As a huge fan of Control, with its blend of stale office rooms punctuated by new weird abstraction and stark angular architecture, I was a little hesitant to play Control Resonant, because it takes things out of the Oldest House and flips the core gameplay from shooter to melee brawler. But Control's appeal is the baseline that sits under everything in this sequel, and I can feel it almost immediately once I start playing, because even though this game’s pushing out of the Oldest House and onto the more open streets of New York, and shifting into up-close Devil May Cry-inspired melee combat, it never really stops feeling like Control.
“Control first, so that’s the world,” says the game’s art director Elmeri Raitanen (who also worked on Alan Wake 2), and then adds something that tells me just as much about how this game is built, “it already rules out many things that it can’t be,” which sounds simple enough, but in practice it means every space, every asset, every bit of this New York is already working inside a fairly strict visual language before it even becomes a level. It means that while I’ve played many games set in New York, I’ve never seen it like this before.
I notice that in the opening hours of play as new protagonist Dylan Faden escapes the Oldest House. It starts grounded enough with familiar brickwork, wet streets, iron stairwells, that familiar kind of city backdrop you’ve seen a hundred times, usually in Spider-Man games, but then it starts to drift, its narrow alleyways and rooftops glow red with Hiss invasions, dynamic lighting casting abstract shapes, and suddenly this New York feels like an extension of Remedy’s approach to designing the Oldest House, it’s overly familiar with bursts of uneasy geometric design, splintered desks and chairs are replaced by shattering windows, phone boxes and rooftop vents.
Making the familair weird
Resonant, like Control before it, is about spectacle within recognised spaces, the idea that you should be able to understand the world to a point, and then it breaks apart, twists and becomes something unusual, here that’s done through lighting, repeating patterns and the shifting shapes of the creatures investing New York – at times, during my first steps into New York, everything gets 'weird' with repeating figures spiral into the sky, the ground gives way, streets become caverns, avenues are canyons.
“We definitely want to aesthetically and creatively stand out,” says Raitanen, and in practice that shows up in how aggressively consistent the visual language is, especially now that the game has shifted into this faster, closer combat style.
Because Resonant is not hanging back anymore, Dylan is right in the mix of everything, swinging a shifting, vibrating metal weapon called the Aberrant that flips and distorts between forms depending on the weapon loadout – a sythe, hammer, dual daggers – layering in ‘paranatural’ abilities on top of that, dashing through groups, lifting enemies into the air, ripping chunks of pavement out of the ground and hurling them at floating Hiss, and it’s all very physical, very immediate, but it still reads cleanly, which is the surprising part given how much is happening at once.
That clarity comes from the way everything is visually signposted, even when the screen is full of motion. It's part of a broader design decision that keeps enemies readable amid chaos. My fear was that the Control approach – the weirdness – would make everything confusing, but after 20 minutes I begin to instinctively know which enemies pose the biggest danger, how others will attack and which could offer life-saving energy drops, made more productive by screen-warping finishing moves. There’s a designed hierarchy to enemy types, and despite the creature design being these strangely flexing, blending mixtures of diffused light and claws, it all just makes sense.
The colour red is here to help more than I first realised, because it’s not just about mood or style; it’s communicating danger and places of interest… red is the colour of the Hiss. This is a hand-over from the first Control, and given the speed and intimacy of Resonant, it's become more important, especially when exploring the sandbox like Evacuation Zone.
“The piercing red light is definitely one of them,” Raitanen explains, when talking about visual signals for the Hiss, described in-world as an ‘aggressive, interdimensional, resonance-based entity,’ and in practice it just floods environments with this very specific kind of warning tone; everything shifts when it appears; my reading of space changes instantly and areas of the map tease me from afar, a glowing red of an alleyway hints at a side-quest or story secret I find myself unable to ignore.
Red is the colour of Hiss
In the Evacuation Zone, which is where I spent most of my time, largely because I was having so much fun smashing Hiss with a large hammer and leaping about New York’s rooftops – in one memorable moment, the Hiss took over a bus; I had to fight a spinning bus. That red shows up everywhere, layered over a version of Manhattan that’s already quite dense and grounded but then broken up by these heavy blocks of crimson and jagged black distortion from the Hiss, which feel like they're aggressively invading the world.
This is where production reality starts to show through the art direction in a very direct way, and Remedy’s art director is open about it, too. “We are still a fairly small team, so it’s sort of artisanal video game making,” Raitanen says, and I can see what that means when I start paying attention to how spaces are constructed, because there’s a lot of reuse going on, but it’s not hidden; instead it’s folded into the language of the world and made into a statement of how the Hiss is reshaping New York.
My first story mission, The Sinkhole, is a prime example of the team making a production limitation into a staple of the art direction. Control and Resonant are built on the idea of patterns, repeating motifs that evoke a sense of psychological unease, often purposely designed to confuse and unsettle. While the Evacuation Zone feels dense and authored, when I drop into this level's titular sinkhole, I’m confronted by a honeycomb of repeating rooms, all the same, all dressed with the same wallpaper, tables, chairs and humming TV, and worst still, I can manipulate the rooms, spin them, flip them; ceilings are now floors. It’s the same asset used time again, and it’s brilliantly confusing.
“We don’t have to build like 100 different apartments,” he tells me, and once I’ve been playing for a while, I understand exactly what he means, because I start noticing how windows repeat, how layouts echo each other, but it works because there’s intentional confusion behind the environment design that builds on deeper patterning throughout the game.
Then there’s this other line that really explains the intent behind it all, as Raitanen says that at one point in the game, a section I've not played: “We have the same exact house asset, repeated, and it actually becomes a string rather than something that stands out as a visual bug”.
Patterns and repetitions
Playing Resonant, repetition starts to feel like a rhythm running through the whole game, whether it's rows of jittering, juddering pigeons caught in a loop or those moments when shocks of FMV – filmed footage of patterns forming in water, ink in liquid, layered and spun – are superimposed over the action; Raitanen says making those effects was "the most fun two weeks of my life". So even when you catch repeated assets, it doesn’t break the illusion, because it’s consistent; it belongs to the rules of the world, and it means something.
This is where things get a bit more abstract in my interview, but in a way that still maps quite cleanly onto what happens in the game, as I ask Raitanen to describe the look and art style of Control as a series. “How do you visualise uncertainty?” he says, explaining this is actually something the art team were asked to design – ‘uncertainty’. And he offers more examples, saying the game’s script asked the art team to create “an object in a constant state of superposition,” or a “seven-dimensional object”.
It sounds like theoretical physics, not art and design, and Raitanen does laugh and reveal how the art team references scientific books and journals as much as traditional art theory to create the look of Resonant, but for all the strangeness of the art requests, in practice those ideas translate into spaces that don’t quite settle but remain playable.
Back in the Sinkhole, and everything is coming together. Repetition and room spinning is confusing as you’d expect, particularly because this section has me tracking and fighting invisible Hiss across ceilings and up walls, dropping into new rooms and falling into others, but then I remember the colour red and its meaning, and notice a room will light red every time a Hiss enters or passes, and it all comes together – in an engaging blend of chaos, randomness, repeating design and colour-coded art direction to make it all readable.
By the end of my Resonant demo, what sticks isn’t the scale of the game’s New York setting or even the fast-paced, well-balanced combat; it’s how deliberate everything feels in its use of repetition as design, because Control as a series is built on the identity of patterns, unsettling repeating forms and looping 'lines' of surrealist spaces. The fact that Remedy has actually managed to transition the series from a shooter to a brawler, from the Oldest House to the streets of Manhattan, and retain its core new-weird identity really is an art form in its own right.
