I was a huge enormous fan of the first Control game, and while it fluctuates as all “favorites” do, I have emphatically called Control my favorite game of all time on several occasions.

And I think I fucking hate Control Resonant.

This isn’t going to be one of my longer posts (coming back after finishing, I was wrong about this), I just wanted to get my thoughts out because I kinda can’t believe what a completely dogass time I’m having playing my most anticipated game of the decade and likely the last western AAA game I will ever be excited about given current market trends. I’ve just finished the game’s fifth area, The Park, which is, like many areas of Control Resonant, simply a bigger version of a level from Control with fewer ideas spread thinner. That seems to be the overall formula that Remedy followed for many of these areas. And The Park truly broke my experience in a way that I doubt the game can recover from.

The first issue I had with this area was the unreal difficulty spike, and the game is mechanically aware of this spike and does absolutely nothing to accommodate the player in getting past what was likely a brick wall stopping point for a lot of players. It’s hard to tell from looking at Steam achievements, not only because the game is fairly new but because there aren’t achievements for entering each main area for the first time. But there is an achievement for getting any area to level 3, and we’ll be using that as a kind of barometer here because at time of writing, about half of people have it on Steam. The reason this kinda works for me is because you reach level 3 after like 15 minutes of activity in an area and as we’re about to explore, getting strong enough to meet The Park on even footing requires a JRPG level of monotonous grinding.

Unlike the first Control, the sequel Resonant seems to expect the player to grind side quests. And unlike Control, Resonant seems preoccupied with those side quests being repeatable randomly generated junk. The first game had these randomly generated infinite junk quests too – They were a late-game addition and completely skippable. The first Control gave you a little too much to work with, which often made the game feel a bit easy or a bit too lean in places. Control Resonant overcorrected. Control has quiet moments of cool contemplation between often tense combat encounters. Control Resonant sees fit to pack the world to the gills with rapidly respawning packs of enemies that offer the opposite of variety and keep you locked in combat or pursuit for almost the entire duration of the game. It’s exhausting. It’s flat. It’s boring.

The combat definitely does have its moments, but bares the core issue I’ve been getting at here: Control Resonant’s combat doesn’t give a shit if you’re having fun, and does not give you any of the tools you might use to make your own fun. Combat cannot be approached in a variety of ways, all weapons are combo-based melee weapons of barely varied speed and range. You are given some additional abilities, and while in a better game these abilities would be keys to solving emergent combat mixups, in Control Resonant you are simply given 2-3 options where one of them is very obviously better than the others. There are six(?) different upgradable combat finishers and the principle difference between them is visual accompanied by the classic trifecta of randomizing the speed, range, and damage of each one to make them “mechanically varied” with the most sarcastic air quotes imaginable. Thankfully, you are able to discover this through experimentation – Resonant is extremely generous with respecs, which makes it super easy to uncover how shallow the game’s RPG mechanics are for yourself. All of these issues work together like a SWAT team to create combat that feels like a chore every single time – same old enemies, many of them functionally and/or visually identical to enemies from the first game, same old abilities, again many of them basically reskins of abilities from the first game. If you enjoy this combat you have fallen for a trick and your lived experience is invalid. I’m being hyperbolic. I’m also being extremely honest.

I’ve fought several main bosses so far, referred to as “Resonants”, and it feels strange to call them “main bosses” because I’m only realizing now that these boss fights are supposed to feel like a big deal. Everything feels weightless, cooldowns are out of step and devoid of rhythm, the player character is constantly getting caught up in the abstract avant-garde level designs (which jesus fucking christ was it a mistake to have this art style and platforming co-exist because at times this feel less like a game about a supernatural resonance and more like a game about getting stuck on little railings and 4-inch tall stones), and the fights are just fucking interminable. It’s a Recore boss fight trying to have the aura of Dark Souls but the rickety mechanics and the horrible sense of pacing are a mold that has infiltrated the entire honeycomb structure of this game. And if you want to do Dark Soul aura you’ve gotta get a better fucking composer. I have hopped up platforms to reach a floating boss in no less than 20 separate video games over the course of my life. That is the sole conceit of the first bossfight. I’m tired. The other Resonant fights are no more refreshing. The visuals are cool. That is not enough.

