Remedy doesn’t take shortcuts. Instead of rewarding the player with experience for familiar actions—completing missions, eliminating bosses, completing side quests—Control Resonant shifts responsibility to the world itself. The open areas of a warped Manhattan react to your every victory over major threats. And let’s face it, these reactions aren’t the most welcoming: the neighborhood you just cleared becomes more dangerous than it was before you arrived.
As Control’s story expands beyond the Oldest House—that ever-shifting architectural anomaly—its former inhabitants also begin to run through the streets of New York. The Noise and the Mold, familiar from the first game, have occupied Manhattan. Recognize these forces? Don’t be fooled. They’ve changed. The Noise—the same reddish paranormal parasite that once corrupted Dylan—is now not just infecting people. It’s permeating the city itself. As game director Mikael Kasurinen put it, Noise “has been growing stronger.” And now it can corrupt larger things—even taking over an entire bus, which attacks the player, emitting the moans of infected passengers. A terrifying sight.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Developers at Remedy Entertainment held a private screening for IGN, where they demonstrated a fight with one of the main bosses—a giant Resonance spewing streams of magma. But the key intrigue of Control Resonant lies not in the enemy design, but in the progression mechanics. There are no classic experience points. Dylan doesn’t level up like you’d expect in an action RPG. Instead, the Manhattan districts themselves are leveled up.
Remedy deliberately eschews grinding in favor of exploration. Each zone has its own progression bar, and reaching a new level rewards the player with a talent point. These points can be spent on upgrades that work exclusively within a specific district—for example, increasing the chance of first aid kits dropping during activities in that zone. This approach encourages returning to previously visited locations, discovering new opportunities there, and at the same time recognizing that Manhattan is constantly evolving.
Districts are more than just backdrops. Each one boasts unique visual and quest features, and their development conceals branching side missions and events that can be completed in any order. Exploration in Control Resonant isn’t a secondary element, but the foundation upon which the entire gameplay is built.
Unlike the first Control, which emphasized shooting, the sequel shifts the focus toward close-quarters combat. Mold, for example, now covers the subway walls with blue-and-yellow mycelium and has special properties: it’s soft and resistant to blunt force damage, but some areas are calcified—they, on the contrary, require crushing attacks to break down. This forces the player to adapt their tactics to each enemy.
Control Resonant is scheduled for release on September 24, 2026, for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. The physical version, however, will be delayed until October 15, but the game has already gone gold—development is complete. Remedy is positioning the project as a must-buy on release day. Judging by what we’ve seen, the studio is truly outdoing itself.
Control Resonant isn’t just a sequel. It’s an attempt to revisit genre conventions while maintaining the series’ signature atmosphere and cinematic feel. And it looks like Remedy is succeeding.
