Control Resonant sees developer Remedy Entertainment take one step further into the world of RPGs, following its first experiments with the original Control. But this isn’t a studio that likes to follow conventions. Rather than rewarding you with XP for finishing missions, taking down bosses, and completing side activities as most games in the genre would, Resonant hands upgrades to the world around you. The open zones of this corrupted Manhattan react to you defeating the big threats infecting it, growing much more dangerous with each new zone conquered. We’ve already taken a look at how this sequel’s combat has evolved, but now it’s time to see how the threats you’ll be taking down have changed in turn.
As Control’s story expands beyond the shifting walls of The Oldest House, so too have the otherworldly entities that once called it home. Much like how the Bureau’s headquarters was made up of a series of unique areas infested by the Hiss and the Mold, each of Manhattan’s zones finds itself swarmed with these familiar forces, albeit not quite how you remember them. Chief among them are the eerie, red-hued Hiss, the paranatural parasite that corrupted Resonant’s protagonist, Dylan, in the original Control.
“You see the Hiss in this simpler form in the first game,” says Mikael Kasurinen, director of both Control games. “But as it’s getting out into the outside world, its turbulence and corruption go to the next level, and it gets way more violent and uncomplicated. It starts to even affect the environment as well, not just human beings.”
I can attest to this. Having played a few hours of Resonant now, I’ve been forced to fight all manner of possessed entities – ranging from gangly eldritch monsters and giants with two-tonne sacs of glowing red goo for heads (with which they attempt to flatten you like a mallet), to an upturned bus emanating haunting passenger groans as it spun above me.
“We had fun thinking about [the enemy designs],” art director Elmeri Raitanen tells me. “The Hiss has been cooking and getting stronger, and it can corrupt more things and bigger things. And naturally now, even outside of The Oldest House, we have more opportunities to play around with things, like this design for a large enemy that is a spawner type. So we were thinking, ‘How can we actually do something like this in the world of Control?’ So a ‘Hissified’ bus made most sense. And then the fact that the poor passengers inside then became these ‘Hissified’ spawned enemies.”
Also returning is the Mold, the bacterial threat found in the depths of The Oldest House in the original Control. These fuzzy fungal fiends have carved out their own pocket of New York, caking subway walls in blue and yellow mycelium and armoring themselves in layers designed to challenge Dylan’s melee-centered skillset.
“The Mold has evolved as well,” reveals Sergey Mohov, Control Resonant’s lead gameplay designer. “The majority of enemies are Hiss in Manhattan, but Mold are a more isolated faction. There’s still quite a lot of Mold enemies, but we were able to give them some special properties as a faction. They are soft and made out of this spongy mold material. Because of that, they are naturally resistant to blunt damage. On the other hand, some of that material has calcified on them, and you can break it with blunt damage. So you need to try to pay attention to, like, ‘Okay, this enemy has armor from the front. Maybe I go behind, and I hit it. Or maybe I pull out my big hammer and smash its armor, and then I can attack it afterwards’.”
Fighting the Mold leads to combat dances performed to a different beat than those with the Hiss. They’re often more considered encounters, framed around knowing which enemies to target first, and taking in your surroundings so as not to get caught up in the traps they’ve set.
“They don’t necessarily attack you until you actually engage them or until you get really close,” Mohov explains. “So there’s a little bit of, I don’t want to say stealth, but they’re not actually necessarily actively caring about attacking Dylan. They’re just kind of there, and their job is to just infect everything with Mold, including you. They’re covering the encounter area with the Mold damage zones that create these spore clouds that inflict status effects. There are mines in the air and on the ground that you have to avoid. There are also these mold alarms which trigger nearby encounters if you get too close to one. And burning all of that stuff is really fun because mold is afraid of fire.”
You’ll get the ability to burst into flames and fry up some mushrooms as you progress through Control Resonant’s story. Progression doesn’t quite work how you might expect for an action RPG, though, with traditional character leveling systems discarded in favour of one that connects you to the world in a uniquely Remedy way.
“So Dylan doesn’t get XP, but zones do,” states Mohov. “Every time you do an activity in the zone, you get some XP for that zone. And every time the zone levels up, you get the zone improvement, [which are] things that increase, for instance, health drops while you are doing activities in that zone. Or they can reveal loot chests on the map, or open up arcade cabinets, which are these challenge missions that you can do later in the game once you’re more powerful.”
That’s not to say there’s no progression system for your protagonist, though. “Every time you level up a zone, you get a talent point,” Mohov explains. “And that’s more kind of classic RPG progression where you level up, and you get an extra ability point.”
There’s only one set difficulty level in Control Resonant, as the team believes that they are making a “well-balanced, yet challenging experience”, Mohov tells me. Though assist modes will be available to help out those struggling, he encourages everyone to try to play Resonant how it has been intentionally designed before tweaking it themselves. And even if you do ultimately dial in some assists, it’s worth experiencing one of Remedy’s methods for that fine-tuned balancing act: an enemy scaling system that sees the whole of Manhattan react when you take down one of its big bosses, The Resonants.
“Enemies do have levels in the game, and they do get harder as you get into further zones,” Mohov explains. “Every time you kill a Resonant, which is one of these tentpole fights, you get an ability. But [The Hiss] also fights back, and it fights back by creating more threats for you in the world.
“So once you defeat a Resonant, combat encounters throughout the world, not just in the zone where you fought the boss, will respond,” Mohov continues. “New enemies are going to appear that weren’t there before, and a lot of the encounters are going to level up. So you need to be strategic about when you want to do that. Because you are going to grow in power a lot once you kill a Resonant, but also the world is going to get quite a lot of new threats, and there’s going to be new challenges for you to overcome.”
I’ve only played through a couple of the Resonant boss fights during my hands-on time, but from these brief encounters it’s clear to see that Remedy has placed a lot more thought into boss design this time around. Not only that, but they feel better woven into the central set of missions than they did in the original Control, where they were frequently positioned as optional adversaries.
“I think you will have a really hard time finding two bosses that are anything like each other,” claims Mohov. “We want you to come in there and get this sense of wonder, and also they test very different skills. Every boss by definition is a skill check. And some bosses, you’re going to have a harder time with some builds than others. So you will want to think a little bit about what artifact do I want to equip in this one? What are the damage types that I’m dealing with here? Is it better to attack it from range or is it better to stay up close?”
In our previous drop of this IGN First, we showed off a full fight against the Central Resonant; a mammoth, magma-splurging beast that certainly poses a challenge. It tests your grasp of Dylan’s floating ability as the floor literally becomes lava. Visually, its stumbling off-kilterness is in stark contrast to the game’s first boss — a giant, yet deadly, face which dazzles in its hypnotically kaleidoscopic imagery. This is due to Patterning, a brand new paranatural threat that is rivalling the Hiss and Mold for ownership of Manhattan.
“It transforms the cityscape in this weird algorithmic pattern,” Elmeri explains. “Often you find these Resonants — former persons of power at some sort of a focal point or an anchor point of this localized patterning. So this poor person somehow becomes amalgamated into their surroundings as well. So it’s not just the person, but becomes part of the environment.”
After defeating this first boss, you’re left to tackle the other Resonants in any order of your choosing — although not all of them must be taken down in order to see the story’s end. It’s a further example of choice making its way into each aspect of Control Resonant, whether that be when buildcrafting in its menus, the moment-to-moment beats of battle, or deciding whether taking down all of its bosses is worth the payoff of angering the paranatural New York that birthed them. That’s for you to decide.
Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.