Back in 2024, I was working 2 jobs, having just started up a small site called Pixelbyte, and struggling to do whatever coverage I could. This was between me wanting to put my head into a GameStop wall and doing pizza deliveries, tempted to walk off into the woods never to be seen again. I wasn’t having fun is the crux of this story. This was also when I wrote the first perfect score that a game on this site would get until over a year later with Date Everything, and until I apparently stopped caring this year and started handing them out like cookies at a blood drive. It was Alan Wake II, which remains a modern horror masterpiece.
And that’s kinda the point; I love Remedy. I love that they take risks and try to blend and subvert genres. I LOVE HOW THEY PUT A MUSICAL PLATFORMING SEGMENT INTO A HARDCORE HORROR GAME! I will not have people come at me for not respecting the hustle because, when we get right down to it, Control Resonant is the sequel to one of my favorite games, and it did nothing for me. There are these moments where the game is… Fine… I guess. There are high points lost in the madness. Sadly, they were few and far between.
Dylan made for an interesting villain in the first game, and I don’t hate the character’s turn here. I mean, in fairness, as Control Resonant even points out, he was never a bad person. At worst, he was a victim of egregious abuse who snapped and used the only tool in his belt: a cosmic horror like the hiss. Next thing you know, everybody is dying, and you are talking in proverbs. Basically just another Friday night for me. This is the worst; at best, he didn’t really DO anything that should have driven the audience to hate him.
The thing is, some characters just can’t make the transition to lead. Baby-faced lead Sean Durrie isn’t particularly bad in the role, and I very much enjoyed him in the first game. Being possessed by the hiss at the time, his performance is processed, and his dialogue was disjointed and menacing yet somehow mundane. This mix is boring, but in an engaging way. None of that affects his role here. He just, at times, feels disengaged, with this very, very soft-spoken nature.
What makes it worse is that I also don’t think the game is very well written, something best illustrated in the side activities that dot the world. There is a guy in a locked room who needs me to run across the city and grab these random things for him so he can keep hiding in the topsy-turvy version of New York City we find ourselves in. You want a real indicator that the writing is lacking? They decided this absurd inception-style New York City should be called New New York City when they could have called it Nior York City, because the REMEDY-VERSE IS ETERNAL!
Anyway, doing this side quest featured some of the most insanely sterile writing I have ever seen, and yeah, I will put that against anything. It’s not… Bad… in a bad sense. It’s bland. Talking to the guy is fine enough, I think, but like almost everything else, it is capped off with Dylan recapping everything to Frankie Kevish’s Zoe De Vera over the radio, adding very little to the task at hand, and occasionally going on longer than the initial task. What’s even worse is that Zoe is probably the best character in the game, getting most of the best dialogue trees. I would honestly rather be playing as her, and yet here we are.
Then there is this weird choice to make the dialogue interactive. I could almost stomach this if it wasn’t presented through this second long directional press for your choice. I can’t be confident that there aren’t multiple outcomes based on dialogue, but based on my experience. I got to the appropriate ends, so I don’t think so. And you get a lot of multiple choices that say the same thing. The difference between “Can I HELP you?” and “Can I help YOU?” Different emphasis, same thing. Then this happens while you are wandering around the city. I’ll get to combat soon, but more than once, a radio prompt for a multiple-choice popped up the second I started fighting enemies. You can ignore it but you can always expect getting castised so, you choose.
There are things I liked about the big, beautiful city, and it does look gorgeous. I just wished the city warping didn’t feel so complicated. What’s worse is that Remedy does this thing in Control Resonant where, obviously, Dylan has these special powers, and yet they can often feel ineffective. There is this enjoyable verticality to everything, though, as you take to the rooftops, then drop in on a group of hiss, right up until it doesn’t work.
