Key Takeaways
- Remedy Entertainment has explicitly called Control 2 an “action-RPG.”
- The first Control didn’t have any RPG elements to speak of.
- There was a teaser for Control 2 in Alan Wake 2’s Lake House expansion.
Remedy Entertainment is still celebrating the high of shipping Alan Wake 2, one of the best games of 2023 and widely considered to be one of the best video game narratives of the last decade.
The studio’s next game is FBC: Firebreak, a three-player first-person co-op shooter set to release next year. It’s set in the Remedy-verse but isn’t the studio’s usual fare, but Remedy has never been one to pigeonhole themselves into a single genre, either. After FBC: Firebreak, a sequel to the critically acclaimed 2019 third-person shooter Control is in the pipeline.
The Old House Calls…
Remedy has been relatively quiet about the progress of Control 2. While the studio had originally planned to release the game with Control publisher 505 Games, it recently struck a deal with Annapurna to fund half the development of Control 2 in exchange for extended media rights over Remedy’s various IPs.
In a social media post outlining the results of Remedy’s Capital Markets day, the studio explicitly called Control 2 an “action-RPG” in a bullet point. This is notable because Control didn’t have anything resembling RPG elements, and was much more in line with a typical action-adventure or third-person shooter game.
There’s a chance that this designation isn’t significant and Control will be a standard sequel to Control 2 as expected, but the addition of ‘RPG’ to the genre could be significant. Can we expect a more free-flowing open-world experience in Control 2? Will there be dialogue options and choices, and other ways to shape the world around the player? It’s not exactly Remedy’s style, but the studio does blend genres.
There is a teaser for Control 2 in Alan Wake 2’s recent expansion, The Lake House. In the expansion, FBC Agent Kiran Eztevez winds up in the Old House, the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Control. There she encounters Dylan Fadden, the younger brother of Control protagonist Jesse Fadden. Dylan tells Estevez that “something is changing” and to tell Jesse that he “tried.”
Control puts you in the shoes of Jesse Faden, the newly installed Director of the Federal Bureau of Control. You must explore the organization’s headquarters, uncovering its mysteries and contending with a supernatural force named the Hiss.