Right so there’s mold. We’re still sort of talking about an individual level here, The Park, otherwise known as The Mold Level, a level we already had in Control 1. The first game’s mold level had a really great leadup with this angry woman who was apprehensive about letting you mess with the mold. Ahti was there sometimes. The mold was this strange new thing, and even then it just about overstayed its welcome, but it was an entire new idea, and it showed up unexpectedly throughout the Oldest House. The idea that the mold was almost irresistible to humans was a fun idea and it was only one of a dozen things that made that area feel fresh.

The Park, on the other hand, introduces exactly two new ideas to the entire mold situation: the player is given the opportunity to see what happens to someone who eats the mold (the answer to this question is “it makes you talk kinda funny for a second but then you’re fine because you’re the main character”) and a final bossfight against a mold Resonant, the intersection between TWO unexplainable cosmic phenomenon (the answer to this question is it’s the same mold boss from every other video game with a mold /poison plant-type boss, it’s a lumpy thing with tentacles that shoot a damage over time status effect except fun fun, this game doesn’t have consumables so you just sit with status effects and enjoy them which is super dynamic and keeps me on my toes except for how it doesn’t do that at all and is boring). They do not elaborate or expand on any of these ideas. The entire design document for this level genuinely could’ve been:

Mold Level

• Same as Mold Level in Control 1 but outside instead of inside
• Same enemies, no new enemies
• Same mechanics, no new mechanics
• Same visuals, no new design decisions, no evolution or mutation of the mold even though one of the story beats is that the mold is evolving, if we actually show that happening we’ll break the Project Golden Rule: Don’t Have an Idea, and If You Accidentally Do, DON’T PUT IT IN THE GAME
• omg what if you EAT THE MOLD and then… Uh… I don’t know we’ll think of something, and it’ll be so cool. Maybe the mold like… Gives you a temporary ability? Or changes how you see the world? Maybe eating the mold lets you infiltrate some sort of mold hive? Wait, I KNOW! We’ll use it to tell a couple cringey middle-school level jokes and then open the door to the bossfight! And since none of those ideas are good or new, we can use them without breaking the Golden Rule!
• What if the boss isn’t just a big mold monster, but it’s like… Um… Nevermind. I’m tired from having all of these huge ideas.

So you get to The Park and notice that every single enemy is maybe twice as strong and twice as durable as anything else you’ve encountered. So naturally, you think “Oh okay, this is like a branching path thing and I’m not supposed to be here yet.” But no, the game is completely linear, there really isn’t anything that’s actually optional (I mean, you could just decide not to play the scripted side quests, but that’s barely removed from deciding not to play the game outright) and you don’t really have any control over what order you do things in. You arrive at a new area, do the one to four main activities there (usually one related to each of the three main quests) and then maybe a scripted side quest that involves you walking up to an object, saying “That’s weird” and then getting a reward for completing yet another rich and enveloping narrative escapade. After completing said immersive experiences, you may then move on to the next area in a perfectly linear fashion. This worked in the first game because a building is inherently a claustrophobic and winding thing on the inside. Resonant takes place in a fucking open-air New York City and immediately gives you the ability to fly, so everything the game has to do to keep you on-rails is super fucking obvious and video-gamey and just moving around the world is one of the most frustrating things about this game. And it’s constantly peppered with the combat, the second most annoying part of the game, and when you get to your destination, it’s usually time for some dialogue, the third worst part of the game, and the entire time you’re listening to the score, the fourth-worst thing about the game, and looking at Dylan Faden, a waste of fucking space.

It’s so hard to stay on topic because this area is really just a microcosm of issues that spread quilt-like over the entire game. This is an essay about The Park. You show up and everything is twice your “level”. Oh right, so you have a “level” but you don’t level up, it’s a vague representation of your combat ability that has nothing to do with how appropriate your toolset is for the fight you’re about to start, it’s just like… You unlock an ability that makes you 5% more likely to proc whatever and the game goes “oh wow you’ve gotten so strong” even though 95% of the time whatever you just buffed isn’t related to what’s happening. Enemies don’t drop experience points and currency is useless, so you gain power by progressing through really poorly laid-out skill trees that feel like a clumsy afterthought and manage to make me dread the combat even when I’m away from it because looking at the skill trees reminds me of how monotonous it is.

