Control Resonant eventually reaches the strange, memorable heights associated with its predecessor, but getting there takes too long. Remedy’s follow-up is less focused and less elegantly structured than Control, with much of its opening stretch spent crossing a repetitive version of Manhattan.
That setting is the central problem. The game begins inside the familiar Oldest House before moving into a distorted city, and the contrast makes its urban world feel especially ordinary. The result is a slow start that can leave players disappointed long before the later chapters begin to show their ambition.
Why the Oldest House worked so well
The Oldest House is the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Control, the secretive organisation investigating unexplained phenomena. Its design draws on the brutalist office and civic buildings associated with the 1960s and 1970s: heavy concrete, muted colours, stark geometry and a sense of institutional anonymity.
That mundane workplace becomes the engine of Control’s supernatural identity. It resembles the sort of office where an ordinary job might disappear into routine, except that gravity, architecture and reality itself can suddenly stop behaving properly. The building is arguably the game’s most important character.
Its appeal also overlaps with the idea of the liminal space. Like the Backrooms concept, the Oldest House begins with an oppressive lack of personality. Because the environment is so familiar and uneventful, even a small violation of its rules feels deeply unsettling.
From ordinary offices to impossible architecture
The Oldest House reveals its strangeness in stages. Office workers hang motionless above the floor, intense red light transforms otherwise functional rooms, and corridors begin to bend, stretch and fold into impossible shapes.
This gradual escalation gives the original game a strong sense of unity. The environment becomes stranger as the challenge rises, allowing the setting, story and combat to reinforce one another. What first looks like an anonymous office eventually becomes an architecture that is both incomprehensible and strangely practical.
A generic Manhattan stand-in
Control Resonant continues the story after the seven-year gap between the two games. It opens in parts of the Oldest House that will be familiar to returning players, but it soon moves outside rather than travelling to the astral plane and the mysterious Board.
The new setting is a warped version of Manhattan. In theory, a city should provide the same kind of recognisable foundation as the Oldest House’s offices. Instead, this version of New York feels like a composite of generic open-world locations seen across games for decades.
Signs recur too frequently, the same shops appear again and again, and most buildings lack a distinct architectural identity. It rarely feels like New York City. The streets have the vague quality of a filmed substitute location: a city standing in for Manhattan without developing a personality of its own.
That sameness makes movement exhausting. From rooftops, the player can look across streets that seem interchangeable, with objectives scattered through an urban space that often feels empty rather than mysterious. The city is large, but its scale does not consistently translate into discovery.
Some of that emptiness may be deliberate. The quiet streets could reflect pandemic-era urban life, while the broader map may be an attempt to expand Control’s distinctive weirdness across a much larger canvas. Even so, the effect weakens the charm and impact that made the original setting so memorable.
Remedy’s identity takes time to emerge
Remedy’s games are rarely anonymous. Their influences can be obvious and their homages unusually direct, but that confidence usually gives each project a clear identity from the outset. The studio’s affection for works such as Twin Peaks has helped make its games feel deliberately authored rather than interchangeable.
Control Resonant does not immediately offer that same certainty. Too much of the early experience resembles open-world busywork, and the travel between objectives can feel like time taken away from the more inventive material.
Eventually, the game becomes much stranger and more compelling. Its second half can stand alongside the best moments of Control, but reaching those moments requires patience and persistence. Players considering an arcade and gaming news read will find a familiar lesson here: a memorable setting matters as much as the mechanics built around it.
For anyone drawn to the atmosphere of unusual spaces, an arcade machine buying guide offers a different way to think about how games occupy a room. A dedicated arcade cabinet can make a strong visual statement; Control Resonant simply takes too long to make its own city feel equally distinctive.
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