The more interesting thing is how limited the twisting portions of the city are. Me, on a personal level, am torn because I loved it conceptually, just not always in practice. Two areas in particular are built almost entirely on the idea of constantly shifting perspectives, with, up until then, there being an area or two that essentially allows you to shift the action to a wall, or a roof above, even though there are areas offering some enjoyment.
The main narrative points offered the most engaging twisty stages, like this crazy subway that involves you shifting on walls to travel through tunnels while the trains drive straight at you. At one point, you are jumping from train to train while hordes of them speed past at different angles. I really liked this area, and there were a few others like this. While there is never a moment that hits the high of the astral maze, you also get these epic segments themed around music, like battling your way out of a parking maze with these catchy beats. I was so engaged as I did this.
The music as a whole was a bright spot, with some more morose epic chanting stealing the scene during pivotal moments. Control Resonant decided to drop almost everything that connects it to the wakeverse, so if you are hoping for Poets of the Fall to have a grand moment, you will be waiting a while, then still waiting. I am not sure overall why this was done either, because similar to its predecessor, the story is pretty light, so the constant backend narrative threats help to constantly create that attachment, which I never really felt in this one.
This continues because all the secondary elements, like AWEs, never reach the same heights as well. The world TRIES this refresh feature that actually sounded exciting when it first popped up. You beat the major bosses, and the world refreshes. This sounded like something that would keep the world engaging as I progressed. Not really, though; it just brings back the same four or five tasks to redo to grind out the levels in each area, which unlocks more features but, more importantly, levels you. This task can become VERY grindy, with painfully repetitive tasks
The AWEs typically pop up as world tasks with a few exceptions. One of my favorite missions, and I cannot believe I am saying this, is one in which you just sing karaoke, summoning your inner Sleeping Dogs to sound awful. THIS was the kind of oddity I expect from a remedy game, and it was short but sweet. Most tasks, though, involve just bouncing around from one location to another. Maybe you fight enemies in a locked area. That guy locked in the protective room I mentioned earlier? His task is literally traveling to three points to grab one thing before returning with it… And fighting enemies in a locked area.
But traversal can just be annoyingly frustrating. Fast travel points might be easily accessible, but at other times I was right below one, with it on a roof, and it was faster to run across the map to another one than try to find the one set of platforms that got me up there. This is to get halfway across the map because traveling the roads is also often less intuitive than you want it to be. Again, Dylan can fly and jump to higher points and shift gravity, yet some fast travel points have complex access to prevent this, and major roads sometimes have barricades that Dylan somehow can’t just get over.
You see them, stop, then have to take a long road to get around. These fetch quests become so complicated not because they are hard, but because you need to actually navigate between the points. It gets even worse when you mix in these less-than-enjoyable electricity puzzles that involve figuring out where there are junction boxes they hitting an electrified box, running to the next box, hitting that. The point of it is to do these weird navigations, jumping from box to box before the electricity resets, and these come up A LOT. This feels like a sum-up of most of the puzzles: they’re about the same, more obtuse than clever.
And then you get to the actual combat, which is, I was shocked to find, more similar to the original Control than I was expecting. Dylan has a toolkit that keeps him fast. He can quickly dash around the combat zone, and the fly ability allows him to gain distance. This is where the similarities stop, and it was at that point the system started to wear on me. Jesse moved fast to keep her distance, attacking with guns from a range; Dylan doesn’t have that luxury.
He HAS to fight at close range and, whole freaking crap, does it undermine the entire concept. To really fight enemies, he has to jump in their faces and, in doing so, lock himself in a loop of slashing or smashing. Healing involves gathering these shards, and the way Control Resonant actually doles them out is through defeating enemies. That leaves this endless supply of tiny hiss that can absolutely kill you, but you can grind them fast too to get heals, though never a lot. This creates these situations where you are on the verge of death, running around, and all you can think is, “Well, obviously the one thing I can’t do is attack anybody.
