// KOTAKU — GAMING
Control Resonant Hands-On: Giving One Of The Most Consistently Surprising Developers The Benefit Of The Doubt
When Remedy released Control in 2019, it didn’t fit neatly into any existing space. It wasn’t quite a booming AAA shooter, nor quite an indie darling, but rather its own strange little AA joint destined for “cult classic” status. Control‘s winning combination of brutalist aesthetics, mundane everyday items and office spaces, and the weird fiction of urban myths and creepypasta tales quickly carved out its own space, one which would grow in size as adoration for the oddly shaped hit spread.
Mikael Kasurinen, the creative director behind Control and its sequel, Control Resonant, tells me that the success of this smashing of aesthetics stems from how “real” it all feels. “I think there’s a shift that’s been happening in the last five to ten years,” Kasurinen opined, “where I think that there’s kind of a Stephen King era of classic horror that is—not being replaced, but there’s this new weird: creepypasta, internet lore, the Backrooms…You know, taking the world as it is but then have something utterly confusing happening within it.”
What Kasurinen is talking about is a kind of grounded weirdness and horror spectacularly captured by recent works like Severance and Backrooms as well as by The Oldest House (still the coolest name ever for a game’s setting), an imposing skyscraper in the heart of Manhattan whose impossible depths, out-of-this-world sights, and shifting corridors set the tone for Control.
Players became enamored with the Federal Bureau of Control, or FBC, a secret government agency headquartered there which tries to contain and understand the supernatural phenomena of the world, like a floppy disk that grants psychic powers, a slide projector with the ability to open portals into other worlds, and a fridge capable of housing powerful beings of untold origins. Along the way, they even came to love the oddball crew that staffed the FBC like Ahti, a Finnish janitor who speaks in what seems to be broken English until you make sense of his cryptic ciphers and realize he might actually be the most powerful thing/person in the universe.
Slowly but surely, Control got the acclaim it deserved and found its place among the weirdos. Players eventually peeled back enough layers to connect with its strange heart and exhilarating plays on convention; the Ashtray Maze is still a standout video game sequence to this day. It certainly accrued enough accolades to justify Remedy’s continued exploration of the connected universe it had created, which linked Control to 2010’s Alan Wake and has since gone on to encompass that game’s acclaimed 2023 sequel.
Now we’re getting Control Resonant, a sequel that leaves behind (and even partially destroys) some of the very things that made its predecessor so successful, all the while embracing a more conventional shape: that of a third-person hack-and-slash action-RPG that leaves behind the protagonist, genre, and locales of its predecessor.
My preview of Control Resonant consisted of the game’s opening act, which follows new protagonist Dylan Faden (the brother of the first game’s heroine, Jesse) as he spills out of the Oldest House, which has seen better days, and onto the mean streets of Manhattan. “Of course it was deliberate that we’re leaving the Oldest House behind, that it’s fallen and broken down…The first game is about Jesse stepping from our world into this place of power that’s inherently weird and so on, and she tries to understand, ‘What the fuck is this place?’” Kasurinen tells me, all the while likening her journey to Alice in Wonderland. In order to invert the sense of comfort that both the creative team and players have likely developed over the course of playing (and perhaps even replaying) Control, Kasurinen admits that the team had to leave behind the popular setting and embrace something bigger—New York City—which also let them stick Dylan, a character molded by the FBC’s weirdness, into a more conventional setting.
It’s not that conventional, though. The Hiss, an otherw