There are certain expectations placed on a modern Remedy game, and yet paradoxically I go into each one not knowing what to expect, and rarely getting what I thought I might. This is especially true of its recent sequels – Alan Wake II famously took its predecessor’s “What if Luigi’s Mansion was for adults and book nerds?” and switched it out for “What if Resident Evil had dance numbers and was also for book nerds?”
Control Resonant takes this idea and goes even further, building from the original Control‘s winding, Metroidvania-esque third-person shooter trappings and pushing it out to a winding, Metroidvania-esque character action game. It’s exactly the kind of shit I would expect Remedy to pull, taking the change in protagonist for a sequel as an opportunity to change up entire genre sensibilities, and yet again I had very little idea of what was ahead of me as I stepped out into a twisted version of Manhattan for the first time.
Because, yes, Control Resonant sees us finally leave The Oldest House, though not in the boots of the first game’s Jesse Faden. This game’s lead is her brother, Dylan, previously instrumental in the plunging of the Federal Bureau of Control HQ into lockdown, the proliferation of an interdimensional entity known as The Hiss, and for the murder of numerous FBC agents. Despite all that, and thanks to having cleansed him of the Hiss influence last time we checked in, Control Resonant opens with Jesse violently snapping her brother out of his coma before disappearing, leaving him to awaken and realise that The Hiss has broken containment within The Oldest House and spilled out onto the streets of Manhattan.
As a Parautilitarian like his sister, and now in possession of an Altered, shape-shifting weapon known as the Aberrant, Dylan winds up striking an uneasy alliance with what remains of the FBC in order to – at least attempt to – make some sense of what’s currently distorting Manhattan into a physics-defying nightmare kaleidoscope.
And so for the next 30-odd hours, that’s exactly what you’ll do. Resonant strikes a decidedly more freeform cadence than its predecessor, still occasionally falling back on gating your progress by way of new abilities or power level-based challenge floors, but giving you a lot more to work with in terms of where you go and in which order you tackle things. There are multiple story threads to pull at here – helping your new pal Zoe and the FBC to contain threats and evacuate civilians, unravelling the mysteries behind powerful new Resonant Entities making things even harder in their vicinities, and hopefully figuring out where the hell Jesse has gone and why she’s seemingly abandoned her post as Director of the FBC at the height of disaster.
That journey sees you travel through a number of cordoned-off zones, rather than one big, open map, which allows Remedy some degree of control still over how you experience its story and how it builds in challenge. Every zone is full of things to find, secrets to puzzle out and quests both story-critical and optional, all which lend to an overall Zone Level as well as your power climb as Dylan, with the Hiss and other threats only increasing in strength and numbers as you reach major milestones. Thankfully, Dylan is well-equipped for the task, and the Aberrant is a weapon as ever-growing and changing as the world around him.
Control Resonant is without a doubt the best that Remedy has executed on its gameplay aspirations, not simply retrofitting familiar genre trappings to suit its narrative stylings – though that’s always appreciated – but genuinely delivering a class-leading example. Those who’ve cut their teeth on the likes of Devil May Cry or God of War will feel right at home, particularly in the combination of the former’s acrobatic, twitchy action and the latter’s progression economy. It’s filtered through a very Control lens, of course, so everything is just a little weird (complimentary). The Aberrant itself is basically a metal rod by default, but it’s up to you to pick and mix its various forms across each layer of your weilding it.
So while your basic attacks might see it take the shape of a huge scythe, your secondary attack could be closer to a drill or a huge mallet, and then your combo finishers again offer a number of different forms and effects. It’s like packing multiple weapon choices into a series of custom combos that you can reassign, upgrade and perfect as the game goes on and new types of obstacles are introduced. Whatever your choices, movement in combat is snappy and balletic, encouraging you to be constantly cancelling out of combos to dodge enemy attacks at the last moment and then picking them right back up to make good on your variation of the Aberrant’s buffs and finishers. It took me a while to get good at, to the point where for the first few hours I wondered if the game’s difficulty was tuned way too high, but once you understand the cadence and what the game is asking of you it all falls into place.
And even if you don’t gel with the action, and decide to dial things down to a more approachable level, everything around it is still so umistakably Remedy. You may start to wonder if the (intentionally) repetitive Manhattan streets are going to outstay their welcome, only for your understanding of them to be subverted time and time again. You’ll start wandering into unassuming subway tunnels and ending up in Ashtray Maze-esque sequences of trippy visuals and world-enriching mysteries. You’ll grow incredibly fond of Zoe’s penchant for sharing her taste in music with you at just the opportune time to perfectly punctuate a scene. There are times when I’ll readily admit that Resonant gets bogged down in its “game-y-ness” to a detriment, but it rarely sits there for long before reminding you that you can’t possibly know what lies ahead.
Very reasonable considerations asked by the folks at Remedy, as well as an inherent desire to let folks experience things for themselves, prevent me from saying too much about what makes Control Resonant a fantastic sequel and a ripping culmination of everything that we’ve seen from Remedy to date, but I can only hope that my word is promise enough.
This studio’s ability to draw the uncanny out of the mundane never faults, nor does its writing in portraying (or maybe highlighting) nonsense in bureaucracy. One of my favourite moments sees Dylan being lowered into a huge, pitch-black sinkhole on a small platform, only for it to jerk to a halt halfway down – in another game this would be a moment for horror, or maybe an especially tough combat challenge, and I would’ve enjoyed that well enough – but in Control Resonant it turns out to be a dispute at the top about who’s authorised to operate a lever. The sinkhole itself becomes plenty weird after that, of course, but it’s the idiosyncrasy of humanity amongst these unprecedented phenomena that really sells it all.
I couldn’t possibly have expected that a game like Control would be followed up with an open-zone character action joint, and even after gaining the knowledge I continued to face the unexpected all the way through Resonant. Somehow, Remedy has made its most video game video game to date while simultaneously one-upping itself in the narrative stakes. Story isn’t a thing that happens while you play Control Resonant, it’s what you do in Control Resonant. And while that’s true of other modern Remedy game, it’s especially so here where there is far more “do” than ever before.
Reviewed on PS5 | Review copy supplied by publisher
Great
- A deft shift into a new genre that stands among the greats
- And all the while retains every bit of Remedy charm
- A visually stunning, twisted version of Manhattan to explore
- Another banger soundtrack, thanks to the incredible Zoe
- Goes. Fucking. Places.
Not great
- It's possible to get stuck wandering the more pedestrian streets for chunks of time
Born into the world of video games through SEGA, and in particular Sonic the Hedgehog, Kieron’s gaming tastes now consist of the latest, shiny AAA thing, an indie darling or two, and an embarrassing number of hours of Balatro.