About this filter

Control is Remedy's story of Jesse Faden taking over the Federal Bureau of Control, a government agency quietly losing a war against something it does not understand. It is a game of deadpan bureaucracy and genuine dread, and the people in it swear the way people under that kind of pressure actually do — in the spoken dialogue, in the subtitles, and in the case files and memos you pick up and read. This filter is for players who want Jesse's story, the Oldest House and the combat exactly as they are, with the harshest language taken out: streamers who need clean audio, parents playing where kids can hear, or anyone who simply prefers a calmer playthrough. It runs only on your own installed copy of a game you already own, on Windows or Steam Deck.

The filter covers English voice-over and English on-screen text. On the audio side, 435 voice clips are filtered across 1,227 individual moments, each clip preserved at its exact original length so nothing drifts out of sync. On the text side, 975 flagged words are masked across 58 files with full asterisks and no first-letter hint. You pick what gets filtered from four groups (Strong, Moderate, Mild and Religious Oaths) before it runs. Control keeps its speech in several different places, and the pass follows all of them — ordinary dialogue, the streamed audio logs, Hotline calls and Darling broadcasts, and lines stored inside the game's sound banks; 13 filtered clips sit outside the main dialogue folder entirely and would have been missed by a narrower scan.

The patch was built by reading Control's own file formats directly: the voice edit is a byte-preserving mute inside the game's Wwise audio, so no clip is ever re-encoded and every one keeps its original length and format, and the text edit rewrites the game's binary string tables in place. Nothing is written into the game's archives — the filter deploys loose files that sit alongside them, so uninstalling is a removal rather than a repair. Every change is backed up before anything is written. The result was confirmed in a live playthrough: subtitles and documents render censored, and flagged voice lines go silent with no audible leak into the surrounding speech. One prerequisite is worth knowing before you download: Control will not read these files without the free Loose Files Loader, a separate community add-on, and the filter refuses to run rather than pretend to work if it is missing.

What Was Changed

  • Voice lines: 435 English voice clips are filtered across 1,227 individual moments. Each clip keeps its exact original length, so lip sync, subtitles and scene timing are unaffected — only the flagged word goes quiet, and the rest of the line plays normally.
  • On-screen text: 975 flagged English words are masked across 58 text files, covering subtitles, UI strings and the in-game documents you collect. Masked as full asterisks, with no first-letter hint.
  • Choose what's filtered: four selectable groups — Strong (the F-word family), Moderate (the S-word family), Mild (the A-word family and light insults), and Religious Oaths (blasphemy used as an expletive). All four are on by default; untick any you'd rather keep.
  • Speech in Control is not all in one place, and this covers the parts that are easy to miss: ordinary dialogue, the streamed audio logs, Hotline calls and Darling broadcasts, and speech stored inside the game's sound banks. 13 of the filtered clips live outside the main dialogue folder entirely.

What Was NOT Changed

The story, the script, the performances, the music and the sound design are exactly as Remedy made them — only the flagged English words change. Gameplay, difficulty, saves and achievements are untouched. German, Spanish and French voice and subtitles are left exactly as shipped. This filter only affects language, so violence and imagery are unchanged. One line is deliberately left as written, where a character refers to an ancient deity while telling a story — a genuine reference rather than swearing. The game's own archives are never written to; the filter works by adding loose files alongside them, which is why removing it is just a removal.

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