Review: Control Resonant (Patreon)

OK, remember the hit film, The Matrix? It was nuts, man. Before it came out, they marketed the movie using the mystery at the core of the whole thing: What the heck is the matrix, anyway? When you saw the movie, you found out what it was. And it was cool! Then they made more Matrix movies that attempted to keep you engaged despite you already knowing the core conceit of the universe. While I won’t deny that The Matrix Reloaded had some cool shit in it, it was inherently less cool than the original movie, because you went in already knowing some extremely crucial things about the nature of that world. The Matrix is a grand reveal. The sequels are decent movies.

Control is a game extremely steeped in mystery. Jesse Faden’s trip to The Oldest House opens with you knowing very little about what’s going on. She’s a lady in search of her long, lost brother who quickly finds herself locked in a death-struggle with some kind of inter-dimensional threat. Even the FBC, the shadowy government organization that inhabits the Oldest House, is a huge mystery to be uncovered. Part of why Control is such an amazing video game is that it’s an entirely new world with its own rules, factions, and mysteries. Control is a grand reveal. Control Resonant is a decent video game.

Wait, let me have this one back and give it another go.

OK, remember the hit film, The Matrix? It was nuts, man. This dude, Neo, was the absolute star of the show. At times it seemed like the entire universe revolved around him. He’s the coolest, most powerful character in the franchise! Then they made a video game, Enter the Matrix, where Neo is only referred to in passing moments, fleeting chunks of story where whoever the heck you even played as in that game has story beats that intersect with the character you actually care about. In Control Resonant you play as Dylan Faden, the brother of the amazing-but-now-missing protagonist from the first game, Jesse Faden. While Dylan’s story has beats that intersect with the character you actually care about and the world is built out a bit further, Dylan’s own journey feels secondary.

Eh, the first intro was better. Forget about it, let’s move on.

Control Resonant follows up on the first game by taking it to the streets. The Hiss escape from the Oldest House, Dylan wakes up from his coma to give chase, and the conflict sees a new entrant in the form of a mysterious force that has separated Manhattan from the rest of the world by creating huge, patterned chasms that are impossible to cross. So now, instead of being trapped in a building with The Hiss, you’re trapped an increasingly weird New York City with them.

Resonant attempts to bring the maze-like nature of Control’s original design to a much larger space. New York is broken up into multiple zones connected by doors and, eventually, fast travel points. Getting from place to place is a matter of realizing that the on-screen radar is effectively useless for navigation, pausing the game to look at the map, and ending up running down a street that has a giant wall of mold or a mysterious locked door or something that you can’t bypass anyway. Some zones are better about this than others, but I found getting around the world to be something of a chore for the first half of the game… by that point I had memorized which streets were dead ends while also realizing that I need to stare at the map more before figuring out where to go.

The original Control was similar in this way, but on a much smaller scale. With it being a building instead of a city, the potential for getting lost was a lot lower. Both games make good use of in-world signage to try to give the game a more natural type of navigation, but sometimes you’re just trying to get to the next thing and are tired of staring at maps and trying to remember which street has an unlocked door at the end of it.

As you move around the city, you’ll invariably end up fighting a lot of the Hiss. Sometimes a specific area will lock down and prevent you from moving forward until you’ve dealt with all major enemies in the immediate area—minor enemies repeatedly spawn while major enemies are alive, giving you a quick source of health drops, should you need them. Control Resonant is primarily about melee combat, as opposed to Jesse Faden’s configurable gun. To that end you can select from a few different weapon forms, as in the original game, but instead of “shotgun” or “pistol” configurations you’re choosing between things like slow attacks that wind up and fast dual blades. You’ll eventually choose forms for your primary attack (square button), secondary attack (triangle), and a combo-ender style that happens after landing all the hits of your primary attack.

While reading about these ideas might make this seem like it’s fitting into some kind of character action template, there’s not a lot of flow between attacks and combos are limited. With the dual blade primary form and a “big metal fists” sort of combo-ender, my main combo for the overwhelming majority of the game was to mash the square button six times. I eventually found an upgrade that would allow me to combo into my secondary attack (a drill sort of stabbing attack) after the first three hits of my primary… but the secondary attack wasn’t as useful as letting the three attacks from my combo-ender do the job, so branching to a different button is less effective than just mashing it out. This gets old, and resetting your skill points to try different abilities isn’t free, so you're a bit more locked in than it seems.

