In Control Resonant, It’s The Tiniest Details That Continue To Matter Most

Control is one of my favorite games ever. Six years after release, one of the things that sticks with me the most is a pencil. 

Within your first few seconds of playing, you happen upon your first memo. It's located at a security checkpoint and outlines a number of items that are not permitted inside the government building you've just entered. These seem expected enough: laptops, weapons, various smart devices, and so on. The final two list items sound much stranger: one being No. 2 pencils. 

It sounds almost like a prank. Certainly, I did not expect any payoff for those words, which are located at the end of one of the many memos that populate The Oldest House, the setting of the game. Here is a giant building in the middle of New York, housing a clandestine government agency responsible for managing the supernatural, and a pencil is a problem for these people?

So it was a treat many hours later when I reflected on that seemingly throwaway bullet point, after developing an understanding of the way archetypal items can transform into dangerous objects, and why No. 2 pencils would thus be banned by the Federal Bureau of Control. The fact that the explanation requires you to piece these things together, rather than being overtly explained, makes it that much more satisfying. The Oldest House is full of weird stuff, so it would be easy to forget all about that tidbit from the very beginning of the game, or for it to indeed have been nothing more than a joke.

And yet it's precisely that connection back to such a small detail that makes me adore Control so much. The world-building is accomplished not just through overt lore dumps or cutscenes, but through small details that are interspersed so subtly that you could easily miss them. 

Fortunately, Control Resonant also delivers in this regard. I was reminded of that No. 2 pencil memo a few hours into the game when Zoe, your FBC handler, threatens a fellow FBC agent with "fridge duty." On its own, this again sounds like a joke--given the years-long lockdown of The Oldest House, the prospect of having to clean out the fridges inside sounds both tedious and disgusting. Secret government agents being stuck on cleaning duty sounds like a silly threat. Good goof, Zoe.

Having been trained by Control to catalog every last detail in my mind, I kept playing, wondering if that would lead to some payoff. In discussing this with my colleague Mark Delaney (who scored Resonant a 9 in our review), he made me realize I wasn't thinking widely enough--fridge duty clearly refers back to the first game. A side quest called Fridge Duty involves an Altered Item, a supernatural fridge, that must be stared at--without blinking--in order to keep it pacified; you get to see the gruesome aftermath when someone fails in the task. So, Zoe dangling the prospect of fridge duty is actually more of a serious threat than you'd otherwise realize.

Does this matter at all in the grand scheme of things? Will you better understand protagonist Dylan Faden's redemption story, what happened to my precious Dr. Darling, or how this all expands on the Remedy Connected Universe? Not in the slightest. And yet, it's this callback, more than most combat encounters or larger plot beats, that I expect I will remember years from now, and that's no slight against the game's very enjoyable action or story.

By encouraging you to actively engage with every detail you come across, Remedy is able to build a deeply rich world that gives you as much as you're willing to put into it. These details don't make or break the experience, and you'll certainly be able to understand what's going on without them. But it's these morsels that I find so tantalizing, and I love the way you're rewarded for obsessing over any given thing--I'll never forget the "aha!" moment in Control when I pieced together the true nature of the NSC, ostensibly a power plant for The Oldest House, which--like everything in the building--is more nuanced and more sinister than it first appears..

Despite being my most-anticipated game of the year, I'm progressing relatively slowly through Control Resonant, exploring every nook and analyzing every document. It's going to take me a while to see through the full story that I'm eager to see, and yet I wouldn't have it any other way.