With the recently released Control Resonant, Remedy Entertainment returns to its weird Control universe of teleporting toy ducks, nightmarish creatures, and explosive action, all of which is grounded by a deeply personal central story. But when considering its predecessor, Control, I was struck by just how much this sequel not only differs from the first game, but deliberately inverts or twists what players previously experienced--much as the central Big Bad does to the entire borough of Manhattan.
Control Resonant begins with our protagonist Dylan, barefoot and in dire need of a shave, awakening from a seven-year coma. With his sister--the series' former main character, Jesse Faden--missing and Control's Oldest House now a crime scene of corpses, Dylan finally leaves the building he’s been imprisoned in for over two decades. He finds a mostly empty Manhattan, cut off from the world, along with the remnants of the FBC, which Dylan deduced was trying to fight the Hiss and a strange, new apocalyptic entity: the Patterning.
Dylan, trained in melee combat, must use his powers and abilities to find his sister and put an end to this world-ending catastrophe.
Yet perhaps the most significant subversion in Resonant is how Jesse and Dylan's roles--one a savior, the one needing to be saved--are reversed. According to developer Remedy, this was an intentional decision that is reinforced throughout the game.
In a recent interview with creative director Mikael Kasurinen, he told me that the first decision Remedy made with Resonant was making Dylan the protagonist. He immediately noted the contrast between the siblings.
“Dylan is from the paranatural world,” he said, “and Jesse is from our world. Their journeys need[ed] to be from one to another.”
The contrasts continue: Jesse uses a shape-changing gun, and Dylan a shape-changing rod; Jesse spent her life trying to track down the FBC while Dylan longed to escape it; Jesse becomes the head of the FBC and is greeted as the hero the bureau needs, while Dylan is its number-one enemy, often mocked--even to his face--as the regrettable Plan B for the FBC; Control is set almost entirely inside the Oldest House, while Resonant takes to the streets.
Jesse, a lifelong drifter with a leather jacket, is filled with confidence and “ready to become the director of the FBC.” In the first game, she even remarks, “Everything here is crazy. Weird. But it feels … right. Like how the world should be.”
In contrast, Kasurinen said, “Dylan is lacking confidence; he feels worthless because of his past and personal failures.” Dylan blames himself for the initial destruction seen in the first game, after he willingly let the Hiss take over his body as he yearned for freedom from the lifetime of torture to which the FBC subjected him. Unlike his sister, Dylan doesn't at all feel like he's found himself during his time in the Oldest House.
Despite opposite journeys, Kasurinen stressed that “the emotional impact is the same,” highlighting how the Faden siblings share being “fish out of water.”
In Control Resonant, Dylan's sense of alienation is heightened by its surreal, ever-changing environments. When players step into Manhattan, the world is fractured and broken, but not destroyed. The Patterning divides Manhattan into mirrored projections of itself, inverting angles and gravity. Buses curve over roads that suddenly become vertical. Buildings split into mirror images. This is the Patterning, rearranging the entire world that Dylan must contend with.
However, and as art director Elmeri Raitanen was quick to note, the Patterning is not about destruction.
“One key aspect to us in the design philosophy was that the Patterning doesn't destroy things,” Raitanen said. “It doesn't rip pipes off the ground, shatter roads, or crack building facades. But things … exist in multiple places simultaneously.”
Instead, the Patterning creates a simultaneous existence, in which structures are layered atop or next to each other. This phenomenon is part of what makes Resonant's world design unique. It’s why you see people with four limbs or two faces, as the Patterning’s effect is layers, not erosion. It’s why buildings “fold,” or spread.
Dylan eventually becomes really the only person that can navigate this world. He can walk up walls, scale to the top of buildings, and even glide over gaps.
I asked the team what particular artists or designs inspired this world, and they named the Padovan Sequence--a math sequence that has a “recurrence relation”--MC Escher's works, and a Donald Duck comic.
Lead level designer Anne-Marie Grönroos said that the comic “A Matter of Some Gravity” was a "great inspiration.” In that story, Donald and Uncle Scrooge are cursed by a spell that changes their personal gravity: They can walk on walls or fall sideways, while everyone else is unaffected. Anyone who’s played Control Resonant knows exactly what this feels like, as same as his feathered inspirations, Dylan can also walk up walls and fall horizontally. “We wanted to capture that same feeling of surprise and revelation when your [individual] gravity gets shifted,” Grönroos said.
