“What are your thoughts on CONTROL Resonant?”

Spoilers for CONTROL Resonant.

I’m blown away by everything in CONTROL Resonant. While I knew some of what to expect from minimal exposure to prerelease media, the experience of playing the game has been nothing short of remarkable; I can barely put it into words. The game is a masterpiece as far as I’m concerned.

The Day One rebalancing patch was a positive improvement in my opinion; at the time I restarted my playthrough since I was only a few hours in. With the patch I felt the combat with Strike and Extend was fun and engaging. Perfect dodges and skills like spreading status effects with the ground pound are stylish and satisfying. I like that the weapon and talent progression buffs are action-oriented rather than combo-oriented; I do not play a lot of games with similar combat and think a combo list would have made me feel like I was doing combat “wrong” the whole time. Thus I’m glad there isn’t a combo list, prominent or otherwise.

The biggest challenge I’ve had is with level traversal, specifically but not limited to The Park, since obstructions aren’t very legible when reading the map. For example in The Park, I didn’t realize until much later that there was a way to get up to the FBC outpost without Reach. I am generally okay with this, however, I found that traversal took a huge amount of trial and error to reach the mysterious dog in the Underpass and to reach the patterned FBC field office for the Unknown Resonant Entity fight. Failing to reach the dog repeatedly in the Underpass in particular was mildly panic-inducing, simply because the dog is so lovely and I badly wanted to help her out!

I noticed a quirk of how the mixtape collectibles are implemented. I “collected” the song Fight for Control after jumping off the first Gravity Well, which of course started playing the song and made for an absolutely incredible moment of flying through the air. After dying in combat while the song was still playing, however, respawning and repeating the sequence of jumping off the Gravity Well failed to play the song a second time. I assume this is because the song was already in the inventory? Anyway, it would have been nice to try again with the in-game music drop intact.

Last but not least I can’t say enough about the storytelling and character performances. The moments with Jesse and Dylan, including the flashback to Ordinary, are so beautifully wistful and had my heart in my throat. The moment during the Ordinary flashback when Dylan comforts Jesse, and the game shows a pixel art closeup of the two children, I described thusly to a friend: “I don’t think a game that isn’t aware it takes place in 2026 [and contains such an obvious nostalgic throwback] bothers with something like this. I fucking bawled.” All I’m saying is, shit’s bad out here in the real world, and it’s not lost on me that the development team took the time to include such a loving, caring moment in the game.

I also loved Arish’s overall arc, but especially his haunting dialogue during the lead-up to The Co-Director boss fight. The foreshadowing headaches; the interposition of Zoe reconsidering whether people can change, followed by Arish asking Dylan “what did it feel like, when you changed”; the haunting comment from Arish that his headache was gone; followed by the reveal of The Co-Director’s design in a cutscene.

Alright I’ve written way too much already, so let me hit a couple final points:

• Great soundtrack (wasn’t what I expected in parts, in a good way)
• THOSE parts of the final fight were “demoscene as fuck” (highest possible compliment)
• Dr. Florez’ performance and in-game rendering thereof was shockingly expressive and naturalistic for a side character (I just think a lot of PCAP seems to have people nodding an unnaturally large amount, so kudos to the performer here)
• Beautiful dog and animation thereof; just so full of life
• Emily’s soliloquy to Jesse made me cry

In closing, congrats and thank you to the team for making a beautiful game and sequel that I for one would NOT have known to ask for!