So you’re at The Park and everything’s way too fucking strong, you’ve done all of the actually scripted content, and you’re wondering how exactly you’re meant to get stronger so you’re on par with these new enemies. There’s one really obvious thing – the boss preceding The Park gives you a fire ability so no shit, it’s extra effective against the mold, but not enough to make the area fun or make the pace of the combat fall in line with the rest of the game up to this point. And none of this is me complaining about the difficulty – the game tells the player, in no uncertain terms, that the number next to the enemies health bar indicates how ready you are, mathematically, to fight them, and enemies with skulls instead of numbers should be avoided, as they far outclass you. Mechanically. They are not intended to be fought yet, and if you choose to fight them anyway, you should expect slow pacey combat due to underpower. This is intentional and how the game is designed and explained to the player. I’m also talking about all this as someone who has just finished The Park, so I’m looking back at a brick wall that I did not enjoy breaking down, not shouting in frustration at one I cannot break at all. I say all of that to qualify the following, and this cannot be understated:

The developers of this game did not design a path forward for the player from this point. There is a gap in the middle of the game from the moment you arrive at The Park to the moment you are actually capable of completing it in a way that feels “correct” or balanced in any way. Your options are to brute force the combat, and there is so fucking much of it, or do the following, which I can only assume is the intended path forward. And it sucks balls.

The only way to get stronger at this point is by doing randomly generated infinite slop side quests like “defend the thing” or “hit the thing” or “interact with the thing”. These should not be in the game. This is placeholder content. This is un-design filling the hole that design is meant to fill. Remedy, you were supposed to fucking make something for this part of the game. You were meant to make a bit of video game here in the middle to bridge the empty space between the two cleft-in-twain halves of game you’re selling.

For completing these thoughtless filler slop gaps devoid of human care, you are given a purely random reward (an abstract shape with a name chosen randomly from the thesaurus page for “anomalous object”). It almost certainly will not be useful in any way, but is nearly guaranteed to NOT do the only thing that would actually help in this situation – increase your stats.

That skill tree I’ve been complaining about almost never actually increases your damage output or survivability. It just gives you more options, and if you’re not interested in engaging with mechanics that are reheated leftovers from Control or some other AAA action game skill tree, your options are even more limited. Often, the novel options are the weakest ones, discouraging the player from experiencing the only “new” this game has to offer. So you get to pick from 30 different versions of slow, boring melee combat against a constant flood of maybe five total enemy types per area (most of which are shared between areas or reskins or literally just recycled from the first game).

And just to reiterate, Dylan Faden is a complete fucking waste of space as a character. His presence is quality subtractive. He is a black hole from which no charisma escapes. I hate it when he opens his mouth, I am less interested in Control as a story every single time I see his Xanned-out disinterested thousand yard stare. And the quirky sidekick character you get in this game instead of Ahti or Pope is literally just a completely normal boring quirky white woman with no traits other than “We gotta survive” and “Don’t be so silly, we gotta survive!”. Oh wait she listens to music. That’s a trait. That’s her trait. People have a trait, right? One trait. That is her whole trait. Thank god this woman has a trait. She’s the Michael Jordan of being a music listener. She has a boombox.

These are two of the most boring characters I have ever seen in any medium. I want to scream skyward so that I can experience the character depth and emotional resonance of my upstairs neighbor coming downstairs to beat my ass. I felt the same way about Dylan when I was playing Control 1, but he was thankfully barely in that game and everybody else was great. Now he’s the whole fucking game and he is so fucking boring. Jesus Christ what are his traits? Dylan is the Michael Jordan of sleepwalking. Like okay so he was infected with a super-dimensional hell resonance that occupied his mind for years and made him float and recite slam poetry and probably poop his pants sometimes. He was in a coma alone with that influence literally in his brain for seven years. He was basically roommates with Space Satan for the better part of a decade and now he’s like… A Dreamworks movie protagonist. He’s like this milquetoast regular guy. He’s like a Best Buy employee. Or like a software engineer. He’s just some fucking regular ass gamer. He’s a normal man.

