Control: Resonant is shaping up to be Remedy’s most ambitious game yet, taking the strange supernatural foundations of Control and pushing them into a much larger, more unpredictable direction.
Remedy has spent years building games around surreal mysteries, shifting realities, and unsettling worlds that refuse to behave normally. From Control to Alan Wake 2, the studio has become known for blending psychological tension with bizarre paranormal forces. With Control: Resonant, the developer is preparing to expand that universe again, this time with a bold new approach to combat, setting, and story.
Unlike the 2019 original, Control: Resonant will not center on Jesse Faden. Instead, the sequel introduces Dylan Faden as the main protagonist. Even more surprising, Dylan will rely entirely on melee combat rather than firearms, marking a major change for the series. This shift makes Control: Resonant Remedy’s first game built around close-range fighting, giving the sequel a distinct identity while still staying connected to the strange world of the Federal Bureau of Control.
The setting is just as unusual as fans would expect. Control: Resonant takes place in a warped version of Manhattan, where reality has become unstable. Players can expect gravity shifts, time fractures, strange anomalies, dangerous enemies, and events that may not follow normal logic. It is a setting designed to feel unpredictable, hostile, and constantly in motion.
Game director Mikael Kasurinen has explained that Control was never intended to be only about one character. According to him, the franchise is about a world with its own story, a world that is wide, complicated, and full of possibilities. That idea appears to be central to Control: Resonant, which aims to grow the universe beyond the events of the first game.
Kasurinen also revealed that work on the sequel began shortly after the original Control launched. At first, the team simply thought of the project as the next Control game. Over time, it evolved through many prototype stages as Remedy explored how to bring its ideas to life.
One of the biggest challenges was adapting the studio’s technology for a more open-world structure. Control: Resonant is described as the biggest game Remedy has ever made, which means the team had to rethink tools, production methods, and design pipelines before moving fully into development.
Kasurinen said the early phase of development was focused on concept work, planning, and experimentation. During this time, the team was not only deciding what the game should be, but also building the processes and technology needed to make it possible. This preparation eventually led into pre-production and full production, with the main development timeline taking roughly two to three years.
A key part of Remedy’s process was something Kasurinen described as “vision propagation.” This involved bringing together leads from different departments to define the core ideas of the game. Through workshops and collaborative planning, the team worked out the fundamentals before those leads returned to their own groups to guide day-to-day development.
This approach helped keep the project aligned across departments. For a game as strange and mechanically ambitious as Control: Resonant, maintaining a clear creative vision is essential. With shifting gravity, fractured time, melee-focused combat, and an open-world Manhattan filled with anomalies, the risk of design chaos is high. Remedy’s solution was to make sure every team understood the larger goal before diving into production.
Kasurinen emphasized the importance of being willing to abandon ideas that do not work. If a team runs into a problem and the solution is not effective, the studio must be able to step back, admit it is not working, and find a different path. For him, that flexibility is necessary to keep the project healthy and prevent the team from losing sight of what the game is meant to be.
Control: Resonant appears to be more than a standard sequel. It is a major expansion of Remedy’s connected universe, a reinvention of Control’s combat style, and a large-scale experiment in supernatural open-world design. By shifting focus to Dylan Faden and placing him in a distorted Manhattan filled with reality-breaking threats, Remedy is aiming to deliver a game that feels familiar to longtime fans while offering something dramatically new.
For players who enjoyed the strange atmosphere of Control, the mystery-driven storytelling of Alan Wake 2, and Remedy’s talent for bending reality, Control: Resonant could become one of the studio’s most fascinating releases yet.
