Control is "Remedy's RPG franchise," says creative director, and it's been that way since long before it was even called Control

Control may have been GamesRadar's 2019 Game of the Year. It may be a thrilling action-adventure game with a mind-bending world and story, but there's one thing it isn't: an RPG. Sure, there are some light RPG-style systems and character progression, but a full-blown RPG, Control is not. That said, its sequel, Control Resonant, is shaping up to be exactly that, a true-blue action RPG with dedicated buildcrafting, a bunch of meaty skill trees, stat screens, and so many different abilities as to essentially have distinct classes, according to creative director Mikael Kasurinen, who tells me a Remedy RPG was the plan from the very beginning.

I caught up with Kasurinen during gamescom latam 2026, and I was surprised to hear him say Control was supposed to be an action RPG series since before the original game was even conceived.

"When I was thinking about Control, and it wasn't called Control or anything like that, but I had this kind of thinking in my head that I wanted to create an RPG franchise," he says. "'How do I get there?' The question was, 'what would it be? What's the Remedy version of that?' The way to learn is to start by doing, and that's how Control was born."

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Kasurinen points out that Control laid the RPG foundation for Resonant to be built upon with various abilities, weapon choices, and non-linear map designs, something that was entirely new to the Quantum Break and Alan Wake developer at the time.

"It was the first time we ever did that," he says. "There was a main story, but there's also these other stories as well. You had side quests. We'd never done that before. We'd never done dialog choices before, where you talk to a character [and] you can choose what to say. All that stuff was new ... My intent was, 'I want to find out what is the Remedy version of an RPG experience.' That's what Control was."

Again, I'd sooner label Control a horror game than an RPG, but it sounds like Remedy's plan from the very beginning was for Control to act as a transition between the strictly linear action-adventure games Remedy was known for, and the deep, systems-driven RPG Control Resonant is being described as.

"With Resonant, I wanted to stop calling it action adventure. Instead, like, no, it's an action RPG. This is Remedy's RPG franchise, and we're gonna kind of embrace that, fully commit to it, and so on, and go even further into that direction."

I'm a longtime Remedy fan, and I've also been known to enjoy RPGs here and there, but there's no way of knowing exactly how a Remedy RPG will shake out. I've been telling myself that Alan Wake 2, a triumphant shift into full-on survival horror, is proof of the studio's adaptability, but RPGs are a whole different beast, and Remedy isn't taking any half measures. Kasurinen tells me you'll be able to customize new protagonist Dylan's abilities to such a degree that it'll feel like there are different classes.

"You can focus more on, let's say, if you want to have a close combat brawler type of character who's quick to knock out enemies and make them falter and so on, really hands on, fighting type of a thing, you can create the character around that," he says. "Or you can be more indirect. You can summon turrets, you can turn enemies against each other and so on. You're more like the mage versus the knight. So, you can shape the way you deal with things in multitudes of different ways."

Control Resonant is out on PS5, Xbox, and PC sometime in 2026, at which point we'll learn if Remedy has the chops to make a game that stands among the best RPGs out here.

Control Resonant may be an action-RPG, but Remedy isn't veering into hellishly-challenging territory: "There are no parries, there is no back-and-forth with a single enemy."