Jesse Faden walks into a government building looking for her missing brother. Within minutes, she finds the director dead, picks up his shape-shifting gun, and gets the job. Most workplaces at least make you sit through orientation first.
That is the beginning of Control, but the story behind the promotion stretches back years and across dimensions. Beneath its flying office furniture, Remedy’s game is about a woman trying to understand what happened to her family, an agency convinced it can catalogue the impossible, and an invading force that makes a strong case for working from home.
Spoilers follow for Control and its two expansions, The Foundation and AWE.
The accident in Ordinary
Jesse and her younger brother Dylan grew up in Ordinary, Maine. As children, they found a slide projector that could open doorways to other worlds. The resulting Altered World Event made the town’s adults disappear, including their parents. It also brought the siblings into contact with a mysterious presence Jesse calls Polaris, which helped them survive.
The Federal Bureau of Control, or FBC, arrived to investigate. It confiscated the projector and took Dylan into custody, but Jesse escaped. She spent the next 17 years searching for him, with Polaris still guiding her. So when Jesse finally reaches the FBC’s New York headquarters, she has a very personal reason to distrust everyone inside it. Her brother became the Bureau’s research subject; she became the one who got away.
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A government office with very strange filing problems
The FBC studies and contains paranatural phenomena. An Altered World Event is an incident where those forces disrupt ordinary reality. An Object of Power is an item tied to supernatural abilities, while an Altered Item behaves impossibly without necessarily granting someone a useful power. Think less “magic sword,” more “refrigerator that must never be left unattended.”
The Bureau operates from the Oldest House, a building that hides in plain sight and rearranges its interior. The FBC stabilizes parts of it using Control Points, which is helpful when your commute might otherwise become a different corridor every Tuesday. The Bureau has procedures, classifications, and a great many documents, but those systems cannot make the phenomena safe or fully understood. That gap is where much of Control gets its unsettling charm.
When Jesse arrives, the Oldest House is under lockdown. Director Zachariah Trench lies dead in his office. Jesse takes his Service Weapon, survives a test in the Astral Plane, and is recognized by an entity called the Board as the new director. She came to ask where Dylan was. Now she has inherited the building, its employees, and whatever killed their boss.
What is the Hiss?
The Hiss is a hostile resonance that spreads through the Oldest House, corrupting Bureau staff and filling its halls with floating, chanting victims. Polaris protects Jesse from its influence. Some surviving employees also wear Hedron Resonance Amplifiers, or HRAs, devices developed under the missing research head Dr. Casper Darling to shield them from the Hiss.
Jesse works with research specialist Emily Pope and operations chief Helen Marshall while hunting for Dylan. Along the way, she binds Objects of Power and gains abilities including Launch, which lets her throw objects with her mind, and Levitate. There is something satisfying about defeating a supernatural invader with a conference-room chair. The chair has probably wanted its revenge for years.
The Bureau had been holding Dylan as Prime Candidate 6, a possible successor to Trench. After violent incidents, he was isolated in the Panopticon. But when Jesse reaches his cell, he is gone. Dylan eventually turns up in the Executive Sector, apparently having surrendered. He is also deeply connected to the Hiss, and their reunion gives Jesse more disturbing leads than answers.
The slide projector and Trench’s mistake
The FBC continued to experiment with the projector seized from Ordinary. One slide led researchers to an otherworldly environment known as Slidescape-36, where they encountered Hedron. Darling brought Hedron into the Oldest House and developed the HRAs using the protective resonance associated with it. Jesse recognizes a connection between Hedron and the presence she knows as Polaris, though the two are not simply interchangeable.
Trench experienced something different during the expedition. The Hiss reached him, and over time he became convinced that Hedron, Darling, and the protected staff were the real threat. His paranoia had a catastrophic result: Trench used the projector in the Nostalgia Department, opening a path for the Hiss into the Oldest House. The director of the agency created to contain dangerous phenomena let one through the door. Bureaucratic failure rarely gets more literal.
Jesse fights to reach Hedron, but the Hiss destroys it. Without Hedron’s protection, she is briefly overwhelmed and trapped in a warped version of office life, condemned to endless menial work. Somehow the supernatural nightmare includes delivering mail. When she breaks free, Jesse realizes that Polaris’s resonance can exist within her even after Hedron is gone. Hedron helped awaken that connection; its destruction did not erase it.
Jesse reaches Dylan, turns off the projector, and closes the Hiss’s entry point. Dylan survives but falls into a coma. The Hiss already inside the building remains, so the Oldest House stays under lockdown. Jesse accepts the position she never applied for and commits to clearing it out with the people still standing. The main story ends with a director who has finally found her brother but cannot yet bring him home.
The Foundation: who controls the Bureau?
The Foundation takes Jesse beneath the Oldest House, where the Nail links the building to the Astral Plane. Damage to it threatens to let that other realm spread into the Bureau. Marshall went below to challenge the Board’s influence, and Jesse follows to contain the damage.
This expansion makes the Board even harder to trust. It grants Jesse powers and speaks as though it owns the position of director, yet it is reluctant to explain what it wants. Jesse also encounters Former, a being with its own history with the Board, who offers help. By the time she confronts the Hiss-corrupted Marshall and cleanses the Nail, Jesse has learned that accepting help from a powerful entity does not mean accepting its authority over every Bureau decision.
That matters because the FBC has spent years presenting containment as control. The deeper Jesse goes, the clearer it becomes that the Bureau’s relationships with the Oldest House and the Board are far less equal than its paperwork suggests. Jesse can lead the agency, but she still has to decide whose interests it serves.
AWE: Bright Falls enters the files
In AWE, Jesse enters the Investigations Sector, where the FBC studied strange incidents beyond New York. Its files include the events around Cauldron Lake and the disappearance of writer Alan Wake. She also encounters Dr. Emil Hartman, whose contact with the Dark Presence has turned him into a monster. Exposure to the Hiss makes him an even worse problem, and Jesse must hunt him through the sector.
The expansion connects Control to Alan Wake, but it is easy to overstate what those connections prove. Wake’s writing and the Hiss incantation appear together, raising questions about his influence on events in the Oldest House. That does not establish that he invented the Hiss or personally designed every part of Jesse’s journey. The projector expedition, Trench’s exposure, and the Bureau’s decisions all have their own roles in the disaster. Remedy leaves room for unsettling possibilities without handing us a neat flowchart of cosmic responsibility.
After Hartman’s defeat, the FBC receives an alert about a possible event in Bright Falls with an apparently impossible future date. It is one last reminder that the Bureau’s tidy labels cannot keep reality on schedule.
What Control is really about
Jesse begins the game trying to reclaim a brother from an institution that took him. By the end, she has become the head of that institution, while Dylan remains unreachable and the building remains dangerous. Her victory is real, but it is incomplete.
That is why the title works so well. Trench thought he controlled the Bureau and was manipulated into opening the door to the Hiss. The FBC collects the unexplainable and gives it a case number, though its knowledge is partial. The Board expects a director who will follow its instructions. Jesse, having lived with the consequences of other people’s decisions since childhood, starts to make decisions of her own.
She cannot make the Oldest House normal, and she may never get every answer about Polaris, the Board, or Dylan. For now, she can choose what kind of director she will be. In a building where even the hallways refuse to stay put, that is a surprisingly solid place to start.
