We did not want a brooding hero seeking revenge, but quiet lulls and a bird-sketching protagonist make Control Resonant a more introspective kind of action game.

Spoiler warning: key events and the ending are discussed

Background: Control Resonant slows down the rhythm of the original Control

Control Resonant is a very different game from the original Control, and the difference is not only the most obvious action contrast: Jesse packs heat while Dylan speaks softly, carrying a big stick. The warped Manhattan of the sequel is still governed by a repeating pattern effect, and a first playthrough can still throw a player into strange loops of violence. One minute, the player is slashing and smashing through hordes of inhuman enemies with Aberrant, enacting a never-ending chain combo of bellowing violence. The next minute, the player is scanning nearby rooftops for signs of a squeaking purple dragon plushie to give to a very wiggly dog, who, in the player’s suspicion, could teleport.

Combat often feels desperate and bloody: knockdown-and-drag-out brawls that leave the player limping away like John Wick after a particularly messy gunkata affair. But these fights end. In their place is not always more action-RPG battling; more often, the game leaves an odd sense of melancholic peace and quiet. That dichotomy is what makes Control Resonant feel distinct from Control, where the Oldest House was disorienting by design and constant Hiss pressure kept the player moving toward the next objective or plot point.

One structural change makes the difference visible. Outside specific major plot beats and world-resetting boss victories, Control Resonant does not respawn enemy mobs in the way the original game did. That gives the player time to breathe and take in the surroundings. It also changes the emotional pace. A more introspective adventure is the perfect speed for Dylan, someone trained from childhood to be capable of superhuman violence and equipped with a shapeshifting tool for that violence, yet spending one of his first scenes in the game enjoying the fresh, crisp Autumn stink of New York City for the first time in his life.

When Dylan stumbles out of the Oldest House near the beginning, the camera shifts focus to a single leaf floating on the wind, recalling the image of Forrest Gump, while the dreamy strings and flutes of Petri Alanko’s soundtrack play wistfully behind it. The scene does not present a killer unleashed. It presents a prisoner liberated. The player is invited to feel Dylan’s elation at being truly free, even though that freedom is coupled with sadness and conflict: his sister is missing, Manhattan is in danger, and he cannot simply disappear into the ether.

Control Resonant director Mikael Kasurinen says the team agreed on Dylan’s direction early. They did not want the brooding hero out for revenge. They wanted someone who does not reach for violence as the first solution, someone who can see beauty where others see horror. Dylan feels empathy for the monsters because he sees himself in them.

Development: Dylan’s interiority reshapes the game’s quiet and violent beats

Control let players into Jesse’s running inner monologue, but that did not make it a very introspective narrative, because Jesse herself is not a very introspective person. She is motivated by action, lives in the moment, and is constantly moving forward. Her and her brother’s story in the first game reflects that. Jesse could come across a document, a recording, or some evidence of the FBC’s abusive treatment of Dylan and feel genuinely terrible about it, but only momentarily. Her innate sense of urgency almost forced her to put her thoughts on hold until the latest threat was dealt with. Even when she did react, she was rarely truly surprised, because she had known for ages that these were the shadowy G-men who stole Dylan away. New information mainly reinforced her existing motivation to find and rescue him.

Control Resonant reverses that emotional engine. It is almost primarily about Dylan’s interiority: his guilt, his need to atone, and ultimately, who he is outside the clutches of both the FBC and the Hiss. That interiority is reflected in the exterior structure of the game, which ebbs and flows between cavalcades of carnage and many quiet, pensive moments.

Kasurinen describes the contradiction at the center of Dylan. He has no doubts about himself as a parautilitarian. He knows he can face the paranatural threats and win. What he doubts is whether he deserves to exist as a person. He also has a gentle heart. He wants to help, and he has no trouble saying what he sees and feels.

The Sinkhole sequence makes that contradiction concrete. The Sinkhole is a particularly intense, Earth-piercing concentration of the citywide Patterning. The trip to the bottom uses an ad-hoc “diving bell” of cobbled-together FBC sensors and comprises multiple levels of tricky fight scenes. Dozens of crimson fiends coagulate around Dylan in increasingly abstract-looking patterned apartment blocks. The Hiss are brutal here, and the player must work quickly to dispatch each new wave or risk being overwhelmed. Upon finally reaching the bottom, the player faces one more crushing attack, including one massive, flying monstrosity likely never faced before. The fight is hard and tense, but eventually Dylan prevails. Then his diving bell is yanked back to the surface, leaving him behind: a diver trapped at the bottom of a paranatural Mariana Trench.

Control Resonant never tells the player outright how to escape the subsequent maze. It lets the player navigate the strange geometry and variable gravity alone. Despite the attempts of handler Zoe to raise Dylan on the radio, the sequence leaves him alone with his thoughts. Music rings out, and it is unclear whether Zoe is playing it for him or whether it is happening in his head. Crackling snippets of comms chatter reveal that the minutes Dylan has spent stuck in the Sinkhole have lasted hours on the surface.

That is a powerful sequence because it heightens the struggle of escape with the dread of hearing how the world is going by outside. It works because, even with the music, it is quiet enough for the player to focus on those feelings. For Dylan as a character, it is a big moment. He has spent most of his life helpless, first as a “guest” of the FBC, then as a brainwashed agent of the Hiss. Threatened with entombment in a reality-breaking pit, his voice wobbles with fear, yet he chooses, for one of the first times in decades, to reject that helplessness and save himself. He weighs up those doubts and decides he deserves to exist.

Latest Progress: Jesse’s fate, the ending, and what remains unresolved

Even after a first playthrough, the account still leaves thoughts around Jesse unreconciled. As the first female main protagonist of a Remedy game, Jesse ends up sidelined in favor of exploring the inner workings of her brother. That includes a series of quests where she risks being literally erased by the Patterning. The ending, and this deserves a second spoiler warning, has Jesse pull a kind of messed-up UNO reverse card on Dylan’s ultimate sacrifice, ensuring that he lives while she ends up where Dylan had been, all the way back at the beginning of the game.

When asked whether players might get a new glimpse of the Fadens soon, perhaps a peek at a “Control: Gestalt,” Kasurinen says it is too early to talk about the future. Thematically, he wanted the two games to complement each other and show two different sides of the same world. The world stays the same, but it is seen through a new protagonist.

The account’s player had played through Control quite thoroughly a few years ago and did not initially feel the need for a lot of extra information about the myriad ways Casper Darling was a wretched manipulator who had abused Dylan. But on the other side of that reaction, the player was occasionally taken by the lengths Control Resonant went to give Dylan chances to heal on-screen. Some of those chances are small and quiet: befriending a dog, hearing new music for the first time since childhood through music fan and radio misappropriator Zoe, or drawing perfect still-life tableaus out of piles of garbage. Dylan ruminates on the idyllic scenes he imagines as he sketches, thinking about how he would like to experience them once the Altered World Event is over.

One drawing was a self-portrait of Dylan in his 40s, sitting on a bench surrounded by birds. It lands with force because imagining a peaceful future for oneself is powerful when all evidence has always pointed to the contrary. The game suggests there is no better time to have those thoughts than in a moment of quiet.

As of this account, the current stage is post-first-playthrough: the player has completed Control Resonant, still has thoughts around Jesse that are not reconciled, and receives no confirmation from Kasurinen about a future glimpse of the Fadens. What remains is the game’s central emotional handoff. Control’s world is the same, but Dylan’s freedom is not simply revenge or rescue. It is the harder thing: deciding, in the middle of a warped Manhattan and after decades of helplessness, that he deserves to exist.