bit right.
