Control Resonant, much like the inside-out, interdimensional cryptids it has you bashing with a shapeshifting stick, probably shouldn’t exist. At least not in the risk-averse, pennypinching reality that sometimes seems to have enveloped the art of gamesmaking, and that may have installed some scepticism into my own head. The sequel to a liked yet slow-selling shooter, which replaces both the original’s player character and its instantly recognisable, bureauca-brutalist setting, while violently pirouetting into open-world RPG melee brawling. Five words that Remedy, in all their thirty years of existence, have never previously let pass their lips.
But exist it does, which is fortunate, because the gamble pays off spectacularly. Resonant’s reality-bending trip across a kaleidoscopic Manhattan is as rich in stark views, eerie atmosphere, and creative quests as Control’s Oldest House ever was, driven along by strong character-first storytelling and Remedy’s best action in ages.
There is a lot of that action, so it seems like a good place to start. Control Resonant makes big changes on both sides of its fights, starting with the fact you are now Dylan Faden, brother and formerly brainwashed foe to Control’s Jesse. A sort-of free man for the first time in decades, Dylan takes to heroics with a weary but honest determination, fueled by the combined guilt over his prior bodypuppet misdeeds and concern for his now-missing sibling. Who, at least, grants him a parting gift of the Aberrant, which looks like it came from the same transforming amarments factory as Jesse’s Service Weapon – just for swinging rather than shooting. Meanwhile, the people-warping Hiss and Mold are back as the main opponents, but in a positive departure, the enemy line-up is heavier on properly twisted, otherworldly foes than simple humanoids. Think floating, fuzzy megaspores, towering armless lumps with spikes for faces, and on several occasions, possessed buses. Mamdani’s New York, eh.
Mathematically, combat starts simple. Each Aberrant form – i.e., your weapons – gets its own button and a three-hit combo. Primary and secondary forms have three choices each, a kind of Whacking Things Greatest Hits of hammers, scythes, and nunchuks, plus your pick of a distinct combo finisher.
Pick up the cadence of these one-against-all battles, though – and factor in the active combat abilities you earn through boss victories – and Resonant’s melee starts clicking. And expanding. And exploding. Encounters are relentless, a barrage of enemy attacks matched only by Dylan’s own supernatural damage dealing, both parties busting their moves in storms of sparks, debris, and extradimensional haze. Aberrant hits and power deployments flow into each other beautifully, and even without engaging the manual lock-on, the game is uncannily good at interpreting which foe you’re trying to strike, so there’s little cause for frustration as you rapidly flick between opponents.
After a few upgrades, it’s possible to craft reliable stance break builds, particularly through combinations of the status effects that certain abilities specialise in. This can then turn Resonant’s already-satisfying slugging matches into something that resembles Doom Eternal as much as Devil May Cry, Dylan whooshing around arenas to chain together executions (themselves as gratifyingly animated as Doom’s) and snowball off their strength, healing, and poise damage buffs.
I still think the original Control’s combat is better than it’s sometimes described, especially if you invest in furniture-throwing, but it simply isn’t as dynamic or aggressive as this. Parrying? Never heard of it – Dylan has a dodge, but the skill tree tunes even that to serve as a proactive attack-boosting tool, rather than just a means of avoiding harm. Resonant wants its players to push. Begs for it, practically, and nearly thirty hours in, I’m still happy to oblige.
The only places where Remedy’s character action inexperience peeps through are the boss battles. Some genuinely are enjoyable, one-on-one paranatural duels, though others are overly simple, their sense of threat owed to massive health bars and the sheer damage of their attacks – not the challenge of recognising and avoiding them. They do all have the striking and memorable visual design you’d want from an action-RPG boss, at least, and their reward of potentially build-altering new combat powers meant I never felt I was wasting my time going after them.
Resonant is also smart in how it handles upgrades and levelling up more generally. Spending points and materials on a single Aberrant form will buff the base damage and falter build-up for all forms, so while resources are scarce enough that you’ll still need to make decisions on which to prioritise – I, for one, fell in love with the clanking, stunlocking, poise-evaporating power of the secondary Drill form – you’re still incentivised to spend leftovers on less favoured weapons. This, simultaneously, keeps them at least fairly viable later in the game, so power doesn’t come at the cost of flexibility.
