Control Resonant Will Be Remedy’s Biggest Game Yet

[added 9/10/2026 by matus_ace]

Control Resonant is shaping up to be a significant evolution for Remedy’s series. The Oldest House is still part of the experience, but this time Dylan Faden is stepping out into Remedy’s version of Manhattan, bringing with him a much greater degree of freedom in how players move through and explore the world. Different zones, new traversal abilities and the constantly changing Resonance Cycle are also creating new challenges for the level designers.

We spoke with Arhi Makkonen, Senior Level Designer at Remedy Entertainment, about how the team approached building such a different version of Control. He explained how Dylan’s movement abilities affected the design of the world, why Control Resonant is no longer a Metroidvania, how the Resonance Cycle changes encounters, and how New Game Plus allows the team to introduce challenges that would never be possible during the first playthrough. He also talked about recreating Manhattan using real-world references, and confirmed whether a certain iconic character from the Remedy Connected Universe will return.

So, compared to the previous games, this is quite a significant change. What were the main reasons behind changing the overall structure of the world and the way the game plays?

First of all, the original Control was already quite surprising. It was essentially a Metroidvania, which probably wasn't something people expected from Remedy. So, with the next game, we wanted to keep that sense of freshness and continue surprising players, while still making it feel familiar as part of the Control franchise.

Early on, we decided that we wanted to play as Dylan Faden, and that immediately meant the experience had to feel different from playing as his sister, Jesse. Dylan is much more melee-focused, so his combat is more aggressive and fast-paced. You're getting much closer to the enemies and engaging with them at close range. Even in the early prototypes, that felt very good to us.

If you think about the first Control, its combat was less about aiming and more about movement and choosing your targets. That philosophy still works very well with melee combat.

As for the shift towards an action RPG, it really comes down to player freedom. We love giving players the freedom to choose how they want to approach the game, and the action RPG structure works very well for that. So, in many ways, it felt like a natural change for us.

You’ve moved away from the Oldest House and are now taking us into a more open-ended version of New York. Are you still retaining that unique Control feel, particularly the brutalist aesthetic?

Yes. First of all, the Oldest House is still part of the game. It's just not the only location anymore. We start the game there, and there will also be some Oldest House sections later on, so we're definitely not leaving it behind.

But our version of Manhattan is now the new major location. We always have the real-world layer of Manhattan as the foundation, and on top of that we have this strange paranormal layer. It's similar to how things worked in the Oldest House – there are strange things to discover throughout all of these areas.

As for the brutalist aesthetic, that's still very much present in the Oldest House. Manhattan itself isn't architecturally brutalist, but there is still a certain shape language to it that feels very much like Control. You have the blocky buildings, the grid-like structure, the skyscrapers, and all those elements that also connect it to the other games in the Remedy Connected Universe.

The other games in the Remedy Connected Universe have dealt with major threats, but their impact has generally been more contained to a specific place or situation. Now you're taking that threat into one of the world's biggest cities, with much larger consequences. How does Control Resonant fit into the wider universe?

It fits perfectly. This is the biggest game we've ever made at Remedy, and narratively it's also a much bigger threat. We're actually moving outside now. We're no longer contained in one location, and that's a natural evolution from the first Control. We started by seeing the danger inside the Oldest House, and now that danger has begun to spread outside of it.

Control is essentially a collection of different stories. We can change the characters, we can explore different kinds of threats and show what's happening in different places. Now we're dealing with a bigger threat, and it felt exciting to us to go bigger with this one as well.

As a level designer, you’re creating all these distinct and interesting areas. How many zones will there be in the game, and how different will they be from one another?

We wanted to give each of them a very strong identity, so they differ quite a lot. Every zone has its own atmosphere and experience, as well as its own time of day, weather and color palette. So, even from a single screenshot, you should immediately be able to tell, “Hey, we're in the park now.” Maybe there's Mold there, and you get this greenish-blueish vibe.

We haven't shown all of the zones yet, and there are still things left to explore. But I don't want to give an exact number. It's cooler to play the game and discover them for yourself.

Dylan has some impressive new movement abilities, including being able to stay in the air, move faster and reach places Jesse couldn't. What kind of challenge does that create for you as a level designer when you're building spaces that encourage players to explore?

Dylan has a lot of abilities similar to Jesse. He can levitate, but now he's also much faster. He can double-jump, run much faster and all of that, so he's a very agile character.

For a level designer, of course, even though we have this open-ended structure, we still want to have those handcrafted routes and moments that we want the player to experience. For example, the player might first be on the streets, then loop around and eventually get to the rooftops.

That's a challenge because the player can move around so much. We need to communicate a lot with the art team and iterate to make sure there aren't small gaps or places where the player can climb up to the rooftops too early.

