// PC GAMER — GAMING
Control Resonant review
A welcome return to Remedy's magnificent hellscapes—with too many hours of middling combat.
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In the first minutes of Control Resonant, Dylan Faden—prototypical sadboy, perpetually kicked puppy, and regretful mass murderer (he got better)—is thrust into a metaphysical war when Jesse, his psychokinetic former protagonist sister, wakes him from a seven year coma by stabbing a magical shape into his chest. She promptly disappears, leaving the Federal Bureau of Control directorless, outgunned, and forced to rely on the man who once killed hundreds of its staff to confront the cataclysm of interdimensional forces violently reshaping Manhattan into a labyrinth of otherworldly logics.
What is it? Melee action in an open world being ripped apart by interdimensional forces.Release date September 24, 2026Expect to pay $60/£50Developer Remedy EntertainmentPublisher Remedy EntertainmentReviewed on Geforce RTX 4070 Super, Intel i7-14700K, 32GB DDR5Steam Deck UnverifiedLink Steam
Dylan and the FBC might be going through it, but Remedy is flexing all its finest talents: sculpting uncanny hellscapes, placing tactical redactions in bureaucratic lore collectibles, and capturing endearingly human performances in circumstances beyond human comprehension. Unfortunately, melee combat isn't on that list of strong suits—and Resonant's open world expects you to do a lot of it.
Remedy's environmental artists and lighting tech specialists are at the height of their powers in Resonant: The stark, brutalist surrealism that saturated the Oldest House in the first game has boiled out of its breached walls and onto New York's streets, reconstructing blocks of brownstones and downtown shopping districts into a sprawling, dreamlike mazework of impossible architecture and alternative physics.
Roadways have abruptly become cliff faces, with pavement—and the buses parked on it—bent skyward at perpendicular angles. Rows of pixel-stretched structures bleed into chasms where chunks of cityscape have simply fallen away.
Whole neighborhoods spiral upwards, outwards, inwards. Some are swallowed in the telltale oilslick haze of Hiss corruption. Others have been reconfigured according to the alien logic of the Patterning—a newer, stranger force whose spreading influence sorts apartments, taxis, streetsigns, pigeons, and unevacuated denizens into inscrutable designs of sprawling radial symmetry.
It's arresting, at turns breathtakingly incomprehensible and queasily familiar. Nestled into the mutated Manhattan's warped streets are pockets of untouched city life: abandoned cafes and laundromats and bespoke art galleries, which only heighten the sense of eeriness through their proximity to reality's active unspooling.
It's gorgeous, a sequel that's begging for an inevitable photo mode update. And it's a pleasure to move through, with Dylan's accumulating collection of mobility superpowers—floating, air-dashing, double-jumping, and eventually, freely reorienting gravity—allowing for truly impressive feats of traversal design.