Control Resonant review – A kaleidoscopic ode to creativity

Published: September 18, 2026

Our Verdict

Control Resonant is a masterful explosion of creativity, an expansion of the first game in every conceivable manner. It shatters every expectation and rebuilds them into something new.

Do you remember? Do you remember the Hiss and the Oldest House and the Director? Do you remember Prime Candidate 6? Do you remember, Prime Candidate 6? Do you remember the FBC? What you did to the FBC? 

Control Resonant is a game about remembering, but it first asks you to forget everything you know about the Federal Bureau of Control. Like the Men in Black arriving with their black suits and little unrememberiser gadget, Remedy wants you to forget Jesse, forget the Oldest House, forget the slick gunplay and twisting corridors. Forget, to some extent, the Hiss.

Because once you’ve forgotten everything that made the first game so memorable, Control Resonant builds you back up in a new wavelength, the same parts fitted together in a different order. The result is a game that your muscle memory rejects, but awakens something unmistakable that has been buried in your brain for the past seven years. It’s Control twisted, patterned, reformed, made whole again in a manner that doesn’t feel quite right, at least to start with. But as you play on, you realise that Resonant revels in this disharmony, building on the ideas and themes of the first game in a way that simultaneously makes perfect sense and no sense at all. 

Do you remember Prime Candidate 6?

You’re Dylan now, not Jesse. The siblings still form the emotional core of the story, but you now have Dylan’s host of paranatural abilities at your disposal. You also have all the baggage that entails; the ramifications of playing the mass-murdering antagonist from the first game provide immediate friction, and diving deeper into the cycles of abuse that the younger Faden has endured offers a traumatic perspective on the events of the first game. 

But as Dylan and Jesse unpack their childhood and federal upbringing in order to protect the future, the other protagonist of the first game also steps aside to allow new blood a chance to shine. The Oldest House makes brief appearances throughout the game, but most of the action occurs on the warped, twisted streets of Manhattan. This presented my first problem with Control Resonant. 

In this first dozen or so hours, it abandons the claustrophobic corridors of the Oldest House, seemingly dismissing some of the finest levels that have ever been designed and everything that Remedy so cleverly packed inside for a generic open world. And it’s not just any generic open world. This is Manhattan, the openest worldiest open world to ever open world. Sure, Remedy puts an Inception-like spin on Marvel’s Spider-Man, but you’re still jumping across rooftops to bring satellite dishes online in order to unveil more of the map. Until you’re not.

Do you remember the Oldest House? 

While some of the side missions in Control Resonant are brilliant-in true Remedy fashion, there’s everything from an exploding head virus to playable karaoke-I would ignore them to start with. Fight some bosses, follow the apparitions of Jesse, and unlock some combat and traversal abilities, respectively. Once you have these at your disposal, Manhattan transforms from a tired trope to a playground unbound by the constraints of gravity or conventional physics. 

The West Incursion Zone has been hit by the worst patterning-that’s the city folding in on itself as the reality-bending virus escapes FBC containment and does battle with the Hiss-and it’s here that the fun really begins. What before were paranatural roadblocks rising dozens of metres into the sky are now new, inverted floors to sprint across. What were arbitrary barriers to prevent exploration are now new peaks to conquer, new quests to collect. 

This is just the start. Even later in the game, when you visit the Subway and Unknown zones, Remedy ramps this up even further, until the gravity-bending city threatens to engulf you in a constant barrage of disorientation. The Subway in particular left my jaw hanging open on multiple occasions thanks to clever pieces of design, storytelling, or both. There were multiple occasions when I forgot which way was up, spending so long battling or puzzling in the upside-down city above my head that only a defeated foe falling upwards, towards the other cityscape, towards the centre of the earth, would remind me that I’d been upside down for hours. 

The twisting city mirrors the shifting narrative. Often stories are presented out of order, but it rarely matters. There are frustrating occasions when you realise that you can only progress by unlocking a certain ability first, but they are few and far between. For the most part, you can pick up on any part of a quest and work backwards, forwards, or upside-downwards to figure out what you need to do and who you need to save in order to atone for your past mistakes. World design becomes quest design becomes narrative design. All intersects, a pattern that repeats across every block of Manhattan as often as the foes that you battle.

Do you remember how to fight? 

The Hiss, like the early areas of Manhattan, grow a little stale, but dive deeper and Resonant throws some welcome variety at you. From living fungus to climactic boss battles, Remedy applies its abundant creativity to every element of combat. Each variant of violence is a competing force that threatens humanity in its own right, battling each other as often as taking out their anger on you. They intersect like a violent mandala, a rhythm oscillating between furry mould, fiery Hiss, and worse than both. 

You can’t face these threats with a gun, as your sister did seven years ago, so you use your shifting combat blade, the Aberrant, performing scything combos and drilling brutality. That should be enough. That must be enough. There are options, builds, upgrades, menus, but you soon find one that works and stick to that. For me, a drill, and stacking Focus to debilitate opponents and leave them vulnerable for all manner of grisly finishers. You might opt for summons, taking control of the most violent enemies, or a good, old-fashioned hammer. 

The boss battles and the titular Resonants therein are the cyclical star attraction amid a gameplay loop that reverberates like the peals of a bell. Picking a favourite is like choosing a favourite child, but most importantly, each is unique from the others. For once, Remedy eschews repetition, and in doing so creates some of the most memorable experiences in recent years. 

Do you remember?

At its heart, Control Resonant is a game about memory. About trauma, about repeating the mistakes of the past or moving on from them. Control Resonant may feel completely different to play than its predecessor, but it never struggles to recreate the feelings conjured in 2019. The first time you descend into the Sinkhole is as inventive a level as the iconic ashtray maze, and brilliant moments like this are peppered throughout the campaign.

But it also remembers that the key to all of the physics puzzles and gargantuan battles is the human stories behind them. From the protagonist Fadens to the nobody NPCs, every character is crafted with care, and it’s for that reason that you want to explore the city, to save the city. The narrative feeds the gameplay, which then feeds the narrative all over again.

Control Resonant feels like Remedy poured the first game through a kaleidoscope and crafted a masterpiece from the disjointed shards. Amid the fractured beauty, as the shards coalesce and reform, you can make out a celebration of human creativity as you play through one masterstroke of game design after another. Every shard sings beautifully, but together they create harmony from the chaos. 

Do you remember? Do you remember the Hiss and the Oldest House and the Director? Do you remember Prime Candidate 6? Do you remember, Prime Candidate 6? Do you remember the FBC? What you did to the FBC? What you did for Manhattan?