Fans of Control’s incredible ‘Ashtray Maze’ setpiece are going to love Alan Wake 2

“In so many ways, in Alan Wake 2, we wanted to take certain elements of ‘the Remedy game’, and push it as far as we could imagine,” Remedy creative director and lead writer, Sam Lake, tells me in an interview. Specifically, I’ve asked about the reception to the ‘Ashtray Maze’ from Control, the studio’s last major release, and the instantly iconic reputation it picked up. If you’re unfamiliar, the ‘Ashtray Maze’ is a late game setpiece that acts as a fantastic gameplay and narrative device – a paranormal security device designed to prevent people without proper clearance accessing the deepest reaches of the Oldest House. How it manifests, though, is as a non-euclidean and shifting space – impossible to map and truly know. When navigating it, you are required to wear a cassette player given to you by janitor and (in my opinion) one of the best characters in all of fiction, Ahti. Loaded with the track Take Control by Old Gods of Asgard – an in-game pseudonym for Poets of the Fall – this cassette player allows you to freely traverse the ‘Ashtray Maze’, a peculiar supernatural object that has take the life of many curious civilians. Read more