And it’s not just the character of the uh… Characters. The character of the world itself has been hole punched with the same funny hole punch they use to make Swiss cheese look the way it does. The first Control was so richly atmospheric that I felt very strongly compelled to read every single text log, listen to every single audio clip, and 100% complete the game twice, once around launch and once after all the DLC was out. The DLC was pretty rank too now that I think about it. A sign of things to come. The exact moment when Remedy ran out of ideas.

Resonant has half as many interesting ideas and five times as many collectables, or at least it feels like it does. My cup runneth over with manilla envelopes that say “Gee, the resonance sure is weird, broadly speaking, and I am in non-specific danger” and audio clips of guys going “Gosh, I can’t believe I’m going to die here after the confusing circumstances that got me to this point” and fucking none of them are actually worth reading because they’re all so fucking “What’s the matter Vagueboy, afraid you might say something?”-coded. It’s like how back in my creepypasta days, I got so sick of stories having “something so horrifying I can’t even describe it” or a face that “didn’t make sense to my eyes”. The Lovecraftian idea of “horrifying beyond comprehension” is the death of a writer’s obligation to present an idea. Its a writer foisting off the responsibility of imagination to the reader. Control describes something interesting in detail whereas Control Resonant has a second-person account of a man who once saw something interesting, but what it is he saw we may never know.

The first game used the Found Document as its most powerful storytelling medium, and in Resonant, it feels like the obligatory filler that every other AAA game has. Control Resonant has a huge triumph-shaped hole where the first game just had a genuine triumph of storytelling. The first game made me not only love Control, but love picking up and reading the little notes all over the place – something nobody has ever enjoyed before in any video game. Control Resonant is making me fall out of love with the entire Control Universe. It’s been seven years since the first Control game came out, and it genuinely seems like Remedy has not successfully workshopped a single new idea. I’m invested in this shit. I played Alan Wake American Nightmare for god sakes. Do you know how much I have sacrificed so that I might one day enjoy a sequel to Control that makes it all worth while? This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife! My god what have I done? I promise this is hyperbole.

The music is a waste of storage space on my computer even if I eventually decide the game itself isn’t. I haven’t gotten to much of the non-score music, Remedy always does some interesting stuff with the actual music tracks that artists made for the game, but the musical score was made by what I assume is a structural engineer that should be building bridges instead, because the music is this game is not what music should be, it is what a bridge should be. Flat. Dependable. Gets you from point A to point B. Sturdy and turgid in high winds. This is an unforgivable failure and I will never understand why every video game ships with the worst score I’ve ever heard in my fucking life, but most AAA games are bland enough for a bland score to almost feel correct. A game as aesthetic-forward as Control shouldn’t have this boring fucking Hans Zimmer wannabe Blockbuster Movie Score slop. Remedy, tell Petri Alanko his talents lie elsewhere and I think I’m better than him. Artists need not fear being replaced by AI because data can only look backward, and only the human spirit is capable of dreaming of the future. Petri Alanko should fear being replaced by AI.

And fire the guy that voices Dylan. And fire all of the people that wrote this game. And hire me to score and write the next Control game. You will not need a new voice actor for Dylan in the Control game that I write. Thank you for your consideration.

All that said, I’ll likely finish Control Resonant. I like being an informed hater. Being able to understand in fine detail why something doesn’t resonate with you is an underappreciated skill for a curator of ideas, and we all wear that hat sometimes. Not every idea is precious. And as this game demonstrates, an idea is not a necessary structure component of a product, it is an aesthetic aspect that some appreciate and some don’t. Apparently the overwhelming majority of tastemakers think this is pitch-perfect peak product. But I’m likely done with AAA gaming for the most part after this. The system that creates blockbuster products like Control Resonant is antithetical to the freedom and creativity endemic to retro and indie games. Technology and budget reach a point where the only remaining limitation is the capitalist lie of infinite growth in a finite system that puts every publicly traded company on an inescapable death march to a singularity of complete artistic dissolution. Industrially speaking, video games are a solved problem, and Control Resonant is an industry game as much as Call of Halo Theft Auto 5 is. Control and Alan Wake 2 were too successful and too many people are trying to make too much money for anything untested to make it through the filter. And that freedom to take risks is the seed from which Control grew as an original piece of media worth permanently spending a part of my finite human life to completely strip-mine for every scrap of enjoyment I could find. And I found so much there. Remedy has promised something impossible to people who do not care about any artist’s vision, and every time they fail to create infinite growth in a finite system, they’ll have to prostrate themselves and self-flagellate before the board to maintain the capital investment that enabled them to create some super expensive bullshit for drooling idiots, braindead morons, and mouthbreathing simpletons that wears the skin of an idea somebody had a long time ago. Still hyperbole.

