Remedy's 2019 game takes place inside the Oldest House, the headquarters of a secret agency that studies objects that break physics, and the building is the reason to play it. It is Brutalist, it rearranges itself, and the entire game is set inside it - a single continuous Metroidvania-style space where new abilities open earlier corridors. Jesse Faden arrives looking for her brother and becomes Director by picking up a gun that chose her. Combat is the studio's best: a service weapon with swappable forms, a fully destructible environment, and telekinesis that rips a chunk of concrete out of a wall and throws it, which makes every office a munitions dump. Around that sits an enormous amount of found text - redacted memos, training films, a live-action puppet show - that builds the New Weird tone more effectively than the cutscenes. The Ashtray Maze sequence, set to a licensed track, is one of the great set pieces of the generation. It was also one of the first games where ray tracing was clearly worth having.
