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As up and down as I can be with Remedy games, I maintain that it's a studio to be treasured. Nobody is taking creative swings at its scale outside of Kojima, and Control Resonant may be its hardest swing ever. It takes guts to ditch the one throughline that all Remedy games shared—prominet primary pistols—and telekinetically chuck it out the window.
Resonant is, indeed, a character action game. It's got hot-swappable weapons, combos, air juggles, and a dizzying collection of skill trees. Dylan Faden's melee moveset—powered by a shapeshifting weapon called the Abberant—falls somewhere on the Devil May Cry or Platinum spectrum. It plays nothing like the first Control, a fact that somewhat worried me going into a hands-on demo in Los Angeles earlier this week. The new direction is fun, but will it still feel like Control?
For a while, not so much.
The 2-hour demo opened in the first act, with Dylan waking up to an unmitigated disaster—the Oldest House lockdown has broken and chaos has spilled onto the streets of Manhattan. He meets an FBC contact, Zoe, who initially wants to put him in cuffs and haul him back to his cell. But he proves his worth, and soon Zoe is directing Dylan to problems that need solving. There's a nice symmetry to Dylan's point of view compared to his sister Jesse (who is a larger part of this game than I anticipated): The first Control is all about Jesse leaving our world behind to accept her place in the Oldest House, while Dylan is venturing out into a world he hasn't seen since childhood. To him, the FBC is his captor—one that he's willing to form an alliance with if it means saving New York.
It's a great setup, but that first hour is bland to actually play. It's a lot of slicing through basic Hiss grunts, dead simple platforming, and getting acquainted with upgrade currencies, but not a lot of intrigue. It's a tutorial, so that's to be expected, but Resonant picks up a pulse once its larger, actually dangerous enemies show up. Encounters are set up almost like Doom 2016—grunts won't ever stop spawning until the big guys are gone, so it's about prioritizing the biggest threats and avoiding the little guys until you need an HP piñata to smash.
Dylan's weapon forms are excellent. I started with a combo of:
- A scythe that can cleave through everything in a 90-degree radius
- And drill that deals pointed, single-target damage in bursts
The Aberrant is Remedy tech indulgence reaching new heights—with every attack, the staff transforms and extends into the chosen weapon before snapping off at the hilt and flinging a dozen physics objects in every direction. There's a Sekiro-like stagger mechanic that plays a huge role in weapon choice, too. Some weapons, like the drill, put up weak damage but high stagger.
I wandered around an open Manhattan area checking off little side tasks. Getting around is cool—Dylan's double jump, air lift, and generous glide reminded me a bit of Infamous—but the activities present in the demo were mostly grindy combat arenas. Remedy emphasized that this won't be the case in the final game, as it removed most of the stuff that fills these open areas for the demo.
Still, it gave me an impression that Resonant's focus on larger areas and busier action might leave less room for aspects of the first game I loved, like combing over the notes of FBC scientists or learning new skills from a fiberglass merry-go-round horse recovered from an amusement park in 1998.
I finally got what I asked for with the Sinkhole, a story mission from later in the game that filled the last 40 minutes of my demo. We weren't given much context for why Dylan had to jump down a hole into a dimension of endless bedrooms not unlike the ending of Interstellar, but I think I was there to scan some weird stuff at the bottom. This whole episode was fantastic—I rode down a research probe approximately one billion miles underground, fighting off waves of Hiss while gaining the ability to shift gravity to any plane.
At the bottom was the second boss fight of the demo—a flying, spectral Hiss bastard with chest lasers that killed me twice. The difficulty jumped pretty dramatically here, though I think my weapon choice of axe and hammer were just a bad fit for fighting something airborne. Still, I eventually figured out a simple game plan: meet it in the air, blast it with my fire ability to boost stagger damage, then hit it with a heavy hammer slam.
Notably, Resonant doesn't have a deep combo or scoring system that I noticed. It's more about chaining abilities and cooldowns into stagger opportunities than memorizing dextrous button sequences. For that reason, I have a hunch that Resonant's combat will feel pedestrian to those who actually know ball with this genre, but I'm not one of them, so I appreciate the approachability.
The mission concluded with a sequence that gave me hope that Control's quieter moments will have a place in Resonant. With the beast slain and Dylan stranded at the bottom of the Sinkhole, he began a futile climb through a dizzying maze of living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms. Dylan was presumed dead by the FBC, but Zoe hadn't given up yet. She began playing music, lighting a trail of TVs for Dylan to follow. Remedy's mastery of seamless geometry loading became the main character of the moment as the new rooms appeared and disappeared impossibility fast between camera pans.
As the distant music got further away, the gravity shift ability returned, allowing Dylan to turn walls into platforms and finally climb high enough to reach Zoe on the radio. "Let's never do that again," she said.
It was the longest stretch of the demo where I didn't kill anything, and it turned out to be the highlight. Control Resonant is out September 24.