Melee attacks do direct damage, but many of them also build up “falter,” which is a stun gauge that appears beneath the standard health bar. If you fill the falter meter, you can click the left stick to instantly kill that enemy. So choosing weapons also becomes an act of staring at numbers and looking at different status effects as you see what you can do to kill quickly or falter even faster. To that end you have loadout slots that can hold artifacts. This slaps some more numbers onto your build, like making you more resistant to fire, making sure you take less damage when you fall off the world, giving you additional power in specific situations, and so on.

Power is the rechargeable resource used to cast abilities, which you earn after completing one of the game’s boss fights. The first option I had here was to choose between abilities like “fling rocks at a dude” or “build a rock shield around yourself and use that to charge at enemies.” I couldn’t find a way to make the early abilities matter at all. The time it took to charge up and shoot three rocks at an enemy was better spent running up there and mashing the button six times. Even as you play more and unlock more abilities, the most interesting and effective combo I could come up with was one that would let me put status effects onto enemies. Combining mold with fire causes a big explosion that does a ton of damage. So once I was properly outfitted I started shooting mold spores to inflect mold, then imbuing my melee attacks with fire. Once I land a few strikes, the fire sticks and causes the explosion. It’s nice, but even that doesn’t fundamentally change the combat as much as I wish it did.

Like many other games, Control Resonant has the idea of a perfect dodge, and timing your dodge until the last moment can do various beneficial things, depending on which upgrades you’ve purchased. This is mostly fine, because the perfect dodge is pretty easy with most enemies, but once you start fighting weirder-looking stuff, like a demonic city bus that stands on end and launches enemies out at you, it’s harder to know what you’re looking at and what the attack animations actually are. You get used to it. Or, if you don’t, the game has a really robust set of cheat-like options in an assist mode menu. Here you can alter sliders for incoming and outgoing damage, how quickly you regain ability power, how wide the perfect dodge window is, and so on. You can even just toggle boxes for immortality, one-hit kills, or one-hit falters. The game’s uneven difficulty in the early going, along with a major ramp up in the late game makes these options awfully tempting, indeed. But as long as you dial in the dodge and obey the game’s loading screen tool-tip that informs you that the lock-on camera is really only useful in one-on-one fights and awful in any fight where someone can get behind you, it’s all doable.

Setting the game in a city instead of a warped office building also has an impact on the general tone of the game. Much of the kitschy, goofy characters and settings don’t really reappear here, and if they do, they do so in a way that doesn’t really add anything new. Finding page after page of heavily redacted text about FBC policy or various objects of power doesn’t hit as hard here. But also it’s worth noting that the story of Control Resonant is simply darker all around. Dylan has been a captive for his entire life and the game eventually gets around to dealing with that while also sinking into the Faden siblings’ home life, prior to the slide projector incident that started this whole thing in the first place. While I won’t go so far as to say this game needs, like, content warnings on it or anything, it takes on some themes of child abuse and trauma that hit me a bit harder than I’d normally expect. The original game lets you connect most of those dots on your own. This one plops it in your lap while also delivering some of the game’s most light-hearted and interesting content at the same time, which helps make it all seem that much more effed up.

Visually the game looks fine, though on a PS5 Pro on the performance setting I encountered some situations where dark areas had sparkly walls, like some kind of ray-tracing artifacts gone wrong. I also saw a couple of hits to the frame rate here and there, but nothing too major. The voice acting is mostly good, though the performance on Dylan himself is a bit uneven. You could argue this makes a lot of sense, given what the character has been through in the events leading up to this game, but even after the game tries to justify his generally limp performance with some late-game lore business, I was left a little cold by the line reads.

Since 2019 or so I’ve been saying that I don’t think there’s been a single-player game better than Control since its release. Here we are, it’s 2026, and… I don’t think there’s been a single-player game better than Control since its release. Control Resonant has its own thing going on, and some parts of that are pretty cool on their own, but I was left feeling like this was more of a side story. All that said… I bet a third game would be pretty rad, considering where this one leaves off. We’ll see.

3/5