Control Resonant’s Best Aspect Left Me Utterly Speechless

Remedy Entertainment's signature style has often made gameplay feel secondary to story. Games like Alan Wake, Quantum Break, and Control had fun gameplay hooks, but the depth mostly lived in their narrative puzzle-boxes, where the answer to each strange mystery created three more questions. Control Resonant breaks from tradition magnificently, revealing a whole new side to Remedy. Armed with deep, engaging combat mechanics in a stunning version of Manhattan that is unforgettable, Control Resonant is a confident delivery of Remedy's best gameplay experience ever that never sacrifices the team's unique brand of weirdness. 

Control Resonant takes place seven years after the first game, with the mystical Oldest House still under siege from the Hiss invasion. Now, outside the Oldest House's once-secret doors, a second Altered World Event is threatening Manhattan. With Federal Bureau of Control director Jesse Faden gone AWOL for reasons unknown and much of the bureau dead or displaced, her brother Dylan is released from his holding cell as Plan B. 

If that paragraph of proper nouns leaves your head swimming, I understand. And although Control Resonant doesn't shy away from throwing a lot at you in its story, it does give newcomers a helpful recap of the first game to get them up to speed. The important thing to know is that New York City is under attack from a paranatural threat, and Dylan Faden, once the puppet of the Hiss and blamed for much of the carnage to date, is reluctantly given a chance at redemption.

Whereas Control was a third-person shooter, Control Resonant is a melee-focused action game that winds up feeling like a dark superhero-adjacent adventure akin to Infamous or Prototype. However, Resonant has so much Remedy flair that these comparisons are best understood as suboptimal shorthand for something ultimately deeper and more enjoyable.

Dylan's weapon of choice is the Aberrant, a piece of shape-shifting metal that becomes the basis for intricate combat builds. The Aberrant has several forms ranging from a pair of quick-strike clubs with a chance for critical hits and a larger scythe that does slower but more sweeping damage, to a tweener form that is neither especially fast nor slow but does bonus damage from behind enemies. 

The game encourages you to switch up your build often with respec tokens and a huge tree of upgrades--it's hard to see any of the many options as obviously advantageous, allowing you to experiment without feeling like you're being funneled down a specific path. I loved experimenting with the many different abilities and combinations. Over the course of the 30-40 hour story, you'll fortify the Aberrant and Dylan alike with this treasure trove of combat enhancements, equipping up to six special abilities at a time and combining different sets of them nearly whenever you want to. Each of them gives Dylan a distinctly different feel, but what they have in common is how good they look and feel to use. 

There are shields, telekinetics, friendly summons, and more to pick from the deeper you go. My experience with Resonant may feel very different from yours, and that's partly why it works so well.

Control Resonant's power climb over those hours is supremely satisfying because it invites--and then rewards--thoughtful decisions by the player. For instance, rather than chip away at enemy health bars, you can build their Falter meter. When filled, you can perform finishing moves that give you Dominance, a damage buff that lasts for a short period. Enemies normally drop health refills when killed, while enemies executed from a Falter finisher don't drop health, but empower you with that Dominance, which converts to enemies dropping extra health when dispatched, creating a risk-versus-reward dynamic. With so many enemies often swarming Dylan, each encounter is a fight of quick decisions as you trade health for damage at the right times, keeping Dylan upright and saving the buffs for the right enemies as you see fit. 

Resonant has no parry or blocking mechanic, as the game's combat is built entirely around aggression, including a dodge mechanic that rewards you with at least a perfect-timing window for a counter, and possibly more buffs depending on your build. When played well, Dylan is always on the offensive, dashing around the map to bash ground-based enemies, double-jumping into the air to reach flying enemies, and carefully but decisively managing his powers so that he has the solution to the problems thrown his way in each bout. 

On its default difficulty, Resonant is pretty tough. It's no souls-like, but it'll give some players fits, as it did with me early on. As I learned each enemy's strengths and weaknesses and kept imbuing Dylan with his own remarkable tools for the job, I felt better prepared for what lay ahead. However, if you're coming to this Remedy game for narrative, which is what it's historically done best, and find yourself jumped by the challenge, the game's Assist Mode offers nuanced custom difficulty options, with a few presets you can choose if you don't want to tweak each meter yourself. 

