A seamless story about transition
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| Art director: Elmeri Raitanen |
This review is long and contains spoilers. You have been warned.
Control was a game that hooked me with its design, its (somewhat uneven) play and its absolutely incredible world building. Set in a universe that includes Alan Wake’s stories and built with obvious love for the SCP Foundation’s communal and very online take on urban horror and contemporary folklore, it was one of the most unique AAA games of the last decade.
Control Resonant is its direct sequel and although it picks up seven years after the events of the first game the story is a single through line following the Faydens. There’s no space in this review to talk about the choice of centring a game on the end of a lockdown. Suffice to say it infuses much of the framing of the story and people in it as a dark and bleak post-apocalyptic narrative.
In Control, Jesse Fayden comes to the Oldest House searching for her brother, Dylan. The Oldest House is a building in Manhattan, New York, inside of which the Federal Bureau of Control has its headquarters. The FBC’s job is to find and contain unusual artefacts who have the weirdest and often the most horrific impact on the world. From cameras that freeze whatever they photograph to karaoke machines that won’t let you stop dancing until someone sings a song perfectly, this is old school creepy pasta given immersive teeth.
In Control Resonant, Dylan, who was in a cell inside The Oldest House throughout all of Control, is set free because the threat at play in the first game has got free and invaded New York. As part of this disaster, Dylan’s sister, Jesse has disappeared, last seen muttering about a coming disaster and saying she had to fix it.
Dylan, who was contained because he is responsible not just for hundreds of deaths but also seemingly responsible for the very threat that’s escaped The Oldest House, suddenly finds himself free and tasked with saving the world.
Unsurprisingly, Dylan is not sure how he feels about this and the game follows him as he searches for his missing sister and tries to understand himself all while facing off against the threats hovering just outside the front doors of The Oldest House.
The game begins with a lengthy section of exploration in a folded up Manhattan that feels a lot like elements of the Spiderman games but with Escher geometry and a very uncanny vibe. That’s all fine but it’s hardly innovative especially as at the beginning you can’t really access a lot of the terrain.
However, quickly enough you end up with some unique and uniquely implemented traversal skills that open up this twisted, folded version of Manhattan in incredible ways. You don’t simply run up walls, you change the direction of gravity and can do so from moment to moment. You can fly through the air, change gravity and land on the side of a building as if its vertical walls a the floor.
It quickly becomes mind bending in the best possible way. There are sinkholes that are fractal apartments repeating in all directions, old parks that are traversal challenges coupled with finding lost memories, there are battles with yourself and with your insecurities that observers call you out on – remembering who you were and the harm you’ve done.
There’s even pixellated levels that cast doubt on all your memories.
And from there it proceeds to get weirder and weirder. The weirdness in this game is different to its predecessor which focused less on weird geometries and more on the urban folktales of SCP. The weirdness here is in the world and level design not the quests and tasks that Dylan has to tackle. Even the combat, which has no parrying or blocking, reflects the sense that Dylan has to confront the challenges of Control head on.
The game design twists and turns, telling the story through action as much as through found notes and recordings, through the scattered art galleries (each with a different artist featured), through secret underground locations that belong to a rival organisation and even through the finding of stuffed toys for a sad teleporting labrador.
There were several set pieces that had me put the controller down and sit there looking at the screen contemplating the story, the world and what I was seeing. It is not just beautiful, the beauty is in service to the most important aspect of Control Resonant; its story.
And here’s where the spoilers begin.
In Control, there is a board who run the FBC. They effectively choose the director and protect the FBC from threats. In a conversation with Jesse they say that there never was a Jesse Fayden and a Dylan Fayden. They say ‘there was only ever Jesse Dylan Fayden’.
In a conversation with Dylan in the first game, Dylan recounts his memories and tells Jesse he remembers being a girl. And they then both remark on how both Jesse and Dylan are gender neutral names.
There is this strange sense in the first game that either one or both of Jesse and Dylan aren’t real, that the event which saw them separated and their town destroyed might have been responsible for them existing in the first place. It’s not fully explored but there is enough to cast doubt over whether Jesse and Dylan are entirely real people. In a world where astral travel, monsters who destroy you by hissing in your mind, and buildings with infinite geometry exist it’s of a piece to learn that the main characters are also, potentially, evanescent in their being.
Control Resonant takes this story and builds on it so strongly that I’d say Control and Control Resonant are a single story with a single through line and it’s a glorious piece of work.
In Resonant, Dylan discovers very early that Jesse is out there still attempting to save the world (and explicitly to save him). He is able to find echoes of her and help her at crucial moments. They’re never quite together and occupying the same space at the same time, but they are there, capable of helping one another.
