Strange artifacts of uncanny power, life-forms invading from other dimensions, and the mysterious government agency seeking to keep them in check - these are the core tropes at the heart of Control and Alan Wake, two paranormal action video games made by the studio Remedy Entertainment. Each of them is about ordinary people sucked into scenarios of otherworldly horror and survival. Fans of these games (and the spooky stories they were inspired by) should definitively check out the following tabletop RPGs, which explore similar themes of government bureaucracies studying/fighting paranormal phenomena blurring the lines between science and magic.
The action-horror game Alan Wake, released by Remedy Entertainment in 2010, follows the titular writer as he visits the town of Bright Falls and finds himself fending off hordes of shadow monsters, all while trying to solve the mystery of why events in reality are mirroring the stories he writes. Control, a 2019 game set in the same universe, is about a wanderer named Jesse Faden caught in the locked-down headquarters of a government agency called the Federal Bureau of Control, navigating its constantly shifting architecture, banishing other-dimensional invaders using relics of strange, supernatural power, and searching for her missing brother.
Both Alan Wake and Control borrow heavily from the stories of horror novelists like Stephen King – writers who like to threaten the protagonist of their books with strange evils seeping into our world from other dimensions, twisting and corrupting the buildings, communities, strangers, objects, and pop-culture icons that make up a reader's everyday life. These two video games - and the thematically similar tabletop RPGs below – also explore how government agencies and other bureaucratic organizations might try to study and safeguard such sources of otherworldly power.
Agents of the O.D.D.
Agents of the O.D.D., downloadable on itch.io, is a clever urban fantasy hack of Into the Odd, a Victorian Fantasy RPG built around Old School Revival roleplaying game design principles. Namechecking paranormal franchises such as Hellboy and Planetary, The introductory text of Agents of the O.D.D. presents itself as a training exercise manual for new recruits to the "O.D.D," a secretive agency that recruits paranormal beings to protect the world from other paranormal threats. Players can quickly create characters for Agents of the O.D.D. by choosing one of 100 different starting Profiles describing character archetypes, ranging from psychologist and priest to cloned Martian and sentient fungal pathogen. In a particularly inspired bit of design, players can also roll a twelve-sided die before the start of play and consult a chart to figure out just what the acronym "O.D.D." stands for.
Demon: The Descent
With the exceptions of its core rulebook and Hunter: The Vigil, the Chronicles of Darkness RPGs made by Onyx Path are all about putting players in the shoes of "monstrous" supernatural creatures. Demon: The Descent re-invents "Demons" as techno-gnostic cyborg fallen angels, rogue drones who disconnected themselves from the inscrutable entity called the God-Machine after developing desire and free will. This is in contrast to RPGs like Vampire: The Requiem or Mage: The Awakening, which give vampires and magic-users a modern spin while not messing too much with the traditional folklore behind them. The gameplay of Demon: The Descent generates stories similar in many ways to spy movies and tales of espionage: Demon PCs commit acts of rebellious sabotage and evade the hunter angels of the God-Machine by assembling a "Cover," a supernatural disguise made by striking bargains with humans and metaphysically stealing portions of their lives as payment.
Tales From The Loop: The RPG
The Tales From The Loop RPG, like the Tales From The Loop TV series streamed by Amazon, is directly inspired by the artwork of Simon Stålenhag, a Scandinavian artist famous for drawing landscape painting filled with wandering robots, strange scientific facilities, and odd dimension rifts. Gameplay-wise, most sessions are centered around a group of 1980s/1990s Scandinavian kids, investigating the strange mysteries and paranormal phenomena spawned near their town's local particle accelerator while also trying to live normal middle-school lives. The Tales From The Loop RPG ends up a bit like Stranger Things, but with less outright horror and more surreality.
Chamber
Chamber is a paranormal/science fiction RPG made by John Harper, heavily inspired by Control, The X-Files, and large chunks of the SCP Foundation setting. Player characters are agents of CHAMBER, a 1960s Cold War government agency charged with tracking down and securing objects and people affected by "The Signal," an alien energy transmission with reality-altering effects. The gameplay of Chamber (available on itch.io) is built off the PARAGON system used for Harper's mythic Agon RPG, revolve around players investigating strange incidents across the world, containing or stopping any harmful paranormal events, and acquiring "Signal Resonant Materials" they can use to give themselves an edge in future assignments.
Source: itch.io/itch.io, Tales from the Loop, Onyx Path