It spoils nothing, I hope, to reduce a game as luxurious and uncanny as Control to just four words. Here goes, then: Hell is an office. Remedy's latest takes place inside the Oldest House, the austere, echoing and inhumanly vast headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Control. The FBC is an agency that deals with unusual horrors and is, as of your arrival, in the process of being overwhelmed by them.

Unusual horrors are not actually that unusual in games, though, so the peculiar genius of Control is that its oddness often lurks in its workaday setting rather than the many dizzying glimpses into the void on offer. There is something wonderfully perverse about so many of the things I marvelled at in Control. Sure, here is a magical winter forest growing out of an old storage room, but look at how convincingly placed these snowfalls of Post-it notes are! I can throw desk chairs around with my mind, which is great, but it's so much better when one of the desk chairs in question hits a wall of filing cabinets and the doors of the cabinets ripple, woozily, outwards and away from the point of impact! That I could watch pretty much forever.

This blend of the paranormal and the clerical works so well because offices are weird already. Testify! What are offices if not places where ill-matched strangers come together in the name of some nebulous and often deeply abstracted common cause? Offices are filled with monstera deliciosa and water coolers, but they are also filled with grudges and arcane rituals and human secrets and mysteries. Certain phrases act like incantations in offices: we've-always-done-it-this-way-that's-why and only-Henry-knows-how-to-make-copies-on-both-sides-of-the-page-and-he's-off-today.

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UPDATE 2.30PM: Speaking to Eurogamer, Alan Wake developer Remedy has teased the possibility of a multiplatform release for its previously Microsoft-owned hero.

"The only thing we want to clarify, now that Remedy owns the publishing rights, is that we could bring Alan Wake to different platforms if we so choose," a Remedy spokesperson told me this afternoon.

"We have nothing to announce for now. We are fully focused on Control releasing on 27th August."

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I think maybe the number one rule about anything made by David Lynch is that you should never write about anything made by David Lynch. I'm going to break that rule - just quickly I promise - to say there was a moment that felt straight out of the Lynchian playbook in the Control demo I played at E3, and it was wonderful.

Dropped into things a few hours into the game, one of the first tasks I had in my slice of Control was to find a janitor. I tracked him down and found him in a little back room (there is a wonderful simplicity to tracking things down in Control - in fact it's much of what the game is - but more on that in a moment).

To get here I fought through people and monsters, red reality-distorting fields of light in a windowless, brutalist government building, ripping up walls and floors and office desk chairs as I went. Chaos, by way of Ikea. And after that I opened a door and he just stood there. A janitor, with a mop and a bucket.

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Even if you did happen to be in Finland, Remedy Games is still off the beaten track. You need to drive out of Helsinki along snow-ploughed roads, across a bridge, over a frozen lake where people play ice hockey and on to the next town, a place named Espoo, to eventually find the studio's new office. The building, a brutalist pile of concrete and glass, was built for a private medical firm. Now, a recently-added machine in the entrance takes a mugshot of your face and immediately emails it to the staff member you're meeting. "You have to do this," I'm told, "since some fans managed to get in".

I'm sort of impressed they made the journey, but once you're within Remedy's walls you're reminded why they made their trip. The studio has cultivated an offbeat personality over the years - the same personality it poured into cult hits like Alan Wake and Max Payne. There's a sauna in the basement, I'm told, as we pass a row of seaside deck chairs on a landing facing south, ready for the few minutes of bright sunlight Finland gets once in a while. And now more than ever, I think, Remedy embodies a sense of proud independence - worn outwardly through the ubiquitous staff hoodies which act like an optional uniform, and inwardly by the bodies which toiled for five long years building too-ambitious TV-series-slash-video-game hybrid Quantum Break for Microsoft. More on that, though, in a bit.

It's not too much of a narrative leap to see this slightly weird building in the virtual one I'm here to explore - its cavernous concrete spaces and branching corridors, cramped staircases and side-rooms. You probably know Control's backstory already: lead character Jesse Faden has inherited the directorship of a secret US government agency designed to investigate supernatural phenomena, and which has unwisely set up shop within the eye of the paranormal storm. It's here, within the Bureau of Control's headquarters, Jesse will prove she's the right person for the job, rid the building of possessed former agents, and uncover answers to why things have gotten so weird. But weird, I'm happy to say, is a lot of fun.

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