Remedy Entertainment is a Finnish games studio with an unusually recognisable house style: third-person action, supernatural fiction dressed in bureaucratic clothing, and storytelling borrowed from film and television. The Verge has reviewed its latest game, Control Resonant.
A studio with a signature
Most large game studios are known for a genre or a franchise. Remedy is known for a manner. Its games are almost always third-person, almost always built around a single protagonist with an unusual ability, and almost always narrated in a self-aware register that treats the supernatural as an administrative problem to be filed, catalogued and contained.
The visual grammar is consistent too. Remedy games lean on live-action footage, television-style interludes, documents and audio logs, and long corridors of institutional architecture — offices, motels, research facilities — that slowly stop obeying ordinary rules. The result is a body of work that players and critics tend to identify on sight, which is why a phrase like “nobody does it like Remedy” circulates at all. It is shorthand for a set of design habits rather than a claim about quality.
Control Resonant is the studio’s newest release in that lineage. The Verge reports that it is set in a distorted version of New York City and built around the manipulation of gravity, allowing the player to flip, twist and fly through spaces that the reviewer compared to the architecture of Inception. The Verge’s central point is about traversal: of the many ways games have found to move a player across a large space, it found this one distinctively exhilarating.
Finnish origins
Remedy was founded in Finland in the mid-1990s and remains headquartered there, part of a national games industry that grew from a demoscene and PC-development culture into one of Europe’s more visible development clusters. Its breakthrough was Max Payne, a third-person shooter released in 2001 that popularised “bullet time” — a slow-motion diving mechanic drawn directly from contemporary action cinema — and told its story through static comic-book panels rather than animated cutscenes.
That combination set the template: an action system with one memorable twist, wrapped in a narrative device imported from another medium. Alan Wake, released in 2010, replaced bullet time with a torch that burns away supernatural darkness and replaced the comic panels with the structure of a television serial, complete with episode breaks and a writer-protagonist whose manuscript pages predict the plot. Quantum Break went further still, alternating playable chapters with filmed live-action episodes.
Control, released in 2019, was the studio’s clearest statement of its own preoccupations. It placed the player inside a single building, the headquarters of a secretive government agency tasked with investigating paranormal objects, and gave them telekinesis and levitation as the primary means of both fighting and moving. Its sequel Alan Wake 2 returned to the earlier series and was widely honoured for its direction and art.
The formula in practice
What holds the modern games together is less a plot than an architecture of ideas. Remedy has described its recent titles as part of a connected universe, with characters, organisations and events from one series appearing in another — an approach closer to a shared comics continuity than to a conventional sequel chain. Expansions and crossovers have carried that further, and a co-operative multiplayer title, FBC: Firebreak, returned to the same institutional setting from a different angle.
Technically, the studio builds on its own in-house engine, Northlight, which is one reason its games share a look: heavy use of real-time lighting, reflective surfaces, and environments that can be rearranged mid-play. That capacity matters for the design. When a Remedy game wants a room to fold, tilt or repeat itself, the shift is rendered in front of the player rather than hidden behind a loading screen.
The traversal point the Verge raises follows from this. In an era where most large games solve movement with vehicles, grappling hooks or fast travel, altering the player’s relationship to gravity turns navigation itself into the spectacle. Details of Control Resonant beyond the Verge’s description — its release timing, its scope, how it connects to the studio’s earlier stories — are not established by the material available here, and are best checked against the publisher’s own announcements.
Common misconceptions
The most frequent misunderstanding is that Remedy makes horror games. Its work borrows the furniture of horror — darkness, isolation, possession — but the games are structured as action titles with generous combat systems, and their tone is often closer to dry comedy than to dread. The bureaucratic framing is a joke as much as a threat.
A second is that the studio makes open worlds. Some of its games have used open or semi-open spaces, but its most characteristic settings are enclosed and vertical: one building, one town, one facility, explored and re-explored as it changes. The Verge’s framing places Control Resonant in a city, which would represent a larger canvas than the single tower of Control, though the scale of that world is not detailed in the material here.
A third is that “connected universe” means the games must be played in order. Shared continuity in this sense generally rewards prior knowledge without requiring it, and the studio’s individual titles have historically been designed to be legible on their own. Readers should not assume otherwise without checking.
Finally, the live-action elements are sometimes read as a budget-saving shortcut. In practice they are expensive, involving shoots, casting and post-production alongside the game itself, and they have been a deliberate authorial choice across two decades rather than a compromise.
Where to look next
Anyone approaching the studio’s work for the first time will find Control the most efficient entry point, since it contains the clearest version of the house style in a single self-contained setting. Alan Wake 2 is the more ambitious piece of storytelling and the better demonstration of the engine.
For context rather than play, the studio publishes material about its engine and its development process, and Finnish industry bodies have documented the growth of the country’s games sector. Critical writing on the “weird fiction” revival — the strand of contemporary horror-adjacent literature concerned with bureaucracies confronting the inexplicable — offers useful background, as those novels and the studio’s recent games draw on the same well. For Control Resonant specifically, the Verge’s review is the source of the claims summarised above.
Frequently asked questions
What is Remedy Entertainment?
Remedy Entertainment is a video game developer based in Finland, founded in the mid-1990s. It is known for third-person action games with strong narrative framing, including the Max Payne, Alan Wake and Control series. The studio develops on its own engine, Northlight, and has a recognisable style combining supernatural plots, institutional settings and techniques borrowed from film and television.
What is Control Resonant?
Control Resonant is a Remedy game reviewed by the Verge. According to that review, it is set in a distorted version of New York City and is built around manipulating gravity, letting the player flip, twist and fly through the air across environments the reviewer likened to the architecture of Inception. Further details, including release timing and scope, are not established by the material summarised here.
What is the Remedy Connected Universe?
It is the studio’s term for the shared continuity linking several of its games, principally the Alan Wake and Control series. Characters, organisations and events cross between them, and expansions have deepened those links. The arrangement resembles a shared comics universe more than a numbered sequel chain, and individual games have generally been designed to be understandable without prior knowledge.
Why do Remedy games use live-action footage?
Filmed sequences have been part of the studio’s approach for years, most extensively in Quantum Break, which alternated playable chapters with live-action episodes. The technique reflects a long-standing interest in television and film structure, visible earlier in the comic-book panels of Max Payne and the episodic breaks of Alan Wake. It is an authorial choice rather than a cost-saving measure.
What is the Oldest House in Control?
The Oldest House is the headquarters of the secretive agency at the centre of Control, a government body concerned with paranormal objects and events. It functions as the game’s entire setting: an office building whose interior rearranges itself, expands beyond its exterior dimensions and hides far stranger spaces behind ordinary doors. It is the clearest example of the studio’s bureaucratic-supernatural premise.
Sources and further reading
- The Verge — the review of Control Resonant that prompted this article, including its description of gravity-based traversal and the game’s New York setting.
- Remedy Entertainment’s own corporate and developer communications — published descriptions of its games, its engine and its connected-universe approach.
- Established games trade press archives — contemporaneous coverage and reviews of the studio’s earlier releases.
- Reference works and academic writing on video game history — background on third-person shooters, bullet time and the Finnish games industry.
Surfaced from the rss:verge signal “a video game review”. AI-assisted draft, editorially reviewed.
