Control - Season Pass (DLC)

I finished Control's base game hungry for more Oldest House weirdness, and the Season Pass delivers exactly two more trips into that brutalist nightmare building. What you're getting is a pair of named expansions: The Foundation and AWE, both developed by Remedy Entertainment and published by 505 Games. They are not bonus missions stapled onto the ending, each is a self-contained story chapter with new side missions, new weapon mods, and a fresh batch of combat encounters built on top of Jesse Faden's existing telekinetic toolkit. The Foundation sends Jesse underground, into the cavernous bedrock beneath the Oldest House, to stop the Astral Plane from bleeding into physical reality. The tone is still pure Remedy strangeness, cryptic documents, off-kilter audio logs, lore that rewards obsessive readers while staying deliberately foggy for everyone else. It wraps up one of the base game's more prominent unanswered threads, which is satisfying, though a boss encounter or two surfaces the same uneven difficulty spikes the main campaign sometimes stumbles into. AWE is the bigger swing. It plants Jesse inside the Bureau's long-abandoned Investigations Department, where the Federal Bureau of Control filed records on Altered World Events, including the events of a very specific small-town thriller from 2010. If that framing means nothing to you, AWE still works as a tightly paced action chapter with a new darkness mechanic: stepping into unlit areas drains your focus, cutting off your powers at the worst moments. The light-based boss structure that results is interesting in concept, though the main antagonist recycles a fight pattern across several rooms in a way that wears thin before the credits. A Surge weapon form (sticky grenade launcher) is a welcome addition to Jesse's arsenal and carries usefulness back into the main game. For Remedy fans tracking the studio's connected universe, AWE is the first official handshake between Control and Alan Wake, and the implications of its ending reached forward into Alan Wake 2 and beyond. That lore payoff is real. The caveat: AWE is a story about Alan Wake filtered through Control's perspective rather than a proper Alan Wake chapter, so anyone walking in expecting survival horror will find mostly familiar third-person gunplay with extra shadow effects. Difficulty assists added alongside AWE (adjustable damage taken, energy recharge rates, even an immortality toggle) make both expansions more accessible without locking achievements, which is a practical improvement worth knowing about. The honest read on the Season Pass: neither expansion reaches the heights of the base game's standout set pieces, and AWE in particular recycles enough familiar office corridors to feel safe in its environment design. But the story content is substantive, the new mods and weapons feel earned rather than padded, and the Remedy Connected Universe thread running through both chapters makes this essential context for anyone planning to follow the studio's work into their future releases. If you finished Control and wanted more, this is more. If you barely tolerated the base game's loop, no amount of lore crossover is going to change your verdict. Alex, Scout Team