Control Resonant is a copy and paste of every other game with no original components. Instead of Theseus’ ship being replaced plank-by-plank, Control Resonant starts with no boat whatsoever and just steals planks from other boats until it floats in the free market. Or floats in the toilet. I’ve played Assassin’s Creed. I’ve played Infamous. I’ve player Spider-Man. I’ve played Breath of the Wild. And I’ve played Control. So I don’t really feel like playing Control Resonant has any kind of point. These are hours of my life I’m exchanging here. If you’re not offering to enrich this time in my life, you’re kinda just removing it. Like doomscrolling. Or smoking cigarettes. Control Resonant has taken a trip all around the world of video games and taken pictures of every great idea every other big AAA action game has ever had. And Control Resonant has put these pictures in an album, and it shows me this album and it says “Look, Nat, look at all of these great ideas I have” and I’m just like look, your sister came by seven years ago and already showed me all of this shit and honestly, your breath stinks and I’m really disappointed that you took this whole seven years abroad and clearly haven’t learned fucking anything.

In summary, a list of things that Control did correctly that Control Resonant completely shits the bed on:

• Fun and varied combat with reasons to experiment and adapt
• Areas with tantalizing unknowns
• Refreshing new perspectives on classic sci-fi ideas
• Likeable three-dimensional characters that feel dynamic and unpredictable
• A gorgeous blend of clean brutalism and lush organic texture
• Character writing that doesn’t make me want to put a brick through my head
• Innovative industrial electronic music that shifts and stutters just like the world it contextualizes
• Ahti
• Any semblance of the “Twin Peaks”-style vibe of the first game’s hotel segments
• Charming retro-futurist technology
• Constant teasing about the possibility of a much larger and stranger world (this is retroactively ruined by Control Resonant’s reveal that outside of the Oldest House is fucking boring)
• The Oldest House, the most interesting character in Control 1, is now delegated to completely inconsequential scenery after you leave it behind at the beginning of the game
• The first game had better graphics, really difficult to pin down how exactly the fuck that happened

I think I’ve said what I needed to say. What a fucking disgrace. And the fact that this game is getting pretty universal acclaim just tells me that the world at large still hasn’t had enough of the Ubisoft open world checklist formula and floaty-ass Kingdom Hearts combat. The only thing more disappointing than Resonant is the critical praise it’s getting because we just don’t need more of this lazy Xeroxed retread and the people writing the most visible reviews are uncritical. It’s what the people want, I am, generally speaking, wrong about all of this.

When I finally call it quits with Resonant, I’ll revisit all of this. Maybe I’ll come out a changed woman. I would love it if my next post was titled “I Think I Love Control Resonant”. Maybe my judgement is just clouded now and soon I will bask in the glorious shame of being wrong about a piece of media and I can lay down in the warm grass of it being good actually. But for that to happen, Control Resonant would have to bend space and time and traverse interdimensional infinitely-repeating corridors of impossible coincidence and future memory because as it stands, Control 2 is half the game that Control 1 was. Which is non-Euclidean or something. Or maybe I’ll finish this game and decide that Remedy’s actually been shit this whole time and Max Payne was bad actually. The future is unwritten.

Nah those Max Payne remakes will probably be played completely straight and I’ll probably love them. But if the next game Remedy makes flops as hard as FBC: Firebreak, that studio’s shuddered overnight for sure and if these are the ideas that float to the top these guys are fucked to a wall. I’d love to be wrong, I’m not rooting for anyone’s failure. It’s like sadly watching one of my oldest friends drink himself to death because he got a big promotion and can’t handle making six figures.