Almost every enemy can hit you from long range too, so you either have points where you can’t see attacks while you are wearing down one of the key enemies, all having a ridiculous amount of health early on, where you see your health fade right before your eyes with no idea. Or, you can get melee’d by three or four enemies at a time, with the dodge legit ending right into two punches to the face, which began wearing thin right when I started to get the hang of everything.
What really broke me, though, was one fight I took an hour to beat while I was trapped in a subway. At one point, as you progress, you get sealed into this tiny space with two or three big guys and these acid-spitting minis. The entire ground was covered in corrosion, which in turn poisoned me every 10 seconds, with me bouncing between both big guys, unable to get more than three hits before I had to run more. Every time I was close too, some random acid rocket killed me at one hit to victory. I was exasperated by the end; it almost broke me right there.
Thankfully, I continued because there were some bright spots to be found in there. Once I started to upgrade my kit, combat started to flow better, though the grind never became manageable. A compliment sandwich, if I may. I loved that new abilities involved finding Resonants in the cities, which were the best fights in the game as well. I didn’t like how they rewarded these abilities to you. I did enjoy adding them into the combat for some interesting combos.
At the end of the day, that’s what feels like the problem. There are these tiny issues that build up and just make the game wear thin. When you unlock abilities, you get a choice of three, and if you want one of the others, you need to reset your entire loadout. In the grand scheme, I don’t remember which I chose, but I know I didn’t choose the ground pound. I know this because it took me half the game to put two and two together and realize certain obstacles were locked behind that ability. Nothing that mattered, but I still wanted it. Why? Why do I have to reset everything? Just tie each to a slot and let me pick between one of the three that I can switch when I want. It affected nothing, literally.
Similarly, the gravity shift ability only works at locations where the city has twisted so you are right side up. There were just so many places where letting me shift up a wall would have made everything better. I get you need to try adding barriers, but why? Dylan can’t die from falling, and the ability does NOT work like Gravity Rush, so it’s not like there is a threat of throwing himself off the map. It would make traversal less of a nightmare. And why must he be right on the object he is shifting to? If there is a clear other area, just let me shift. There are some points where I have to climb buildings, then climb a water tower, then jump, double jump, and float to tap the wall and switch perspective around.
These traversal mechanics grew on me, which is why I want more, but it is confusing. Control Resonant has a fairly basic map and a compass that displays objectives but nothing else. I feel like something more reflective of the vertical depth was needed cause you can get lost in a small space or run around desperately trying to find something that is unclear. That said, there are amazing visuals to be had no matter where you go. And the audio design mixed with it is crazy, mechanical, and frightening. If you are playing on PlayStation 5 at least, the DualSense often vibrates along with these noises, with its dynamic rumble, transporting you.
Verdict
I cannot stress to you how desperately, with every fiber of my being, I wanted to love Control Resonant. Control and Alan Wake II live rent-free in my mind as titles I might bring up at any moment as a reminder of how great and underrated Remedy is. I just… Didn’t. At best, there are some fun moments to be found around the incorrectly named New New York City. Ultimately, though, and I struggled with finding my words here, the game is just boring. The combat commits the crime of feeling as if it drags on more than anything else, and traversal can be tedious, both creating this bloat that weighs the experience down. I’m disappointed in the fact that I’m disappointed, which is the tragedy of it all.
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Reviewed on PlayStation 5, also available on Xbox Series S|X and PC
Developer/Publisher: Remedy Entertainment
Release Date: September 24, 2026
Pros:
+Beautiful and trippy visuals
+Moments like Music driven action sequences never hit highs of predecessor, but are still enjoyable.
+Excellent Audio Design that vibrates through you with help from the Dualsense.
Cons:
-Dylan doesn't make a strong jump from supporting character to protagonist.
-Writing isn't as strong as it could be.
-The melee combat feels very at odds with the fast paced nature of movement.
-Side Quests can turn into unenjoyable fetch quests.
-This is compounded with the fact many moments of traversal feel grating.
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Control Resonant
