Not all heroes wear capes.

As spotted by the fine folk over at PCGamer, a developer at Remedy has been quietly working on Remedy’s amazing game Control on the side. Filippo Tarpini joined Remedy around six months after the company launched Control to a strong critical reception. It’s still holding down an 83 on Opencritic, and it was my best game of 2019. When I reviewed it, I wound up giving it 5 stars out of 5 because it genuinely blew me away with its story, world, visual style and gameplay.

But, it definitely wasn’t without some issues. Performance could be iffy on console, there were graphical bugs and quite a few other things that needed a little work.

That brings us back to Mr. Tarpini who clearly has a love for Control because he’s been working on improving the PC release via modding. Early this year he launched a brand new unofficial patch for the game that not only combines his prior mod but also adds in HDR support, an updated form of DLSS, tweaked ray-tracing, full ultrawide support and a new Max texture setting that fixes the slow texture streaming. It’s a substantial rework of the game and the results are impressive.

So impressive, in fact, that the legends over at Digital Foundry have done a breakdown of Tarpini’s work. In the video, they note how much better the game looks as whole. Watching the video, I noted in particular how much better texture streaming is, and how much HDR helps bring more detail into the often very dark nooks and crannies of Control’s world.

Over on the mod’s page, Tarpini has an option to buy him a coffee and I encourage you to sling a few quid his way if you’ve ever played and enjoyed Control. This man has worked on the game in his spare time to create something amazing for fans.

I don’t know if it’s possible, but I’d love to see Remedy officially endorse the patch and maybe even see if it could be easily ported over to the console versions, though that would obviously require a lot of testing and I’m not sure they would be willing to commit money to a project like that. Console patches require fees to be paid, and while it would be amazing to see the game get upgraded further, it probably wouldn’t bring any new players into the fold so Remedy would have to absorb the costs.

And if you’ve never played Control before, get your shit together and try it out.