The Making Of…
How redefining the ‘Remedy game’ led the Finnish studio to reinvent itself
How redefining the ‘Remedy dy game’ with Control led the e Finnish studio to reinvent itself
Somewhere in the depths of the Oldest House, Control’s sprawling universeinside-a-building setting, sits a rubber duck. You’ll likely stumble across it early on, maybe rifle through the documents and recordings that describe how this seemingly innocuous bath toy imprints on a person and follows them, quacking, until they’re driven to the point of madness or – in the case of one poor researcher – cardiac arrest. But it’s sealed behind a wall of glass, and actually getting your hands on that ducky won’t be possible for hours.
This style of Metroidvania design – where a player encounters an obstacle, makes a mental note until they’ve unlocked the relevant ability, then finally returns much later – was completely new to the team at Remedy Entertainment. Before Control, the Finnish studio had spent the best part of 20 years, from the original Max Payne through to Quantum Break, refining what a ‘Remedy game’ looked like: action games with a narrative that led you through a string of tightly designed set-pieces. Games in which, as senior level designer Joonas Kruus puts it, “once you go past a sequence, you never return there.” Control totally changed that, dropping the player into an interconnected world inspired by the team’s love for the Dark Souls games. “And now there’s always a possibility to return to the same location multiple times, from multiple different angles, with different missions. That was definitely a big challenge.”
“We simply hadn’t worked like that before,” game director Mikael Kasurinen agrees – and he’d know, as a Remedy veteran who joined all the way back in 2001. But breaking away from a linear structure wasn’t the only complication for the studio. There was also the matter of the player’s ability set. As protagonist Jesse Faden, you gradually unlock a suite of superpowers ranging from mind control to levitation. The latter is the ability you’re meant to use to reach that rubber duck, by floating your way up to a gap in the ceiling, but creative players were able to find their own solution, using a power you gain much earlier: telekinesis, known in Control as Launch. “If you are patient, you can stack boxes for five minutes and get there without levitation, even at this point,” senior level designer AnneMarie Grönroos says. “And many people did.” Remedy games had always handed players physics-warping powers, but giving them the freedom and sandbox to mess around with those powers? As communications director Thomas Puha says: “That wasn’t something that you did in a Remedy game before.”
Level designers also had to deal with the fact that they had no way of knowing exactly which abilities a player has access to when they arrive in an area. Some of Jesse’s powers are locked away behind campaign missions, but others can be found – or missed – by exploring the world. “So, we had to design all of the main mission flows in a way that even the players who are not going to get those skills, they are still able to proceed,” Kruus says. This was tricky, but it could have been much trickier if Remedy had stuck with the original plan. “I was of the opinion initially that I didn’t want any mandatory powers,” Kasurinen says. “Like, you can play through the game without ever getting Launch.” It was Kruus who eventually talked him out of it, arguing “you’re going to lose out on certain kinds of puzzles, it’s going to weaken the experience of the main missions.”
This was just one of a few dead ends that Remedy bumped up against as it navigated how the style of game the studio was used to making, and the style it wanted to make, fit together. For example, something the team admired about Dark Souls was its firm refusal to hold the player’s hand. So, from the very beginning of Control’s development, it was decided: there would be no quest marker pointing the way to your destination, no GPSstyle directions to guide you. That all remains true of the final game, but the original intent was to go further still.
“Initially, we didn’t even have a map,” Kasurinen says. At least not one you could call up at will – an early idea was to have maps printed on walls, forcing players to pay attention to every single detail of their surroundings. “I remember thinking, ‘Well, I don’t think it’s the end of the world if somebody gets lost.‘” But in Control’s large, vertically-stacked and occasionally shifting environments, the ceiling for just how lost a player could get was about as high as the Oldest House’s own. “It became clear that, no, the player needs to have a relational understanding of where they are and what direction they should, on a high level, be going in.”
Another challenge was checkpointing. This one was a struggle throughout production, and it remains one of the most common criticisms of the finished game – as Kasurinen and co are well aware. When we bring it up, there’s resigned laughter and suggestions that maybe we dedicate an entire post-mortem just to this one question. “It’s another example of us going into territory that is new,” Kruus says. “We’ve handled things in a certain way in the past, and so we kind of defaulted to that same thinking here as well.”
There’s a noticeable dash of Dark Souls to Control’s checkpointing system – most of the time, dying will send you back to the last control point you captured, often leading to a lengthy walk of shame that doesn’t quite fit in a game that’s otherwise fantastic at empowering players. “For some parts of development, the situation was worse,” Grönroos says. “There were half the amount of checkpoints there are in the final game.”
