As if I didn’t already have a massive backlog of cool stuff to play on Game Pass, Microsoft have revealed that Control arrives on Xbox Game Pass for PC on Thursday. Remedy’s spooky interdimensional shooter is already out on Steam, the Epic Games Store and even Xbox Game Pass for console, so it was just a matter of time really. I’m excited to jump back into it.

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If you’ve been waiting for Control‘s Epic exclusivity to end, well, wait no longer. Remedy Entertainment’s third-person spook-em-up arrived on Steam today in the form of an Ultimate Edition containing the base game and both expansions, The Foundation and AWE. As fate (read: Remedy’s marketing department) would have it, AWE launched today as well. It’s the long-rumoured Alan Wake expansion, which has you exploring a new deep dark area of The Oldest House to uncover more supernatural mysteries.

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Control

‘s new AWE DLC might technically stand for “Altered World Events” – the term the game’s FBI-but-magic organisation The Federal Bureau of Control uses for the weird stuff they investigate – but let’s be honest, we all know it’s going to be remembered as the “Alan Wake Expansion”. That’s the theme for this second and final DLC for Remedy’s third-person action-adventure, which we called an accomplished and fun version of X-Files with more guns but less Mulder when we put it on our best action games for PC list earlier in the year.

AWE is a decent chunk of DLC that adds what you’d expect: about four hours of wellying fire extinguishers down hallways, a new enemy type and a new section of the Bureau’s offices to explore. By the end, you get the nagging feeling that you’ve just played through the video game equivalent of a Marvel film’s post-credits sequence – this is, after all, a step in establishing the “Remedy Connected Universe” that started with Alan Wake’s splash onto the Xbox 360 ten years ago. If you’re a fan of Alan Wake, it doesn’t really offer any answers, just more questions. Alan himself isn’t even in it that much. But what it does> have is a really bloody good monster. Some spoilers follow.

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Remedy Entertainment have confirmed that their spooky interdimensional shooter, Control, will launch on Steam on August 27th. We kind of expected that this would be the case, seeing as it had a one-year Epic exclusivity deal which logically would come to an end on that date, but it’s nice to finally have it official. The game will release on Valve’s storefront in the form of an Ultimate Edition, which will have the base game as well as both expansions.

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Remedy’s spooky-ooky sci-fi shooter Control last night added the promised Expeditions mode, launched in the middle of The Game Awards, sending Jesse to fight through challenging combat arenas. That’s the kind of trouble you’ll get into when you go touching a cursed magical jukebox. If you want more spooky places to explore, a new way to get loot, and a whole lot of new violence, this is for you. If you want more story, you’ll need to wait for the paid story expansions to start rolling. Remedy also announced that the first of those is coming on March 26th.

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Epic Games Store exclusives are everyone’s favourite subject that nobody dreads writing about at all. Fortunately, some specific numbers have recently emerged to hopefully replace the speculation.

Remedy Entertainment’s Control was subject to an exclusivity deal, as we reported back in March. Epic apparently valued Control at a chunky $10.45 million (roughly 8.43 million, or almost twenty train tickets), according to recent financial report released by Digital Bros, the parent company of Control’s publisher, 505 Games.

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If it isn’t obvious, the best way to experience Control is to go in blind. Don’t let people on the internet spoil the surprises, because gosh, does Control lean on its surprises. It’s much easier to ask interesting questions than answer them, and Control’s main trick involves putting inexplicable stuff in front of you then making jokes about a paranormal bureaucracy that can’t explain it. The other trick is chunky telekinesis noises.

Despite being unusually excited by trailers and preview events, I quickly grew tired with both. Until the bit where it turned into a music video. Spoilers, sorry.

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There’s already been a lot of talk about the relationship between Remedy Games’ Control and Alan Wake. Control is a game where alternate dimensions have begun creeping into our own, and among the many Easter Eggs that this narrative device allows for are a couple intriguing callbacks to our Alan. These come in the form of Altered World Events, or AWEs – those damned leaky dimensions – and the supporting in-game documents which report on these events. From a secret area that triggers his appearance, to documents that track his movement in the aftermath of the 2010 game. Very curious.

Now in a newly released content roadmap, the developer appear to be teasing an official Alan Wake crossover expansion coming to Control.

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Like Alan Wake before it, Control is one tough customer when it comes to getting smooth PC performance. As you may have already seen in my dedicated Control RTX ray tracing guide, even some of today’s best graphics cards struggle to run this eerie behemoth of a game at higher resolutions, so I thought it was high time to have a look at what all the other non-RTX Nvidia and AMD graphics cards can make of it as well. If you want to know the best way to get Control running at a smooth 60fps at 1920×1080, 2560×1440 and (in a few cases) 4K, read on.

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If your PC’s been struggling to run Remedy’s new telekinetic shooter Control this past week, you may have been desperately searching for a way to turn off its rather strong motion blur effect. Alas, no such option exists right now, but the good news is that it will do very soon as part of Control’s next big update.

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