We also found that it's actually nicer to give the player more freedom in movement. We don't try to have too many locations where there's only one way to get somewhere. Usually, we have multiple routes. But it has been a lot of work, years of work, really, to design the zones and make sure there are enough routes while also having places where you are restricted.

Are you still keeping the Metroidvania spirit in your game?

No, we're not making a Metroidvania per se. There might be some aspects of it, but that's more about exploration and adventure. You can play through the main campaign at your own pace, and you can also do the side content at your own pace.

After a couple of hours, we open up the world quite a lot, and you can start exploring all the zones at your own pace. You do get new traversal abilities by finding different places in the world, and with those abilities you can then unlock more routes and access new areas.

So maybe there's that aspect to it, but I wouldn't call it a Metroidvania, because that's a much more complete setup.

I'll connect this to something you showed in the presentation. After defeating the Resonants, the world seems to reset itself.

Yes, we call it the Resonance Cycle.

So how does that cycle impact the design of the world?

We have a lot of content that's essentially part of this living world. It's not just one type of content that you can find – there are many different kinds of challenges, puzzles, things to discover and so on.

When the Resonance Cycle happens, all the encounters level up and respawn. Normally, if you complete an encounter, it's gone. You've cleared it and the area is now safer. But after the Resonance Cycle, new enemies will appear and different kinds of encounters will come back.

As a designer, I always need to make sure that a piece of content isn't always there. It might appear in some of the cycles, but I can't rely on it always being there. That's really part of the living world design. The world is evolving, and you have to randomize some of it.

It's a bit like playing the same part of a game in New Game Plus. Everything is handcrafted, but some of the content is randomized. When do we activate it? Some players might find a particular challenge in the street, while another player won't see it there. They might only encounter it after the second Resonance Cycle.

So there is some randomization, but all of the encounters themselves are handcrafted and designed. And even in New Game Plus, there is new handcrafted content, so you should definitely try to play the game again.

So, as a designer, did the idea of New Game Plus and encouraging players to replay the game influence your approach in any way, knowing that they would return with all these abilities?

Yes. It's very interesting to see what happens when players have those abilities from the early stages of the game. We can really scale up the encounters early on, and many of the zones are going to feel quite different in terms of challenge because there are now new sets of abilities available.

We can even put things into the early parts of the game that we wouldn't normally use there, such as end-game enemies. Now we can put them in much earlier, because the player already has more abilities to deal with them.

It's going to be interesting to see when people unlock everything, because you can't unlock all the abilities and forms in a single playthrough. In New Game Plus, you can open up even more possibilities, so it's going to be interesting to see what kind of builds people create.

And as a designer, could you tell me a bit more about your work with the art team? The art of the game looks phenomenal, so how does that collaboration work, and how much does the real-world Manhattan influence the design?

We work with the environment artists all the time. We need to figure out the locations together and iterate on them multiple times.

As level designers, we first had to learn what Manhattan actually looks like. I've never been there myself, but I've spent hundreds of hours on Google Maps, taking references and trying to understand the city. That helped me get better at creating the initial blockouts and making sure they feel like something that could exist in Manhattan. For example, I might have an idea that this particular city block should be similar to another block I found in Manhattan. We're not recreating the city one-to-one, of course – this is our version of Manhattan – but having real-world references makes it much easier to communicate with the artists.

At the same time, the artists have a lot of ideas about how to make the game work. They might find a particular type of scaffolding somewhere, for example, or think about what kinds of platforms we could have on the streets that would allow the player to climb up to the rooftops.

They've found a lot of cool things that work really well for us, like hot dog stands, kiosks and other elements you can find around the city. It's a constant, everyday collaboration between the designers and the artists.

What are you most proud of and what are you most looking forward to players finally discovering when they get the game in their hands?

I'm very interested to see where people go first. What do they find? What kind of routes do they take?

During our tests, some people, for example, went straight for the main quests and completed quite a lot of them. Others spent maybe 15 hours just exploring all kinds of side quests, because there was also a lot of interesting narrative in them.

So it's very interesting to see what kind of flow people choose and how they move through the game.

I'm also really looking forward to seeing how people react to the story. We haven't shown much about the story or narrative, and we don't want to spoil it. We haven't shown a lot of gameplay or many of the locations either, but there's still a lot that people haven't seen.

It's going to be very interesting to see how people feel about the narrative. I'm very proud of our narrative team and writers. I think it's our coolest game yet.

You're probably not the right person to answer this one, but there's one character in this universe who has become really interesting, not just because of his role in the story, but also because of how he's used in the design of these games. You encounter him in very particular places, and he has become quite iconic. So, without getting into any story details, is Ahti in the game?

He's not in the game. He's probably in Cauldron Lake right now, having fun with all the strangers there. But no, he's not in Control Resonant.

There are references to all kinds of things from the previous games, but Ahti is not one of them.