The Federal Bureau of Control has fallen. The Hiss are spilling out into the streets of Manhattan, New York transformed into a paranatural battleground – sealed off to prevent the five boroughs from descending any further into ruin. Although if the FBC has learned anything by now, it's that lockdowns can't last forever. The Oldest House in ruin after its own perimeter was breached. An unlikely hero is all that remains.
"Control Resonant takes place seven years after the first Control," says creative director Mikael Kasurinen. Jesse Faden mysteriously disappears and the lockdown falls apart. All the paranatural forces have spilled onto the streets of Manhattan and, on top of all of that, a new threat is reshaping our reality and creating devastating monsters. Dylan Faden wakes up, and this is where the second game begins."
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With FBC Director Jesse Faden MIA, it's left to her brother to help pick up the pieces. Kasurinen says that, for Dylan, stepping out into New York "might as well be a portal into an alien dimension" having spent all of his life locked within the Oldest House. As for us, expect Control Resonant to present Manhattan as we've never seen it before. "What we did to the bureaucratic offices inside the Oldest House, we plan to do to the urban environments of Manhattan. It's going to be a mind-bending adventure in a large, open-ended world – broken and altered by supernatural forces, where each location has been meticulously designed and embedded into a larger narrative."
A world with a story, then, although Remedy isn't quite ready to go into detail on Jesse's whereabouts or how Dylan found himself drawn onto the Astral Plane and into service by the ever-mysterious Board. What I can tell you, however, is that Control Resonant is going to be something of a culture-shock versus the original Control – itself a sprawling action-adventure game which combined third-person firefights with an expansive set of supernatural abilities.
Dylan is more of a brawler than his sister, which is why the Board has granted him the Aberrant to aid in the battle to reclaim Manhattan. It's a shape-shifting melee weapon that takes on different forms on the fly – "a paranatural weapon for a desperate street fight," says Kasurinen. The change in service weapon has helped Remedy drive towards new ambitions, with Control Resonant more of an action-RPG than anything the studio has pursued in the past.
The Aberrant combines with a new set of powerful abilities to unlock more direct action, as well as "making more room for player agency, more variety in how to approach combat, and build crafting," Kasurinen adds. Mixing and matching styles is key to combat, so too is fact-paced traversal of warping environments and pushing aggressively against a more diverse, unpredictable set of enemies. The question of course is how deep down the action-RPG rabbit hole Remedy is willing to tumble, with the genre spanning various degrees of complexity.
Kasurinen acknowledges that this is a big change of pace for Control (which has already targeted action-adventure and first-person shooter, between Control and FBC: Firebreak), but he's clear that Remedy is designing this to be as approachable as it is challenging. "We throw you into a multi-layered combat sandbox and let you loose. We want you to maintain the momentum, so it’s less about trading blows and more about figuring out how to eliminate threats as quickly and efficiently as possible."
"The other part of the combat challenge is a tactical choice: who do you tackle first, how do you improvise in a fast-evolving situation. Creativity is always rewarded," Kasurinen continues, as we ask whether progression is born through evolving parrying and combo systems. "There are no parries, there is no back-and-forth with a single enemy, but you can combine your attacks into a flow that is devastating, where the form of the melee weapon changes as you commence those attacks. And if you manage to use the right abilities, at the right times, against the right enemies, you can be unstoppable."
We've only glimpsed a few of the Aberrant's crude forms. Spend enough time staring at that lush reveal trailer and you might just spot what appears to be twin blades, a scythe, spiked gloves, and a devastatingly giant hammer. Ultimately, Kasurinen tells me, how you wield and combine these forms in concert with your paranatural abilities will shape the way you play and progress through Control Resonant when it launches sometime in 2026 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X.
"Our weapon is shapeshifting, and you unlock new forms as you progress in the game," he says. "Through new forms you can combine different attacks with each other. We also have a progression system that unlocks a lot of synergies between weapons and supernatural abilities, reinforcing different playstyles. You’re able to customize your character way beyond any previous games we've made."
