9 Mind-Bending Levels That Will Melt Your Brain

With the Oldest House developers Remedy showed that they have the art of melting your brain down pat. It’s an eldritch location extraordinaire, a nexus of alternate dimensions with constantly shifting topography where reality is as malleable as thought.

Nowhere is that artistry and ambition more apparent than in the game’s final mission, Polaris, and specifically its opening segment, the Ashtray Maze.

The segment kicks off with a thundering heavy metal track, sweeping you into a bewildering maze of combat arenas connected by kaleidoscopic doors, floors that rise and fall into sheer cliffs and precipitous drops, and walls that race away to reveal cavernous, transforming spaces.

And that music tells you a lot: this is not a place intended to make you think – the serious business of wrapping up the plot comes later – but it is a place for players, now at the height of their powers, to flex their muscles in a pulse-pounding, visually astonishing action set-piece as badass as it is mind-blowing.

Control will be equally well remembered for that fake-out ending, but in the Asthray Maze Remedy created a genuinely novel experience, one unlikely to bettered for some time to come.