FBC: Firebreak Looks Like a Delightfully Bizarre Multiplayer Game That Only Remedy Could Make
Find a friend.
FBC: Firebreak is the only multiplayer game I’ve ever seen where your objective is simply to destroy sticky notes — yes, the little yellow slips of paper. Turns out, those innocuous little slips are at the center of a supernatural event, creating terrifying, but admittedly kind of goofy, paper beings that attack you. Yeah, this is a Remedy game through and through.
If you don’t know the name Remedy you likely, at least, know its games — Max Payne, Quantum Break, Control, and Alan Wake 2. Over the years, the studio has secured its reputation as one of the leading makers of single-player and narrative-focused games. So FBC: Firebreak marks a pretty drastic change — Remedy’s first-ever multiplayer game. But after a lengthy hands-off preview, it’s abundantly clear that Firebreak isn’t just trying to join the multiplayer party, it’s trying to be another uniquely Remedy game — a player-focused experience with an almost infectious sense of humor and style. There are so many multiplayer experiences that feel like carbon copies these days, and that’s exactly what makes me excited to see more of Firebreak — it’s something that could quite literally only come from Remedy.
Firebreak is a three-player co-operative shooter set in the same world as 2021’s Control, set six years after the events of that game. In Control, an agency called the Federal Bureau of Control (FBC) is charged with taking care of all the supernatural and paranormal events affecting the world. The supernatural entity you fought in Control, The Hiss, turned out to be a lot harder to eliminate than everyone thought, and the bureau has practically lost control of the entire building. That’s where Firebreak comes in.
Each match of Firebreak is themed as a “Job” that the soldiers take on, fighting the Hiss throughout the headquarters of the FBC, known as The Oldest House. Each job has an entirely unique objective, is set in a specific location within the Oldest House, and presents some kind of unique crisis. In the job we were shown, Paper Trail, it’s those rogue sticky notes.
What’s interesting is that in Firebreak you can’t “fail” objectives, but the longer you take the more Hiss appear, making it harder and harder to survive. Every job in Firebreak is about maximizing your rewards — you can spend more time looking for money and valuables, but risk getting taken out by The Hiss.
Just like Control, Firebreak makes you go up against a variety of different Hiss types.
The minute-to-minute gameplay is where Remedy’s trademark sense of style and whimsy really appears. While Control certainly had a sense of humor, Firebreak leans much more heavily into that side of things, almost feeling tongue-in-cheek more often than not. During the Paper Trail job you go through areas shooting sticky notes into oblivion, while they whip around and get stuck to your face — blocking your view and making you wipe them off. While Hiss attack you, ethereal sticky note people rise up from the ground and stalk toward you like a baby walking for the first time.
“Control has this great blend of horror tension and edge of absurdity,” says Game Director Mike Kayatta, “We didn’t want to betray Control and take it [Firebreak] out of that space, but we also knew that in this type of game, players become the protagonist. So our strategy was to take the same ingredients and invert them, leaning more into the absurd side of Control.”
That manifests in Firebreak feeling extremely over the top in a delightful kind of way, bolstered by the weapons that you’re using — which feel a lot like Ratchet & Clank in terms of how inventive they feel. You’ve got your normal machine guns and melee weapons, but then you’ve got the weird ones. A kind of mace that has a Piggy Bank attached to its head, creating a squealing vortex of wind and coins when you use it. A firearm that looks like a huge leaf blower and fires a goopy substance that sticks to enemies and slows them down.
On top of all this, each player can take a Crisis Kit into the job, giving you one special tool and item to use — kind of like a class system. For example, the Jump Kit focuses on controlling the field, with an Electro-Kinetic Charge Impactor that delivers a huge electric shock to an area. It’s item, meanwhile is called a BOOMbox, and exactly as you’d expect it attracts a bunch of enemies with music before blowing up.
Firebreak feels like the multiplayer successor to Insomniac games like Ratchet & Clank, with some truly bizarre, but incredibly fun, weapons and items.
Considering this is the Control universe one of the major highlights of that game was Objects of Power, possessed items that would warp reality and cause bizarre phenomena — like a Jukebox that teleports anyone that hears its music.
This layer of absurdity is meant to support emergent gameplay moments, making every job and match feel unique and emergent. And that’s a core piece of the design philosophy of Firebreak as a whole — a multiplayer game that builds on Remedy’s unique strengths and provides something nothing else can. While he wouldn’t say exactly how, Kayatta hints that Objects of Power will play a prominent role in Firebreak, saying “They’re my favorite flavor of weird in this universe.”
According to Kayatta, the game was built with four distinct pillars in mind. The first is that this an experience that can only be found in the Control universe — to which end the development team only looked to Control for inspiration, and not other multiplayer games or pieces of media. Of course a vital part of Control, like all of Remedy’s game, is its intense narrative focus. Kayatta and the team knew storytelling was an important part of Remedy’s identity, but it’d need to be different here.
“It was really important to us to not do our traditional storytelling route. This is not a single-player game where you’re walking down a special path and experiencing the world from certain angles, drinking it in by yourself,” Kayatta says, “For a game like this, we wanted to preserve space for your experience inside the game. That means more space for the conversations you want to have on the mics — there’s a million reasons for it. That doesn’t mean we’ve abandoned the idea of narrative, the world is extremely rich, it’s the world of Control. But don’t go in expecting something like you’d see in Alan Wake 2.”
Jobs can have some unpredictable changes — like a giant made of sticky notes.
Leaning into those unique qualities of Control is supported by the rest of the game’s pillars that all focus on the player experience — pick up and play, better together, and fun on repeat. Remedy doesn’t want this to feel like the typical live service game, and doesn’t want players to feel pressured to play at specific times or like they’re missing out on rewards.
The only monetization is coming in the form of cosmetics, as all gameplay updates and post-launch will be free for all players. There are no battle passes and optional content packs, everyone gets everything at the same time. There are even little choices, like removing cutscenes and forced tutorials, to make sure it’s as easy to jump in and out of games as possible.
This then extends to the core design of the game. During jobs almost anything you do contributes to the success of your team — whether that’s taking out sticky notes, battling Hiss, or looking for secrets.
“Even when you’re not actively coordinating for whatever reason — maybe you want to mute the mic, or just zen out. Maybe you want to complain about your day with your friends instead of getting lost in the game,” Kayatta says, “That’s fine, and it will still feel like your team is in sync. But when you’re coordinating, hence better together, you’ll get rewarded for that.”
Firebreak has two difficulty modifiers. Threat Level determines combat difficulty and rewards. While Clearance Level decides how many zones you go through — each job has up to three zones.
For something as drastically different as Firebreak, it’s clear Remedy wants to be careful. What makes a multiplayer games still feel uniquely Remedy? In an industry filled with dozens of multiplayer games, how do you make sure players' time feels respected? How does Firebreak even stand out in the first place?
These are all questions that the core design of the game itself addresses. It’s a game that already feels quirky, colorful, and completely distinctive. And that might just be the difference Firebreak needs to break through all the noise.
