Andrew Websterįire Emblem: Three Houses is a lot of things. You won’t have all the answers at the end, but Control will be the most fun you have reading redacted emails. There’s a wonderfully cyclical structure at play: in order to learn more, you have to explore and unlock powers, which in turn lets you reach new areas to find even more secrets. While Control is an action game - one filled with plenty of shootouts, a magical gun, and superhero-style psychic powers - at its heart it’s about exploration, as you delve further into the building in an attempt to understand its many mysteries. The atmosphere is incredible: you’ll wander into rooms full of floating bodies, all chanting in unison, set amid otherwise mundane office furniture. It’s a sprawling brutalist structure, one hiding all kinds of unsettling secrets. It’s not long before things go wrong.Īlmost the entirety of the game takes place inside The Oldest House, a strangely appropriate title for the FBC’s headquarters. The latest action game from Alan Wake studio Remedy, Control is a supernatural thriller where players take on the role of Jesse, the newly appointed director of a paranormal government agency called the Federal Bureau of Control. What would happen if you took The X-Files, threw it in a blender with the Southern Reach trilogy, and seasoned generously with elements of Metroid and Zelda? You’d get something that looks a lot like Control.

Whether you’re playing a hopping rabbit or an ambulatory wall, you’re just moving pixels on a screen - but one of those things is still much, much funnier. It’s also a delightful exploration of how video games build narratives around completely abstract rules. So in order to actually complete each level, you have to rewrite its rules on the fly by pushing words around the screen, ignoring the seemingly intuitive connections between objects and their purpose.īaba Is You adds a new dimension to a familiar kind of spatial puzzle system, while still delivering that system’s satisfying blend of sudden inspiration and methodical trial and error. There’s no logical reason that “you” have to be Baba instead of a wall, that a door should be unlocked with a key instead of a rock, or that the flag needs to signify winning instead of instant death. The trick, however, is that all these symbols are arbitrary.

The puzzle game starts by asking the player (you) to move a little white rabbit (Baba) to a golden flag (win!), navigating standard virtual obstacles like walls, water, locked doors, and rocks. Baba Is You is both disarmingly cute and confoundingly clever.

Top 10 best video games 2016