I meant to review one game. I’ve wound up here reviewing three. Or is that seven? Several of them are very good, one of them in a way I didn’t see coming.

I’ll be as quick as I can about it. But I am going to tell you about seven years’ worth of interconnected games from one excellent game studio.

First, for a moment, please jump back with me to this past August. It’s a month before the release of Control Resonant, the next game from the highly esteemed Finnish development house Remedy Entertainment.

It dawns on me that I’ve never played more than an hour of its predecessor, the original 2019 hit game Control.

I also recall that Alan Wake 2, Remedy’s 2023’s game of the year contender, had included references to Control. I wasn’t sure how many, because, as of August, I’d only played Alan Wake 2 for about three hours three years ago. I knew the games were connected, but not really how.

I’d long known Remedy as a game studio. I had covered the them plenty. I just hadn’t kept up playing their games, not since 2016.

Now, ahead of reviewing Control Resonant, I was going to do some light catch-up.

That was the idea. Just a peek at the recent stuff.

Instead, I’ve been sucked into the Remedyverse. I’m hooked. I don’t want to leave. Today, I’m sharing my dispatches, in case you’re interested in taking the journey, too.

Since August, between reporting the news and reviewing new games, I’ve been on a Remedy kick, discovering—belatedly—the magic of a company that is in a groove of trading off making games about Control and Alan Wake, roughly their equivalents to the X-Files and Twin Peaks.

The games are all connected, even retroactively with some older Remedy releases. And the dynamic is like this: Control games are about the Federal Bureau of Control, a kind of FBI for the supernatural. Alan Wake games are about some very specific supernatural events, which have been investigated by the FBC. Control is the zoom out; Alan Wake is the zoom in.

Because of all this, what was going to be a Game File review of Control Resonant (it’s good!) is now a set of reviews of several pieces of the Remedyverse, including the one that really shocked me…