With FBC: Firebreak, Remedy wants to tell a different kind of story

The Verge

14-05-2025

Finnish studio Remedy is best known for its single-player action games, like the survival horror of Alan Wake and the supernatural thriller Control. With FBC: Firebreak, the developer is going in a different direction. It's the studio's first multiplayer release: a three-player co-op shooter set in the universe of Control. But while it won't have the more traditional cinematic storytelling the studio has become known for, that doesn't mean Remedy is abandoning its narrative roots. Instead, it is trying to explore them in a new genre. 'This game actually has quite a bit of narrative design thinking in it, especially because there is not a lot of room for direct storytelling,' says game director Mike Kayatta.
Firebreak is set a few years after the events of Control, after which a building known as the Oldest House — the NYC headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Control, a government organization that investigates the supernatural — was sealed off to prevent a deadly force called the Hiss from getting out. But there were still people inside. While many of them were FBC bureaucrats and office workers, Firebreak follows members of the titular emergency unit, who serve as the first responders keeping everyone else (relatively) safe. That means venturing out into the Oldest House to fix machinery, eradicate the Hiss, and investigate other paranormal situations. Also, there are a lot of sticky notes, and you have to shower quite a bit.
I was able to play through a few missions of Firebreak at Remedy's offices, and the game feels very different from the studio's previous work. It's a first-person shooter that relies heavily on cooperation. In each mission, you and two other players are let loose in the Oldest House to complete specific goals; in one of them, we had to repair the machinery that controlled the building's ventilation, and in another we had to clear away a growing wave of sticky notes that covered every surface. In some cases, the missions had multiple layers to them. After clearing out the sticky notes, for instance, we eventually fought our way to a gigantic boss monster made of even more stickies.
In some ways, Firebreak seems like a traditional multiplayer shooter. You can equip different types of guns, toss grenades, and you're often up against hordes of the Hiss, which behave a lot like swarming zombies. As you progress, you earn currency to put toward upgrading your gear, and you can purchase new skins and sprays like in Fortnite. Each player also has to select a 'crisis kit,' which includes both special abilities — like letting you jump high in the air — as well as specific tools. One has a wrench for repairing machines, while another has a hose for putting out fires.
In my brief experience, the game's structure necessitated coordination. You can't just run into the Oldest House, guns blazing, and expect to survive. Over voice chat, my team was constantly yelling directions and warnings at each other, giving a heads up that a fresh wave of Hiss was coming or sending the person with the right tool to repair something. Often, these repairs were life-or-death necessities. Scattered around each level were facilities to refill your ammo or shower (which removes status ailments and also replenishes your health), but they often lacked power, meaning you couldn't get bullets or health until you got them up and running.
It was a chaotic mess (in a good way), but as with Control, what struck me most about Firebreak was the world itself. It's just so delightfully weird, infusing a bland office space with a sinister tone. Office cubicles become cover in shootouts, while those sticky notes are like an invasive species, smothering everything — including you, if you can't make it to a shower in time. Unlike Control, however, Firebreak is reliant almost entirely on its world to tell the story. There are no cutscenes to watch or audio logs to uncover. Instead, you sort out what's happening by being in this place, and both listening to the little bits of chatter between characters and observing the state of the Oldest House. Or you can try to suss it out anyways, but I'm still not sure why a giant rubber duck started following me in one level.
Kayatta likens this storytelling technique to hearing stories from firefighters in the field. 'We're not telling a beginning to end story,' he explains. 'A lot of that is because the people inside the game are talking to themselves, and they're filling that narrative space for us.' The decision was made in part so as not to interrupt a bunch of friends playing together, letting you and your co-op partners fill in the space with your own chatter. But the structure is also designed to help Firebreak work for two audiences simultaneously: Control fans and newcomers.
'The important thing for us is that if you played Control, you signed up for a single-player, exploration, character- and story-focused experience,' Kayatta says. 'It was super important that we didn't say, 'Ha ha, curve ball, now you need to go find two friends and play a cooperative game that is a totally different genre from a different perspective.' That feels terrible. Those people need to be protected so that they can go from Control 1 to Control 2 and experience the journey that we promised them. And we are absolutely going to make that happen. On the other hand, we also want this to be rewarding and fulfilling for them [if they do play Firebreak ].'
Meanwhile, he says that 'then you have what we hope is a large audience who actually has never played Control … we wanted to make sure that they could understand the world and didn't feel the constant pressure to go back and play Control.' That means a balancing act between having enough narrative to be interesting to new players and feel distinctly Remedy, but without so much direct storytelling that Firebreak becomes required reading for anyone waiting to jump into Control 's sequel. And if you do want to dig further into things like the Hiss or what an Altered Item is, you can always play the original Control or dig into a Wiki (or maybe one day watch a movie or show). When it comes to how much you want to dig into Firebreak 's narrative, Kayatta says that they 'want it to be up to you.'
No matter which way you look at it, Firebreak is a big departure for Remedy. It's a new genre, an expansion into multiplayer, and the studio's first self-published game as it attempts to take more ownership of its own franchises. It's an opportunity to expand in a new direction while still attempting to stay true to what a Remedy game is. 'Forever we have had these very controlled single-player experiences, and we will continue to do that,' Kayatta says. 'But we ask the question with Firebreak: what is it like to share one of those spaces with your friends?'