Everyone agrees that this was an example of Remedy having to learn on the job. “We’re still on the path of refining the way we work, especially with this type of game,” Kasurinen says. “This is still new for us.” It’s not quite a solved problem now, but the team feels like it now has a much better handle on how checkpointing can work in this style of game.
“WE’RE STILL ON THE PATH OF REFINING THE WAY WE WORK, ESPECIALLY WITH THIS TYPE OF GAME. THIS IS STILL NEW FOR US”
“You can see the benefits already in the expansions,” Kasurinen says. “We’re definitely going to have to think carefully about [checkpointing] in whatever we do next.”
Indeed, there’s a sense that while Control is a success on its own terms, its development was also very much part of Remedy laying the foundations for the future. And not just in a game design sense – the studio had to reinvent its entire way of working. “How we build tools and workflows, how artists and designers and technical people work together, there’s a certain way for us to do things,” Kasurinen says. “And suddenly that approach had to be changed to support this new kind of thinking.” Kasurinen refers to it as a “cultural shift” for the studio. For himself and Sam Lake – Control’s chief writer, Remedy’s creative director and the occasionally literal face of the studio – this meant, ironically enough, letting go of a little control. Lake worked up a screenplay that laid out the beats of the story and the content of the game’s main missions, but the responsibility for filling out Control’s world was handed to other members of the team more than ever before. “We had other writers writing the side-missions,” Kasurinen says. “That was actually a big change for us.”
Meanwhile, the game’s four level design leads were each given ownership of one sector of the Oldest House: Executive, Containment, Maintenance and Research. Major elements of the game grew out of this collaborative process. The Mold, Control’s second enemy faction, was completely absent from Lake’s outline, while the Ashtray Maze grew from a single line in the synopsis – “Jesse puts on the Walkman and passes through the maze” – to what is arguably the highlight of the entire game. Because the Maze is located inside Research, the sector assigned to Grönroos, it was her responsibility to translate this into actual gameplay.
“At the start of it, I was thinking of having some kind of puzzle, but that really didn’t go well with the idea of having a song there and driving the gameplay. I had this premonition of someone getting stuck in the maze and there’s a song playing on loop while you’re tr ying to solve a puzzle, and that sounded horrible,” she says. “So I started thinking about how I could make it feel like an actual maze.”
The idea Grönroos landed on was that, once you have the Walkman, the Maze is actually
tr ying to help the player – “It’s opening up all the correct ways and closing all the incorrect ways,” she says – but the Hiss corruption is stopping it from working properly, hence the added combat and platforming challenges. She built a small prototype in a couple of hours, just a few walls opening and closing, and quickly realised she’d hit on something that worked. “You have this little moment of disorientation, and it feels like a maze in that moment, but you don’t actually have to find the path because you see it happening there in front of you.”
At this point, the team didn’t know what track or even genre of music would be playing on the Walkman – the outline mentioned a tango, an idea that found its way into a completely different part of the game – so Grönroos designed the Maze around broader musical principles. The section begins with an intro, then moves to “an alternating sequence of slow paths and quick paths” intended to reflect the verse-chorus structure, and then an outro. With this greybox structure laid out, Grönroos went to Remedy’s concept artists to ask, “How do we make this abstract place with all the white walls feel like something actually interesting?” They came back with a hotel concept that tipped its fedora to the Coen brothers movie Barton Fink, giving the segment its iconic art-deco look.
As for the way the Maze’s walls reknit themselves in front of you to form a path, that was down to technical animator Vladislav Kazakov – Kasurinen credits his first VFX pass as the moment it really clicked just how special this segment could be. “You don’t often see experiences like this in games,” he remembers thinking. “That was a huge moment for me.” While in some ways the design of the Ashtray Maze might seem a little closer to the kind of games Remedy was used to making – a tightly designed set-piece led by one person’s vision – it was formed through the same collaborative process that shaped the rest of Control. “There wasn’t a single ‘aha’ moment by one person who suddenly says, ‘I want to do a shifting maze happening in a motel that looks like it’s from Barton Fink featuring a heavy metal song,‘” Kasurinen says. “It’s kind of a crazy combination of elements that have come together.”
This much, at least, was familiar to Remedy. “It’s never the whole thing right from the get-go, all planned together. It’s more like you make one decision, lock it down, and that leads to three new decisions that you then need to make. Like for instance, using “Take Control” as the song clearly meant that this can’t be an experience where you go through slowly. It needs to be energetic, it needs to have a sense of momentum, it needs to feature combat, so there’s this logical path to follow. And then there are these moments where you clearly see that this was the right call,” Kasurinen says. “And that’s how it always is.”