So much happens at once in every battle, and all this chaos sounds like it might hinder performance, especially when you throw in all the visual noise--like the Hiss' wispy shadows, explosions going off in the streets, and all of the various physics and effects the game pours on--but I played this game for 45 hours on PC (RTX 4070, for the record) without a single hitch. As much as the gameplay depth is a novel showcase for Remedy, its in-house Northlight engine shoulders the burden handily and looks dazzling while doing so.

The strong technical performance only gets more obvious the deeper you get into the main story, where Remedy's artistic efforts become more ambitious. This vision of New York is unlike anything I've ever seen, and though trailers have hinted at some of the arresting art design Resonant features, it's truly something special to behold. Scenes of the city folding in on itself à la Inception are merely scratching the surface. Both the world and the enemies, especially the bosses, are nothing short of jaw-dropping. 

In fact, some later areas of the story get so breathtakingly unique that my only gripe with Control Resonant is how often I'd get lost trying to explore some of these more elaborate spaces, especially since the map wouldn't often bail me out of those jams, recalling a similar issue with navigating the original Control. 

But these frustrations ultimately feel like a small price to pay for the kaleidoscopic wonders Remedy has built. I'm writing this before much of the world has had a chance to see what I'm talking about, and it gives me goosebumps to think about living vicariously through the new eyes that will soon experience the marvels of Control Resonant's world design. Building on the already high bar set by Alan Wake 2's aspirations, Remedy aimed even higher and achieved something I've not seen in any medium.

Playing Resonant, I've thought a lot about how such engaging, complex combat design will speak to a new type of player previously not interested in Remedy games. Thankfully, if you're here first and foremost for the weirdness, it still has plenty of that too. Alongside the 30-hour main story, the several zones of the world each have tons to do, and in many cases, these side quests express Remedy's special brand of strange. I spent some time off the golden path chasing an elusive baby stroller across rooftops, singing life-or-death karaoke, siccing a cat on the Hiss, playing Spot the Difference with an extradimensional taxi cab, and investigating a covert surveillance operation that hides out in places like coffee shops and pizza restaurants, to name a few. 

Every side mission I undertook was enjoyable, and I've done nearly all of them, though the map and quest log suggest I have a few more to go in what is a bigger game than I expected. Some missions have been especially strong reminders that, like Alan Wake 2 before it, Control Resonant feels like an experience only Remedy could've possibly made. Even with much more focus on combat, this has all the hallmarks of a Remedy game.

That means a healthy dose of levity, though I love how Resonant finds new depth not just in its gameplay and world design but in its emotional core, too. Remedy games have previously done mystery, action, comedy, and horror very well. But this is the first time a Remedy game has left me feeling choked up. I adored Dylan's story, both in the present--as he works to redeem himself while surrounded mostly by people who loathe him and tell him as much bluntly--and in the past, as I explored his relationship with Jesse and their parents. 

There's a lot more to know about Dylan, and Sean Durrie plays him with an appropriate somberness. It consistently hurt to see him beat himself up because that antagonism is the only way he's ever been treated by anyone but Jesse. Watching his character arc take shape, and even informing it a bit with dialogue options that don't change the story but do change the shading of Dylan's thoughts and actions, was an even more unexpected achievement than Resonant's deep combat design. Despite everything it does so well, Dylan's personal journey is just about my favorite thing in the entire game, second only to the art direction that melted my brain.

Though I enjoyed the story's way of catching up with characters from the original game and seeing how they've changed, one of my favorite characters is Dylan's handler, Zoe De Vera, a newcomer to the world of Control. She could've been the typical voice on the radio, giving Dylan orders to simply push the story forward, but Remedy pulls her into the spotlight enough to make her an empathetic character, too. As the Altered World Event reshapes reality around them, it's Dylan and Zoe's chemistry, not the New Weird circumstances, that really fuels the narrative intrigue for me.

Alongside the stellar art direction and a surprisingly touching story, Control Resonant's gameplay loop feels more mainstream than anything this team has made since Max Payne. Such intentional smoothing could've been damning if done poorly, but it doesn't feel like Remedy sacrifices any part of itself to chase a wider audience, even as Resonant may well find one anyway. Control Resonant is Remedy's take on a semi-open-world character-action game, and that might sound like an experience you've had before, but at the transdimensional intersection of its impeccable combat design and the studio's signature strangeness stands something unforgettably unique.