When I first heard there would be a multiplayer spin-off of the X-Files-like action game Control, I expected it to pit players against one another with all the psychic powers and weird weapons that made the original game a riot to play. But FBC Firebreak, the next game from Remedy Entertainment, leans hard into the workplace-absurdity angle as players boldly steer ordinary agents to beat invaders out of their offices.

Those offices, of course, belong to the Federal Bureau of Control, the mysterious government agency players explored in Control. In a hands-off digital preview, Remedy gave media an early look at how its next game will play when it comes out in summer 2025. 

FBC Firebreak has three-player squads venturing into various environments in the Oldest House, as the FBC’s massive building is called, nested with different settings, from offices lined with shag carpet to pipe-filled corridors to dank caves. Most of the areas I saw looked straight out of Control, unchanged from when players roamed the halls with Jesse Faden, the FBC’s new director. 

Unfortunately, the Hiss — extraplanar invaders that took over FBC personnel and turned them into warped monsters — are still occupying the Oldest House six years after the events of Control. Though FBC staff members are holding on to safe territory, supplies are running low. It’s up to players to suit up and sally forth on missions to retake the offices, using a variety of weapons and tools. 

The first multiplayer game from Remedy has some guiding principles — most notably, that upcoming added content will be available to all players, not gated behind paid DLC. The studio also refused to include the engagement treadmill of daily missions and monthly grinds — “we do not want to give anybody a second job,” FBC Firebreak Game Director Mike Kayatta said in a briefing.

And of course, Remedy wants to imbue its multiplayer foray with its signature blend of horror and surrealism. But if Control’s split was, say, 70% horror and 30% surrealism, FIrebreak FBC’s ratio of the two is inverted, Kayatta said. Instead of the superpowered Faden tossing Hiss around with psychic powers, players take on the role of the FBC’s middle managers, engineers, secretaries and security guards in the fight to liberate their shadowy government offices. 

FBC Firebreak is about seeing the world of Control from another perspective, Kayatta said, and it’s inspired by works like Annihilation, True Detective and the show Silo, specifically an episode where blue-collar engineers needed to fix a generator or everyone would die. But another big inspiration was, surprisingly, Mike Rowe’s job-documenting TV series Dirty Jobs.

In development, “early on, we watched a weird old show called Dirty Jobs,” Kayatta said. “There’s so many real-life things that are just weird. What would you want to go deal with, and what would just make you nasty? And what were the tools you’d need to have?”

Fighting the Hiss as a government drone

Firebreak’s missions, called jobs, send players into specific environments with challenges and bosses — the one shown in the trailer, called Paper Chase, is set in the aforementioned shag-carpeted offices of the FBC administration section. It’s full of Hiss and, appropriately, some kind of golem made of sticky notes; the end-level boss is a colossal version that’s all torso and arms flailing at the player, like if Spider-Man’s foe Sandman was made of Post-its. 

Firebreak plays like a sort of extraction shooter. At the start of a job, players choose how difficult their run will be, with higher risk bringing higher reward. Difficulty comes in two flavors: Increasing threat level makes the Hiss fight back harder, and cranking up the clearance level will add more zones to navigate and potentially add corrupted items — with names suspiciously similar to those of the Objects of Power that appeared in Control — that can randomly appear during jobs. 

But players won’t be going in unarmed. Before each mission, they line up load-outs of class roles and equipment they’ll take into jobs (which players can switch between at checkpoints if they dislike their current kit). These include guns (shotguns, revolvers, submachine guns and more), grenades and specialized tools like the Splash Kit to soak the environment, a Jump Kit to zap foes and more. 

These ad-hoc tech pieces can have their effects combined — say, to splash enemies with water for lightning to have greater effect — which encourages teamwork. Of course, you can play solo or with just another friend, but the game is tuned to three-player squads, joining Destiny 2 and the upcoming Elden Ring Nightreign in co-op trio gaming (four players just didn’t work for balance, Remedy said).

Our hands-off preview included a lengthy look at the Paper Chase job, and while there was plenty of gunplay, there was also a lot of teamwork and tactical play — you’re less like soldiers and more like emergency responders, Remedy Entertainment Communications Director Thomas Puha emphasized. The aforementioned Post-it golems can leave whirlwinds of sticky notes that can clog your helmet and block your view, but a teammate can splash them off or you can find shower stations to hose yourself down. And we saw a few fun tools, with the signature Remedy blend of practical weirdness, like a piggy bank on a melee weapon, which when slammed against an enemy, creates a tornado of coins that sucks them in.

Players can also hunt down currencies, to spend between jobs to upgrade their gear and expand playstyles, and buy cosmetics (helmets, armor, and so on). They can also earn and equip perks with a variety of effects, including returning bullets on missed shots, switching weapons faster, reloading more quickly, or other advantages. If players equip two perks of the same type, the effects stack; equipping three extends the benefit to other players in the squad.

How FBC Firebreak fits into the Remedyverse — and stands apart

Remedy began its journey making fun, idiosyncratic games with 2001’s Max Payne, a third-person shooter blending Matrix-style bullet time with cop noir. 2010’s Alan Wake, an action shooter with a narrative leaning heavily on darkness in creativity, cemented the studio’s reputation for compelling games that weren’t afraid of weirdness, which carried through to Quantum Break in 2016 and Control in 2019, both of which hinted at greater connections between all of Remedy Entertainment’s worlds. Finally, Alan Wake 2 in 2023 solidified all this as the FBC itself prominently featured in the game’s plot.

That’s where FBC Firebreak opens up, but it’s a different game from its predecessors: Players will be moving quickly through levels and focusing on helping teammates, not taking their time picking through the details Remedy tends to weave into the fabric of its game worlds. 

“This is not a single player game where you’re kind of walking down a special path and experiencing the world from certain angles, exploring, drinking it in by yourself,” Community Manager Julius Fondem said. Remedy removed the barriers between booting up the game and shooting Hiss with your friends, ditching forced tutorials and cutscenes to get players to the action faster and keep it at the center of things.

FBC Firebreak’s multiplayer focus also forced the developers to lean away from the handcrafted Big Moments that have made previous games stand out, from Control’s Ashtray Maze to Alan Wake 2’s We Sing musical sequence. But those aren’t easily fit into a multiplayer game: If you’re playing the same Paper Chase job in FBC Firebreak over and over, do you really want to see that kind of handcrafted moment 700 times? Kayatta asked. Instead, they want players to build their own emergent, totally unplanned situations, which multiplayer games are famous for. “That’s why we’re trying to be so reliant on building a playground that can just produce those moments for us,” Kayatta said.

The developers declined to share exactly how FBC Firebreak will tie into the greater Remedyverse, which Alan Wake 2 brought together in explicit ways, and they reiterated that it’ll be its own game that won’t progress Faden’s story — players will have to wait for the confirmed and upcoming Control 2 for that. Nor will Control fans feel the need to forcibly play this multiplayer title to prepare for the full sequel — FBC Firebreak is a standalone game and tells its own story, which is less about extradimensional horrors than the horrors of office bureaucracy. 

We’ll know exactly how FBC Firebreak ties into the other games when it comes out for PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC on Steam and in the Epic Games Store, this summer.