Dylan’s own talent tree also has, unusually, a geographical element. Beating enemies and completing side missions in one of Manhattan’s various sub-areas will essentially level up the area itself, improving drop rates, healing item potency, and the stock of the local resource vendor. It’s only with each new area level that Dylan himself gets a skill point to put into his tree (which, for the record, is bigger than chuffin’ Yggdrasil). Defeating that region’s boss also ‘resets’ the area, respawning and toughening up roaming enemies in exchange for a fresh set of XP-bountiful side activities.
It’s a peculiar mechanism, but again, one that works. Tying power progression to time and effort spent in different areas motivates exploration, arguably more so than simply slathering the map in question marks, and in my mind created a tidy, almost Elden Ring-like loop of ‘Get rewards, challenge boss, get rewards.’ Lending, in turn, a more tangible and digestible structure to the open world.
That’s an open world, by the way, that absolutely stands up as a successor to the Oldest House. Not that some concrete-walled cameos are any less welcome, but Resonant manages to spread the original’s New Weirdness wider without it getting thinner. There are still loads of flavoursome oddities painted into the city’s details: redacted files dropped by fleeing agents, billboards making less sense as the patterning around them worsens, disturbed objects falling in the ‘correct’ direction as Dylan uses gravity anomalies to walk on ceilings and walls – meaning a messy, inverted fight can send pallets of detritus shooting up into the air. Best of all are the sidequests, which tend to focus on the imaginatively bizarre Altered Items that have escaped the House’s containment cells. Calming a stressed lightbulb, or singing to a room of terrified dancers in ritualistic karaoke, can be both funny and a pleasant cooldown from the tautness of the combat.
It’s never wacky, mind. Resonant’s strangeness is just as often played for drama, and quite successfully, in terms of how often it makes Dylan – and perhaps all of humanity – feel like some kind of cosmic sand grain. Expeditions into massive, impossible spaces; a soundtrack that knows when to hype and when to haunt; lingering mysteries around the invading forces; they all conspire to stoke a lonely, forlorn chill. A fear, really, of the unknowable, and of how for all Dylan’s superhuman strength, he’s still just one bloke with a metal bar and bad memories of life as his employers’ teenage lab rat. Which is cool! Sometimes being reminded of how small you are is necessarily to reinforce the story’s extinction-level stakes, before you can whip out that scythe again and rage against the dying of the light.
It bears noting that amid this raging, Resonant remains focused on itself, which is to say it goes light on the Remedyverse crossover stuff. I haven’t checked off every sidequest yet but at least in the main story, there’s no fanfare moment where the outline of Alan Wake ghosts into view, no big Old Gods of Asgard musical number, etcetera. Which, given how shrewdly the overlaps were worked into Control, Alan Wake II, and especially the latter’s The Lake House DLC, is a minor shame. There is, at least, one tune-heavy sequence that plays like a calmer, nonviolent Ashtray Maze tribute, plus a liberal sprinkling of lyrical tracks elsewhere, so the series’ banger credentials stay intact for now.
Instead, the story puts a redemption-seeking Dylan front and centre, anchored by relationships with the two women in his life. Jesse, who’s off on a mission of her own, co-stars in a series of interestingly novel flashback sequences, leaving handler Zoe as the more regular presence. Zoe communicates mainly in Firewatch-esque radio dialogue to which you pick responses on the fly, choosing to show anger, reservedness, or the Dylan Special: guilt. This is not a branching kind of RPG, but this extra dash of agency is a nice way of better aligning with your character’s thoughts and reactions than was true of the original Control. And the regularity of Zoe’s chats – which you can often instigate yourself – makes sure they stay effective, convincing building blocks for a blossoming friendship that may not otherwise have felt earned.
On the technical side, Resonant also looks the business, Remedy’s love for ray/path tracing and some of the less problematic DLSS tech being even more apparent here than in Alan Wake II. Its supposed Steam Deck support hasn’t quite panned out, however, with potato settings and heavy FSR upscaling failing to keep it above 30fps in busy city scenes. In truth, the whole thing could use another polish patch as well, as I’ve had a few instances of background music briefly cutting out, or enemies getting stuck on scenery. On one occasion I was slapped through a wall after biffing a dodge, which ironically progressed me slightly further through the mission, though less helpful was the bug that kept resetting my outfit choices when loading or fast-travelling to a certain region in the postgame.
I can forgive a few scuff marks, though, when they’re acquired in the process of bold thinking and radical redesigning on this scale. That Remedy have realised this ambition with such rousing action, and a truly fresh take on one of the most well-trodden locales in games, is worthy of applause. Hopefully that this isn’t the last we see of the Faden twins, even if the next one is a cel-shaded fishing sim or something.