Importantly, the design here has Jesse slowly losing her memories over time because of what she’s attempting – she is fading away even as your character progression means that Dylan is growing stronger. After each encounter with Jesse you receive a video recording/memory of her which is shot in pink and purple and blue and white.
While you’re exploring this story the world is also growing bigger and it turns out there are three forces you need to deal with. One is the Hiss, the other is a ‘Hedron’ which is ‘patterning’ the world and the last is a runaway fungus that’s co-opting everything it comes into touch with and absorbing it into a single big entity.
Each of these are ways of expressing physical and mental dysphoria. The Hiss are a constant whisper that distorts and breaks those who hear it – so much so that the only real defence for most people is to do an Odyssey and block up their ears lest the siren call of the Hiss destroy them. In its most lucid moments those effected by the Hiss can be heard calling out things such as ‘you will be beautiful,’ and ‘you will be transformed.’
The Hedron changes the physicality of that which it encounters, turning people into geometric shapes, breaking them apart and reshaping them and the world around them into sterile and static geometries.
The fungal threat is centred on a single mind to which everything else ends up conforming. That mind originally wanted to liberate people but is stuck now, changing them against their will to be one way only.
Each of these threats, thematically, are about the kinds of assault people with dysphoria face. Control Resonant is making the player face metaphors of what it means to live untransitioned in a world which not only doesn’t understand what that feels like but is far too often hostile to that experience.
Dylan’s original rampage was when he succumbed to the Hiss – that constant voice telling him he had to be different from the person he was, that who he was, was unacceptable, was unworthy and if only he changed he would be perfect.
Now he’s faced with this fear of a repeat in himself but also with externalised threats, each one of which want to change him physically and emotionally, in order to be acceptable. The irony here is that these changes are liberating but are ways of constraining who Dylan is, of forcing him to be something he’s not.
It’s only when he’s in purple and pink with Jesse that you see the real Dylan – someone who can see the possibility of what it means to be himself.
Underlying this come two other components. Firstly, the thread that Jesse and Dylan might actually be the same person. That Jesse made Dylan, indeed wanted to become Dylan and that this broke her, her family and even the community where she lived.
It may be that for Dylan to live, Jesse has to fade away because they are two aspects of one person and Jesse, the first of them, made Dylan, the second, as the true representation of who she really is.
Dylan is unwilling to let her go – there is too much of who she is that is meaningful for how he understands himself and there’s a battle here between how to become and what it means to let go of a past which damaged you.
The game helps the player confront the idea that Dylan is who Jesse wants to be and Jesse is someone that Dylan can’t let go of – because to be himself he has to hold onto her.
The second is how Dylan, emerging from his fear, his self-harm, his damage, starts to reconnect with people. His handler in the game is a woman called Zoe who treats him as if he matters even and especially when others don’t.
Yes, they fall in love but it’s that fragile love of people who are emerging from deep trauma – gentle, delicate, liable to take a wrong turn but also fierce and beautiful and a flower that blooms amid the ruins of destruction. Zoe becomes Dylan’s anchor because she’s a person who’s prepared to see him as he is – when the world is demanding he change to be acceptable, she is the one who sees him and says ‘yes’ to who he really is.
There’s a set piece where Dylan is effectively lost in a fractally repeating maze of apartments and the FBC abandons him. He has no way home. Except Zoe never gives up, risking her job to help him find a way home. It’s an incredible moment, accompanied by astonishing music and amazing level design. It’s also not the only moment where you simply don’t want it to end even as I was crying over Dylan’s experience and my own empathy towards him.
Right at the end of the game we learn that Dylan’s birth certificate has been reissued – making him real in the eyes of the world. He has never been real until this moment. Only Jesse existed. Now she’s (not quite) gone and he is what remains and this tiny thing, this birth certificate, acknowledges that Dylan Faydan is a man and is real and belongs as a person and it’s a startling and magical moment.
Control Resonant is my game of the year. It is a game about the challenges and hardships of transition but it is also a game about the beauty of becoming who you have always been no matter what. It is a game with banging music, incredible writing, unique world building and a commitment to this tale of a brother and sister who might actually be a girl who became a boy and how they save the world by embracing themselves. I could play it and play it and play it without ever getting bored.
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The Math
Highlights:
- Astonishing design
- Amazing gameplay and music
- A story that is moving and beautiful
Reference: Remedy Entertainment, Control Resonant [2026]
STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos, BSFA and BFA finalist he's also Chair of the British Science Fiction Association and Treasurer for the British Fantasy Society. He is on bluesky at: @stewarthotston.com.
