{"id":513410,"date":"2026-06-22T23:38:13","date_gmt":"2026-06-22T23:38:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/513410\/"},"modified":"2026-06-22T23:38:13","modified_gmt":"2026-06-22T23:38:13","slug":"i-played-control-resonant-and-its-turned-new-york-into-something-ive-never-seen-in-a-game-before","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/513410\/","title":{"rendered":"I played Control Resonant, and it’s turned New York into something I’ve never seen in a game before"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>, 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cControl first, so that\u2019s the world,\u201d says the game\u2019s art director Elmeri Raitanen (who also worked on Alan Wake 2<\/a>), and then adds something that tells me just as much about how this game is built, \u201cit already rules out many things that it can\u2019t be,\u201d 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\u2019ve played many games set in New York, I\u2019ve never seen it like this before.<\/p>\n

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\u2019ve seen a hundred times, usually in Spider-Man games<\/a>, 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\u2019s approach to designing the Oldest House, it\u2019s overly familiar with bursts of uneasy geometric design, splintered desks and chairs are replaced by shattering windows, phone boxes and rooftop vents.<\/p>\n

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\"Scenes\n<\/p>\n

This depiction of New York manages to draw on the visual design of the Oldest House but take it outside, onto Manhattan’s streets. (Image credit: Remedy)Making the familair weird<\/p>\n

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\u2019s done through lighting, repeating patterns and the shifting shapes of the creatures investing New York \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe definitely want to aesthetically and creatively stand out,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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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 \u2013 a sythe, hammer, dual daggers \u2013 layering in \u2018paranatural\u2019 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\u2019s all very physical, very immediate, but it still reads cleanly, which is the surprising part given how much is happening at once.<\/p>\n

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\"Streets\n<\/p>\n

Resonant’s version of New York feels like one I’ve not played in a game before, it bends and buckles under the ‘new weird’ Control art direction. (Image credit: Remedy)<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 the weirdness \u2013 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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The colour red is here to help more than I first realised, because it\u2019s not just about mood or style; it\u2019s communicating danger and places of interest\u2026 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe piercing red light is definitely one of them,\u201d Raitanen explains, when talking about visual signals for the Hiss, described in-world as an \u2018aggressive, interdimensional, resonance-based entity,\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

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\"Scenes\n<\/p>\n

Combat is fast and flexible, with a nice blend of moves and abilities to control the chaos. (Image credit: Remedy)Red is the colour of Hiss<\/p>\n

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\u2019s rooftops \u2013 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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This is where production reality starts to show through the art direction in a very direct way, and Remedy<\/a>\u2019s art director is open about it, too. \u201cWe are still a fairly small team, so it\u2019s sort of artisanal video game making,\u201d Raitanen says, and I can see what that means when I start paying attention to how spaces are constructed, because there\u2019s a lot of reuse going on, but it\u2019s not hidden; instead it\u2019s folded into the language of the world and made into a statement of how the Hiss is reshaping New York.<\/p>\n

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\"Scenes\n<\/p>\n

While fights can feel chaotic, each enemy type has a clear heriachy so you come to instantly know how to plot your way through a confrontation. (Image credit: Remedy)<\/p>\n

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\u2019m 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\u2019s the same asset used time again, and it\u2019s brilliantly confusing.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t have to build like 100 different apartments,\u201d he tells me, and once I\u2019ve 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\u2019s intentional confusion behind the environment design that builds on deeper patterning throughout the game.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s 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: \u201cWe have the same exact house asset, repeated, and it actually becomes a string rather than something that stands out as a visual bug\u201d.<\/p>\n

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\"Scenes\n<\/p>\n

The colour red signals Hiss, and it means things are going to get weird. It also becomes a gameplay hook, guiding you through the game’s strange spaces. (Image credit: Remedy)Patterns and repetitions<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 filmed footage of patterns forming in water, ink in liquid, layered and spun \u2013 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\u2019t break the illusion, because it\u2019s consistent; it belongs to the rules of the world, and it means something.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cHow do you visualise uncertainty?\u201d he says, explaining this is actually something the art team were asked to design \u2013 \u2018uncertainty\u2019. And he offers more examples, saying the game\u2019s script asked the art team to create \u201can object in a constant state of superposition,\u201d or a \u201cseven-dimensional object\u201d.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t quite settle but remain playable.<\/p>\n

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\"Scenes\n<\/p>\n

Enemy types can range from large brutes to flying fodder and those that explode when defeated. (Image credit: Remedy)<\/p>\n

Back in the Sinkhole, and everything is coming together. Repetition and room spinning is confusing as you\u2019d 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 \u2013 in an engaging blend of chaos, randomness, repeating design and colour-coded art direction to make it all readable.<\/p>\n

By the end of my Resonant demo, what sticks isn\u2019t the scale of the game\u2019s New York setting or even the fast-paced, well-balanced combat; it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As a huge fan of Control, with its blend of stale office rooms punctuated by new weird abstraction…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":513411,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[307,304,305,306,308,93,61,60],"class_list":["post-513410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=513410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513410\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/513411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=513410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=513410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=513410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}