Control Resonant Spills Paranormal Chaos into the Streets of New York

Remedy Entertainment’s 2019 game Control is a brilliant mix of third-person combat and paranormal government intrigue. But the question remained: Where would the story go from here? I’ve gotten playtime with the sequel, Control Resonant, which spills the story into a chaotic Manhattan and follows the redemption of the first game’s final villain.

Control’s story left off with the new director of the Federal Bureau of Control, Jesse Faden, trying to stamp out the infestation of extradimensional beings, called the Hiss, which possess agents and her empowered brother Dylan, who she defeats in a climactic showdown. While it was unclear what would lay in store for the sequel to Control when it was confirmed in 2022, the first trailer of Control Resonant, which debuted at The Game Awards last December, confirmed that the new game would star Dylan. Fans will get a chance to discover more about the game themselves on September 24 when the game comes out. 

Control Resonant picks up seven years later, and despite Faden’s best efforts (alongside agents, as seen in FBC Firebreak), the Hiss have broken containment and flood the streets of New York City. Dylan, awakening from his cell, exits the agency looking for his sister — and perhaps some revenge on his former possessors.

Ahead of the game’s new trailer reveal during the Summer Game Fest showcase, I went to Hollywood to visit the offices of Annapurna, the arthouse film and games studio that co-produced Control Resonant. I was given a rundown on the upcoming game’s themes ushered into a cozy but completely darkened office to play a few sections. As should be expected for Remedy, where it could have zigged with another story about Jesse Faden inside the Oldest House, the Finnish studio zagged with a game about the redemption of her brother as he rediscovers his humanity.

It also dispenses with the ranged combat of the last game for a full melee slash-and-slam fest. My preview started at the beginning of the game as Dylan wakes up in a glass-walled containment center, where he finds the FBC’s headquarters, the Oldest House, in disarray. It’s not long before he leaves the house and starts clashing with the Hiss, now loose and corrupting the city. 

Slicing and stabbing toward redemption

While his sister had the amorphous Service Pistol, Dylan is given the Aberrant, a melee weapon that morphs on the fly, assembling metal and stone to form different modes. These take the form of familiar weapons from other games — twin daggers for quick stabs, a scythe for wide area slashes, a massive hammer for slow, colossal hits and so on. 

The melee combat gets deeper with secondary modes, like nunchucks that could attack at a distance, and finisher modes that appear at the end of a combo. Players can switch between these at will and slowly unlock more, as well as retreat to a hub area called The Gap where they can upgrade their stats, abilities and weapon forms.

Let loose on the streets, Dylan hears a radio call for help and starts working with Zoe, an FBC supervisor who’d been held out of the locked-down Oldest House and has little trust for Dylan but needs to rely on him regardless. Together, they try to bring some order to the invasion of the Hiss.

As much as I loved the original Control’s gunplay, it didn’t take long for me to get in the swing of slashing and slamming things around. Soon enough, I’d unlocked the ability to jump, float and dash around levels — and this was essential to staying alive for the first boss fight.

If I had any doubts that this was a Remedy game, they were extinguished when I hit the first boss. As I walked Dylan through an art gallery, I came face-to-face with a massive sculpture shaped like a woman’s face from the mouth up. Dashing around a big arena, dodging rocks and flung taxis, the boss tested my endurance — if it’s representative of the rest of the game, it should have difficulty spikes that challenge players.

But the best Remedy magic came at the end of the demo. If you liked the Ashtray Maze and We Sing, I got a taste of what’s in store. 

New frontiers in Remedy weirdness

The third and final part of my preview was a mission called The Sinkhole, where Zoe asks Dylan to descend into a deep pit to settle a chaotic anomaly. After climbing onto a circular platform held up by a crane, Dylan uses his makeshift diving bell and descends through the abyss of what had been an apartment complex. 

While defeating some Hiss along the way, the platform at last reaches a depth where the anomaly has warped the former housing units — and they’ve been rearranged up, down, left and right like an M.C. Escher drawing. Unfortunately, some of those former apartment dwellers have become violent, invisible Hiss, forcing Dylan to hunt them down. 

What followed was a gravity-bending puzzle, a joyful if occasionally difficult journey through a complex dollhouse where I had to keep resetting what was “up” while hunting down invisible foes. With them defeated, I still had to descend to reach the bottom — where a colossal flying boss awaited me.

The section ended with a run through an even more complex multioriented dollhouse, where Dylan gets a bit lost but gets a lifeline from Zoe as she calls him through music and static TVs. When I surfaced, I just wanted to keep playing. 

Ultimately, Control Resonant feels like a new take on a familiar world, a zag in a direction that’s bigger and more expansive than expected. Remedy could’ve rested on its laurels with more exploration of Jesse Faden and by diving deeper into the lore of the Oldest House, but by unleashing that weirdness on New York City, the studio continues taking us where we least expect.