Book of Hours (video game)

Lore & Background

Book of Hours is a narrative-driven simulation game focusing on the player character's role as a solitary librarian restoring, exploring, and organizing Hush House, a grand centuries-old library off the coast of Cornwall. The primary gameplay loop involves recruiting residents of the small village to assist in repairing dilapidated rooms, cataloguing the collection, and reading to understand the occult world, enabling further exploration. Unlike its roguelike predecessor, the game is less challenging and punishing, with threats rarely encountered and challenge arising from increasing stat requirements.

Reader's Guide

The game lacks a central plot but follows the librarian uncovering Hush House while serving patrons from the outside world. Affairs in the game world change and influence guests' needs, though the player rarely learns details. The House of Light DLC expands on patrons and events beyond the library, allowing the player to host dinner parties and interact with guests to help conclude an affair. Book of Hours elaborates on the complex world and narratives of the Secret Histories franchise, which includes Cultist Simulator, TTRPG The Lady Afterwards, and upcoming CRPG Travelling at Night.

Did You Know?

• Book of Hours was originally conceived as an expansion for Cultist Simulator before becoming a standalone game.
• The game was officially announced on 31 May 2019, the one-year anniversary of Cultist Simulator.
• A planned Kickstarter campaign in September 2019 was put on hold shortly before launch due to a PR concern.
• Developer Alexis Kennedy stated in a retrospective blog post that Book of Hours was the most successful game of his and cofounder Lottie Bevan's careers.

The Oldest House & Its Inhabitants

The Oldest House stands as one of gaming's most distinctive settings: a Brutalist skyscraper in New York City whose interior dwarfs its exterior, a constantly shifting supernatural realm that openly defies the laws of physics. It serves as headquarters for the Federal Bureau of Control, a clandestine U.S. government agency tasked with investigating and containing phenomena that break reality's normal rules. Players step into the shoes of Jesse Faden, the agency's newly appointed Director, who arrives searching for her missing brother. But the building has been infiltrated by the Hiss, an otherworldly entity attempting to tear through a dimensional barrier into our reality. The Hiss has possessed FBC agents, transforming them into a spectrum of threats—from ordinary firearm-wielding humans to heavily mutated, superpowered variants. Scattered throughout the House are Objects of Power, mundane items charged with energy from another dimension, alongside hidden documents, audio logs, full-motion videos, and in-universe television broadcasts that flesh out the world's history and lore.

Combat Loop & Progression Architecture

Control's combat loop revolves around two interlocking systems governed by separate cooldowns: the Service Weapon and Jesse's psychokinetic abilities. The Service Weapon is a modular firearm that shapeshifts across multiple forms—Grip, Spin, Shatter, Pierce, Charge, and Surge—each with distinct range and behavior, from a close-range shotgun blast to a long-range sniper shot. Players carry two forms simultaneously and swap freely. On the power side, Jesse gains abilities like Launch, Evade, Shield, Seize, and Levitate; three of these five are optional, unlocked only through exploration or side-quest completion. Notably, the game has no traditional cover mechanic—defeated enemies drop health pickups, forcing constant movement. Structurally, the Oldest House follows a Metroidvania design across four nonlinearly explored sectors, with Control Points acting as hubs for fast travel, upgrades, and outfit changes. Progression is gated by security-clearance levels, and the campaign spans ten acts supplemented by eighteen side quests, Board Countermeasures challenges, and timed Bureau Alerts. A modding system built around the Astral Construct lets players craft and equip up to three weapon and three personal mods, while an AI-driven Encounter Director scales enemy encounters to the player's level and location.

Production, Technology & Creative Influences

Control was developed by Remedy Entertainment over a three-year period with a budget of thirty million euros, a significant investment that reflected the studio's ambition to push beyond its previous, more linear titles. Writer Sam Lake drew narrative inspiration from the new weird genre and the collaborative SCP Foundation universe, channeling that tone of bureaucratic paranoia meets cosmic horror into the script. The game's visual identity leans heavily on Brutalist architecture—the style common in Cold-War-era government buildings—chosen in part to showcase the engine's destructible environmental systems. Technically, Control ran on Remedy's proprietary Northlight Engine and distinguished itself as one of the first titles to leverage real-time ray tracing directly from the hardware of modern graphics cards, lending the Oldest House's concrete corridors a striking interplay of light and shadow. The voice cast featured Courtney Hope as Jesse Faden alongside James McCaffrey, Matthew Porretta, and Martti Suosalo, while the score was composed by Petri Alanko and Martin Stig Andersen. Designers explicitly cited role-playing and Metroidvania games as influences, broadening the studio's gameplay vocabulary considerably.

Commercial Success & the Remedy Connected Universe

Upon its August 2019 launch across PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One—published by 505 Games—Control was met with generally positive critical reception. Reviewers singled out the setting, art direction, gameplay systems, and character work for praise, though the main narrative drew more mixed assessments. The game earned nominations for Game of the Year at both The Game Awards 2019 and the 23rd Annual D.I.C.E. Awards, and by March 2026 it had sold more than six million units. Enhanced versions arrived for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in February 2021, and in 2025 Remedy transitioned to self-publishing the title. The game's legacy extended well beyond its base campaign: two expansion packs were released, the second titled AWE serving as a crossover with Alan Wake and cementing both titles within a shared narrative framework called the Remedy Connected Universe. The franchise continued to grow with the 2025 release of FBC: Firebreak, a multiplayer spin-off, and a full sequel, Control Resonant, slated for 2026—evidence that the Oldest House remains a living, expanding world for Remedy.

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