Control - The Foundation (DLC)

The Foundation is the first paid story expansion for Control, and it does exactly what the label says: it goes deeper. Summoned by the Board through a Hotline call, Jesse is sent to the literal lowest level of the Oldest House, a subterranean cave system where the Astral Plane is bleeding into physical reality and a mysterious obsidian monolith called the Nail has been shattered. Her job is to repair it. That's the setup, and it takes roughly four to six hours to work through, depending on how many side missions and collectibles you chase. Two new abilities, Shape and Fracture, define the DLC's mechanical identity. Shape lets Jesse extend crystal formations from walls to create traversal paths or spike enemies out of the ground, while Fracture lets her detonate those same crystals for combat use. The game makes you pick one first, but you get both eventually so the choice is mostly a question of which you want earlier. They are interesting additions to Jesse's toolkit without dramatically changing the combat rhythm you know from the base game. The new Hiss Sharpened enemy type, a fast teleporting melee attacker, is a genuine threat and does a good job of making you think about positioning and use those new abilities rather than relying purely on the Service Weapon and Launch. The cave environments also occasionally bleed into Astral Plane geometry, creating sections where you are suddenly crossing black cubic platforms over bottomless chasms, which keeps the setting from feeling like a one-note cave crawl. Where the DLC gets some fair criticism is structure. Missions run more linear here than in the main game, less freeform wandering and more directed corridors. The crystal platforming sections, where you spawn a ledge, jump, spawn another ledge, repeat, are serviceable but do not offer much puzzle-solving satisfaction. And if you came to The Foundation hoping it would start tying off Control's many dangling story threads about Jesse, Dylan, or Polaris, adjust expectations: this expansion is focused primarily on the Oldest House's pre-Bureau history, head of operations Helen Marshall's fate, and what the Board is really up to. That lore is genuinely fascinating, and there are audio logs and documents that rank among Control's best written material, but the main narrative wraps abruptly and leaves most personal threads untouched. For fans of the base game, none of this is a dealbreaker. The atmosphere is intact, the weird Remedy tone is fully present, side missions include some of the more bizarrely inventive moments in the DLC, and there are new Objects of Power to cleanse and collectibles to track down including a set of eight hidden Maneki-Neko cat statues. The Foundation does not try to be more than a disciplined first chapter, and at that length and scope it holds up well. If you bounced off Control's combat or its punishing checkpoint structure, nothing here changes your mind. But if the Oldest House already has its hooks in you, going underground is worth the trip.

Alex · Scout Team

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