Remedy Entertainment has confirmed that a sequel to 2019’s Control is in development. Set in the offices of the Federal Bureau of Control, a shady government agency whose role is to investigate paranormal occurrences, Control saw the journey of a woman named Jesse Faden, who became director of the agency and liberated the office building from a force named the Hiss.
It was an excellent game, exactly the kind of polished narrative experience fans would expect from Remedy, but it had a few problems. With the sequel now on its way, it’s the perfect opportunity to rectify these issues and make the sequel an even better game.
5 More Environments
The first Control was set entirely in The Oldest House, a vast concrete office building towering over New York. The building itself exhibited paranormal abilities, such as the ability to cloak itself and the layout frequently shifting. While it was a cool location, it was ultimately the only location for the whole game. This meant the player spent a lot of time running down gray concrete corridors which could get a little repetitive.
The sequel could refresh this by offering up more fieldwork, placing Jesse into new environments all across America. We could see her sent to the Nevada desert, the bayous of Louisiana, or even somewhere like Bright Falls from Alan Wake (unless, of course, that visit is being reserved for Alan Wake 2). This variety of locations could even be the basis for the co-op spinoff that Remedy is developing alongside Control 2.
4 Greater Enemy Variety
With greater environment variety comes greater enemy variety. In the first game, most of the enemies in the game were former FBC employees infected by a hostile supernatural resonance called The Hiss. While there were variants with different weapons and attack patterns, it still boiled down to the player fighting off humans with glowing red bits most of the time. An additional problem was that it made combat not that dissimilar to Alan Wake, which also threw hordes of possessed humans at the player with little variety.
Control 2 has the perfect opportunity to delve deep into the supernatural lore within its universe and present the player with all kinds of horrors threatening reality as we know it. More monsters, more possessed items, and more weird bosses would all be welcome in Control 2 and enhance the surreal atmosphere massively.
3 Improved Map
One major complaint that players of the original Control had was the map. While it could be pulled up at any time, it was often difficult to read, as the strange twisted corridors of The Oldest House would end up overlapping each other and creating a mess of tangled architecture that proved useless for navigation. It was often easier to simply follow signs in the environment while trying to locate the next destination.
Control 2 needs to fix this. In its current form, the original game’s map simply serves no useful function, and the freeform, Metroidvania-like structure could benefit from better navigational tools. This isn’t an easy problem to solve, as the non-Euclidian nature of most of Control’s locations causes everything to wrap together (the Ashtray Maze in particular would be impossible), but a solution does need to be found. Even something as simple as highlighting rooms as the player enters them or hiding higher levels at necessary points would be a helpful start.
2 Overhaul The Upgrade System
Throughout Control, the player could collect crafting materials that were used for weapon upgrades. These often took the form of esoteric concepts presented as physical items (e.g. Ritual Impulse, Undefined Reading, Remote Thought) as well as additional upgrades that boosted certain stats of the various forms of Jesse’s weapon.
The problem is, these crafting and upgrade mechanics felt like an afterthought. While the strange crafting items added to the atmosphere of the game, the actual crafting didn’t feel entirely necessary to progression and didn’t feel like it enhanced combat much. Control 2 either needs to make the crafting and upgrades a much more central aspect of its combat and give it greater customization or simply remove it and let story upgrades take over instead.
1 More Lore Visible In-Game
One of the best aspects of the original Control was its lore. The Oldest House was full of FBC files that detailed strange happenings, cursed items, and investigations by the Bureau into possible sightings. It was all detailed and interesting, with a hint of black comedy throughout. It was clear that the SCP Foundation website was a massive influence on the game’s writing, and collecting these documents was a joy.
While some of these strange phenomena found themselves in the game proper – side quests involving chasing a haunted rubber duck and investigating a deadly fridge, for example – most of this ended up restricted to collectibles, which required the player to go into the menu to read them. Control 2 could improve on this by having more of it in the main game, with more quests to discover the secrets of strange sightings peppered all the way through the game, supplemented by the written documents.
Control 2 is currently in development for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.