WELCOME TO THE HOUSE OF GUN

The building putting the ‘brutal’ into ‘brutalism’

The Federal Bureau Of Control’s offices are located within The Oldest House, a brutaliststyle building full of hard edges and straight lines that begin to wiggle and shift when the Hiss invade.

Creative director Mikael Kasurinen describes the architectural style as a “foundational element” in the game’s visual identity. He describes brutalism itself as “all about finding kind of a simplicity of format, an honesty in materials, what you see is what you get there, like concrete, steel, glass, wood – you see what it is, you understand how it works, and there’s some kind of pleasing simplicity to the different locations.”

These straight-laced structures symbolise everything the Bureau strives for. However, in Control, few clear-cut things remain that way.

Kasurinen elaborates, “Of course, there are areas in this world that deviate from that, and

that’s what the next point is – transformation. […] Yes, you have this brutalism. But now it’s been twisted, and corrupted into something else […] To try to revert that transformation is part of your goal. But it’s part of this world as well, that these things happen.”

Kasurinen says, “You might think initially that this is just one place, but it’s vastly more complex than that, it infinitely goes into all directions. If you take for instance, Doctor Who’s TARDIS, it’s like the same idea – it’s bigger on the inside.”

From the near-uniform concrete slabs of the research lobby, we run through shifting red hallways, foreboding walkways cloaked in shadow, a basement covered in a Technicolor coating of mould, a quarry of glistening black rock and an alternate dimension called the Astral Plane. The Oldest House is a world within one location.