Remedy Blows Up Its Own Blueprint: Everything About Control Resonant Is Different

Remedy's Sequel Breaks Every Promise the Original Made

The original Control built its cult identity on specificity. One building. One protagonist. A maze of brutalist corridors that folded in on themselves like a fever dream inside a government filing cabinet. Jesse Faden, psychic gun in hand, was inseparable from the Oldest House — the game's central metaphor was architectural: power comes from learning the space.

Control Resonant launches September 24, 2026, for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store. Nearly every structural decision Remedy made for the sequel contradicts the formula that got them here. That's the story worth understanding before reviews start flooding in.

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New Person, New Place, New Fight

The biggest change is the shift away from Jesse Faden as the main playable character. Jesse does appear briefly, confirming she still has a role in the sequel, but Control Resonant focuses on her brother Dylan Faden.

For anyone who played the original: Dylan was the kid in the glass cage. He was previously a prisoner of the FBC, held for his paranatural abilities. He was a threat, a mystery, a glimpse of what Jesse might become if she lost herself to the powers she was only beginning to master. Handing him the protagonist slot is a genuine inversion — and Remedy seems to know it.

The studio has been deliberate about positioning the two games as siblings in the same family, each with their own identity while remaining connected. The decision to drop the number from the title signals this: Control Resonant was intentionally designed to work as a standalone experience.

The setting shift is equally stark. Rather than entering the Oldest House from the exterior as in the first game, Dylan needs to find his way out to the streets of Manhattan to pursue the Hiss, who are now on the loose. The stark, brutalist surrealism that saturated the Oldest House in the first game has boiled out of its breached walls and onto New York's streets, reconstructing blocks of brownstones and downtown shopping districts into a sprawling, dreamlike mazework of impossible architecture and alternative physics.

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The Combat Is a Genre Swap

This is where Remedy takes its biggest swing, and also where the most friction is appearing in pre-release discourse.

The game places an emphasis on melee combat in contrast to the third-person shooter elements of its predecessor: Dylan's primary weapon, the "Aberrant," can shapeshift into a variety of armaments. His primary weapon can transform into several melee forms, including daggers, a scythe, gauntlets, and a large hammer.

Remedy had intended for the Control series to be role-playing games from the start — the first game introduced side quests and dialogue choices but discarded core RPG systems like skill trees and character builds. Control Resonant now fully commits to being an action RPG with character statistics, multiple talent trees, and customizable weapons.

The pivot drew immediate comparisons in the preview circuit. The melee combat was inspired by Devil May Cry and features responsive, deep mechanics including air combos, a Falter meter that builds toward powerful finishers, and the kind of enemy juggling associated with dedicated stylish action games. Multiple outlets that played the game at Summer Game Fest 2026 praised these elements.

That said, the combat isn't landing universally. Some critics noted that melee combat struggles in an open-world context where players are expected to do a lot of it. Boss and encounter design has drawn particular scrutiny, with some late aerial fights straining a camera and targeting system not built for them.

Others argue that Resonant's combat system is built to facilitate slick, fast-paced movement, with dodging, jumping, aerial attacks, and special abilities synergizing to create satisfying encounters once everything clicks.

The melee debate is clearly the central fault line in early critical coverage.

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How the Community Got Here

When the sequel was first revealed, even Remedy's most diehard fans were skeptical. It wasn't called Control 2, it wasn't a third-person shooter, and it didn't star Jesse Faden.

Remedy acknowledged that reaction directly but pushed back on the concern, emphasizing that the community is trusting and open to unexpected creative twists.

That tracks with how Remedy has positioned this project publicly across every outlet: not as Control with new content, but as a thematically related game that deliberately departs. The studio expressed hope that players who enjoyed the weirdness and uniqueness of the first Control would feel a similar sensation with this one, even as a sequel.

Early review aggregation suggests the gamble has mostly paid off. Control Resonant has been met with broad critical approval. That's a meaningful result for a studio self-publishing a sequel to a cult hit. The more interesting texture is in the split between critics who find the new combat deeply satisfying once it opens up, and those who think asking players to do a lot of it in an open-ended world is a structural miscalculation.

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What Remedy Is Actually Doing

Zoom out and this reads as a deliberate franchise architecture decision, not just a sequel. Remedy describes Resonant's world as "open-ended rather than a traditional open world." The studio dropped the "2" from the name. They built it to work without prior knowledge of the original. They're not making an expanded Control — they're making a second entry in what they seem to want to be a recurring universe, where each installment can rotate protagonists, settings, and even genre emphasis while the connective tissue (the Remedy Connected Universe, the FBC mythology, the sibling throughline) holds.

As the studio recently showed with Alan Wake 2, Remedy is not afraid to take big swings with sequels. That reputation is essentially their brand promise at this point — and Control Resonant is the most aggressive test of it yet.

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