Shifting the Control series' setting from the FBC--an agency that reacts to killer fridges the same way you and I do cold coffee--to Manhattan also meant the team could show the impact Altered Items, the term Remedy uses to refer to ordinary items imbued with paranormal powers, have on normal people. This was yet another way to juxtapose these two stories, Grönroos noted, with Resonant's “mundane backdrop [making] the weirdness stand out more.”
In the game, you'll find ordinary people at a house party with a possessed karaoke machine that refuses to let them stop dancing for days on end. At another location, a woman is convinced her twin is actually a living plant. The Oldest House, unlike Manhattan, was designed to deal with the weird. Manhattan and its people were not. Dylan, however, is fully trained, making him the right person for a world gone wrong.
But Dylan isn’t alone. He finds a friend in his handler, Zoe de Vera, who becomes the voice in his--and the player’s--ear. Kasurinen said it was important that Dylan, unlike his sister, not have his inner monologue communicated. “I wanted to hide his thoughts so that we focus on how he communicates with others,” he said. “The game is a lot about trust and connection, and Dylan wants to connect.”
This again speaks to the differences between the characters. “Whereas Jesse needed [a being called Polaris], a paranatural guide in a paranatural world,” Kasurinen said, “Dylan needed a human guide in the human world. Both needed a representative of both realities to help them understand that realm better.”
Kasurinen also noted another important distinction between the siblings thatI hadn't considered: Dylan and Jesse’s relationship to the enemy bosses, who were once human. Jesse seems to feel very little for the big corrupted entities she fights: They were, after all, part of the agency that had kidnapped her brother.
But in Resonant, we're often led through the life of the ordinary person who the Patterning changes into an often gigantic monstrous entity. We encounter an artist who had moved to New York with her mother; a physicist who’s lost contact with his family; a deserter from the FBC, terrified of what he’s seen.
I felt sympathy for these innocent people who were suddenly corrupted by this powerful force. Dylan himself shows pity, sometimes refusing to land a final blow, and remarking to others that these entities were once people. As Kasurinen explained it:
“We might see a monster, but Dylan sees a victim because that’s how he ultimately feels about himself."
Just as a supernatural force took over their bodies, this is the same as “what happened to Dylan when he was taken over by Hiss in [Control].”
Finally, I wanted to know more about Casper Darling, the previous head of research at the FBC for whom I developed very strong negative feelings in Resonant.
Although Darling was presented in a more charming manner in Control--chirpy, happy, intelligent, and driven by a need to make machines that save lives--we come to discover he was largely responsible for Dylan’s kidnapping and torturous mistreatment. Darling was rightfully convinced that they needed a way to combat bigger threats, and he, also correctly, noted Dylan had developed incredible powers. Indeed, it was Dylan, not Jesse, who was supposed to become head of the FBC, as Darling had sought to “train” him.
But while we know from the first game that Darling was closely involved in Dylan's detention, it's only in Resonant, when Dylan returns to his prison, that we find the full extent of Darling's complicity, shading the fan-favorite character in much darker hues. Gone is the sense that he's a lovably nerdy scientist sticking out like a radiant buoy among a sea of bureaucrats. Darling is a bully, a physical and emotional abuser; he ignores Dylan’s cries for help, like he ignores Dylan's obvious abuse at the hands of another angry adult. “As he tried to make Dylan be what [Darling] thought he should be,” Kasurinen said, “the failure and mistakes surfaced [Darling’s] worst instincts.” He said that “what we see of Darling is often a façade,” contrasting Darling with Dylan, who “everyone sees as a monster.”
Yet again, more contrast. “A big theme in the game was that we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover,” Kasurinen told me. In the case of Dylan, that was true in the traditional sense--that he is a more sympathetic character than perhaps some once thought. But for Darling, the opposite comes into focus, leaning into Remedy's decades-old obsession with nominative determinism, only now flipping even that on its head in Resonant. He is no "darling." He's an unempathetic scientist, resorting to whatever means he deems necessary to achieve his desired end.
For Remedy's often obsessive fans, it's a fascinating wrinkle. It's not a heel turn for the doctor. We're catching up with his past. He was already like this when players met him in 2019's game; we just hadn't seen it yet. It's stomach-turning to reconcile those earlier feelings about Darling with this newer, fuller view of his character.
Indeed, as you play Resonant, the monsters we kill, the humans we trust, and the world we know peel back to reveal something else beneath--something that often defies the first game's aesthetic, themes, and even what we once understood to be established truths. One of the reasons Resonant terrifies me more than a lot of horror games is just how Remedy reaffirmed how little we truly know and, therefore, how much we cannot control.