Control Resonant review: Remedy's latest release tested

Remedy's follow-up to Control swaps the Oldest House for an open-ended Manhattan, and the results are mixed. Control Resonant puts you in the shoes of Dylan Faden, Jesse's brother, freshly woken from a coma after years of possession by the Hiss — and while it delivers plenty of the studio's signature strangeness, it never quite matches the tight, atmospheric focus of the original. I ate mold for it. My handler screamed at me to put it down. I did not.

A new protagonist, a bigger mess

Dylan became the Bureau's indentured lab rat at age ten, so he's got baggage. His sister Jesse, now Director of the Federal Bureau of Control, spent seven years locking the Hiss inside the Oldest House after the events of the first game. In the present, the containment fails: the Hiss spills into Manhattan, the city is cut off from the outside world, and Dylan has to help clean it up while searching for Jesse — who may not even be on the same dimensional plane anymore.

Here's the problem: where Control understood exactly what it was — a mythologised bureaucracy inspired by the SCP Foundation, full of pneumatic tubes, petty HR complaints, and eldritch horror, with bland mundanity colliding beautifully with the freakshow — Resonant feels pulled in several directions at once. Remedy has said each Control game reflects its Faden protagonist, and it shows. Dylan's story leans hard into family drama and trauma, but most of those beats are things you can infer yourself, and the game would honestly be better leaving some of them to your imagination.

Lost outside the Oldest House

The original's shifting, Brutalist architecture was central to its atmosphere — you never trusted the walls around you. Resonant moves to a sprawling map dotted with markers for people of interest, world events, and side activities (Remedy insists it's technically not an open world). Reality-broken Manhattan, flipped upside-down with at least one Inception joke, suits a man who just woke from a coma — but the tension drains away when you can climb a rooftop and spot every Hiss-infested zone at a glance. The weirdness gets diluted into Marvel-blockbuster flatness.

Much of the game involves team-building with the FBC: handler Zoe de Vera radios you in for defend-the-cargo events, escort missions, and fetch quests. Dylan works to prove he's no longer a homicidal meat puppet while charming factions like the mold people and Langston. The best writing hides in side stories, but the pacing suffers when Zoe calls in nothingburger chores right after a major plot reveal.

Combat sees Dylan wielding the Aberrant, a paranatural metal bar that morphs into whatever's needed (and houses a familiar friend from the first game). Skill trees now follow familiar class conventions — high-crit builds, crowd control, AOE. My Glaive build turned mob-clearing into golf, and a fire punch skill proved devastating against Mold. But the combat doesn't feel as weighty as I'd like, and no, it hasn't really improved since Control. Traversal powers come from Faults, interdimensional thin spots tied to Jesse, blending platforming with sibling trauma in ways that feel Mike Flanagan-melodramatic. When gravity mechanics and timers pile on top of deliberately disorienting navigation — occasionally leaving me stuck in a chasm behind a wall — the flow falls apart. And the "Dylan swoops around New York rescuing civilians" segments feel like routine superheroing I could get from a better action game. That's not why I play Control.

Where it clicks

Resonant truly finds itself in the Underpass beneath the Oldest House, where a quiet cosmic-horror workplace drama unfolds through reports and recordings, set against minimalist, Beksiński-tinged vistas. Some of the game's best writing and voice performances live down here. There's also a genuinely unexpected genre shift later on that delighted me, and Dylan's sketch-and-found-objects memory tableaus are charming — I still haven't found the final piece for a dragon built from rubbish and subway cones, and it haunts me.

Visually it's superb, from the paper-bag FBC headwear to Matthew Porretta's return as Casper Darling. But repeated city blocks and same-y military blockades only stretch so far, and too often quirky weirdness — weird dogs, floating vending machines, warring aliens — stands in for narrative substance. Nothing hits the "oh shit, cool" peaks of the original.

Control Resonant chases live-service hallmarks while trying, only partly successfully, to echo the deliberate structure that made the first game work. You can't build a game around unconventional worldbuilding and also bolt on MMO-style daily chores without dragging the whole narrative down. It's not about novelty — it's about focus. The Underpass proves Remedy still has it. The rest of the city proves they lost sight of it.

Source: Eurogamer