How do you follow up a game as critically beloved as Control? If you’re Remedy, by doing something completely different.
While a proper Control sequel is currently in development, Remedy will return to that universe this summer in FBC: Firebreak. The upcoming co-op shooter is a total left turn for the studio, trading in its creepy narrative games for something much wackier. Squads of three will team up to take down the Hiss, kill hordes of possessed sticky notes, and hopefully return to their middle management desk jobs alive. It’s an absurd premise that feels tonally far apart from Control’s world at first glance, but somehow makes total sense in its own weird way.
Ahead of its new trailer reveal at Future Games Show, Digital Trends learned much more about FBC: Firebreak’s finer details, from its multiplayer structure to its character customization. Though it’s very different from anything the studio has made, Remedy explains that the bombastic shooter just sits on the far end of a spectrum that the studio has always operated on.
Workplace comedy
In FBC: Firebreak, the Federal Bureau of Control has completely lost control of The Oldest House. It’s now flooded with the Hiss, as all of the FBC’s protocols have completely failed. To combat the problem, the agency tasks its employees — from secretaries to middle managers — with venturing into the Oldest House and clearing out the Hiss. It’s definitely not a suicide mission. No way.
If that premise sounds unusually silly for a Remedy game, that’s because it is. Rather than following the moody surrealism of Control, FBC: Firebreak practically looks like a workplace comedy that has more in common with Lethal Company at a glance. During the preview session, Remedy showed off an extended look at one of the shooter’s missions, dubbed Paper Chase. In it, a team of cleaners is tasked with shooting millions of evil sticky notes breeding in the Oldest House like rabbits. The image of workers torching walls full of yellow notes with flamethrowers is hysterical; it’s the kind of screwball humor you’d expect if The Office went sci-fi.
While previous Remedy games took clear inspiration from film and TV, the studio told me that they weren’t using pop culture touchpoints in the same way here. They aren’t pulling from Office Space; their only north star is Control. Remedy wanted to build within that well-defined universe without muddying it with outside influences. That would naturally be a tricky task considering that FBC: Firebreak has a much lighter, comedic tone (and even look) compared to Control.
To thread the needle, Remedy had to make sure FBC: Firebreak still had a tonal link to Control even in its wackiness. During the preview event, Game Director Mike Kayatta told Digital Trends that Control is a tightwire act between horror tension and absurdity. The team simply turned the dial to the left this time to play up the inherently funny moments of that universe.
“The strategy with this game was not to betray Control and we didn’t want to take it out of that space,” Kayatta tells Digital Trends. “But we also knew that following who knows what sort of protagonist — because, after all, the players who play this become the protagonists — how do we deliver on that properly for them? So the strategy was to take the same ingredients and invert them. Yes, we lean more into the absurd side of Control, but we’re not trying to invent a new kind of humor that you would have never seen in the universe. And of course, we do have that horror and tense edge as well, although it does kind of step back a little bit to make room for some of the more cleare fun and joyful aspects that are also present in Control.”
Co-op chaos
The humor is FBC: Firebreak‘s most eye-catching feature, but there’s an interesting PVE shooter pitch underneath the comedy. The loop here is that squads of up to three players take on different jobs, which are designed to be completed in 30 minutes or less. Each job includes a location, an objective, and a different crisis spread across up to three zones within a level. Remedy wants this to be the kind of co-op game that players can immediately hop into together with no wait, so there aren’t cutscenes, tutorials, or other barriers to entry in the way of simply loading in.
All that players need to do after picking a job is customize their load out. They can equip cosmetic items like helmets and sprays, but the most important part of preparation is the Crisis Kit. That essentially determines a squad member’s loadout and playstyle, as each one is built around a key tool. In a gameplay snippet I saw, the player could equip a water-based splash kit that could soak sticky notes and put out fires, while another could go for a maintenance kit that lets them fix things in the environment. Each player will also equip a gun and grenade to go with it.
That’s rounded out by a perk system, as each player can equip a set of perks that tweak the gameplay. One will allow players to put out a fire on their body by jumping up and down. Equipping two perks of the same kind will boost that perk’s power while equipping three will share it with the rest of the squad. Perks can be bought with the in-game currency earned from missions (there will also be some customization items purchasable with real money).
Players can also change the difficulty of a mission by setting a threat level and a clearance level, the latter of which determines how many zones players fight through. The higher the risk, the more rewards and currency players can earn. The tension of a job comes from determining how much time players spend in the level maximizing their rewards, as staying too long will increase the threat.
The actual gameplay seems fairly familiar based on what I’ve seen. The sequence shown to press threw a squad into the Paper Chase mission, where they shot at the Hiss and destroyed as many sticky notes as possible along the way. Crisis kits came into play across the video, as one player used their electricity-focused build to shock the Hiss, while another used their maintenance build to turn valves and start the flow of water from a machine. There’s some goofiness baked into the kits too, as one player had a melee weapon that they could attach a piggy bank to and smash it over monsters’ heads, sending coins flying across the screen. It all culminated in a battle against an enormous entity made up of sticky notes, like some sort of Ghostbusters villain.
FBC: Firebreak feels like the kind of game I’ll need to actually play to fully understand. At a distance, it looks like a fairly standard co-op shooter with a good sense of humor. It seems fun, just not as creatively distinct as the studio’s usual projects yet. Remedy does at least seem like it’s being careful to avoid the traps that have killed other games like it. It’s not trying to create a constantly updated live service game (though it will get free post-launch updates). Rather, it’s looking to make a sturdy, mid-priced shooter that players will want to return to without forced FOMO.
I’m willing to give Remedy the benefit of the doubt here. It has earned that after the one-two punch of Control and Alan Wake 2 — though it’s easy to forget that the studio helped craft the single-player for the critically panned CrossfireX between those two projects. Even if it just ends up being a B-game in the grand scheme of its storied career, it at least looks like a legitimately fun one that’s got a personality all its own. I can think of far worse ways to fill the void until Control 2 comes out.
FBC: Firebreak launches this summer for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. It will be available on Xbox Game Pass and PS Plus at launch, and Remedy is aiming for it to be Steam Deck verified as well.
