By the end of Control Resonant I had forgotten a lot of my early problems with it. Remedy’s latest isn’t the tight, confident, elegantly structured game that Control was, but its messiness eventually gives way to a second half as weird and memorable as anything in the original. Unfortunately it takes a lot of time to reach that point, time mostly spent slogging back and forth through the weakest part of the game. It’s also the part that makes the first and largest impression, and why I felt underwhelmed and disappointed by Resonant for most of its run. The problem is where it takes place: its setting, a twisted-up, glitched-out version of Manhattan, has absolutely nothing on The Oldest House.
The Oldest House is, of course, the office space where Control is set. It’s the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Control—the X-Files-ish secret department devoted to unexplainable phenomena—and a stereotypical example of the kind of brutalist buildings erected around America throughout the 1960s and ’70s. Think Boston City Hall, or the FBI headquarters in D.C., or so much of downtown Atlanta; think of a generic late 20th century American skyline, basically, and you’ll be familiar with brutalism.
The Oldest House becomes the primary vector for the weirdness that is Control‘s defining trait. It’s like every boring office job you’ve ever had, if all the laws of physics just disappeared one day. The Oldest House rules, basically, and is probably the biggest reason that Control felt like an instant classic back in 2019.
The Oldest House also shares a lot with a viral concept that exploded into mainstream theaters earlier this year. The Backrooms creepypasta is only a few months older than Control itself, starting on a 4chan thread about three months before the game was released; the YouTube videos that creator Kane Parsons turned into a box-office hit started later, in 2022. The Oldest House is absolutely a liminal space—an overused term these days, but a concept and aesthetic that both Control and Backrooms are very much examples of.
What makes Backrooms Backrooms is that it’s so dreadfully mundane. Its rigorous lack of weirdness is what makes any element that’s even marginally off seem powerfully weird, before that weirdness grows more and more prominent. That’s also true in Control. The Oldest House starts as a drab, stifling, overly familiar office building, the home of dead-end jobs and careers that don’t leave a mark. It’s all concrete, muted colors, functional office furniture, and no life.
Gradually the weird starts to trickle into The Oldest House. You’ll enter a large hall and see tie-wearing office workers suspended in midair, their bodies slumped over but 20 feet off the ground. A deep, vivid red often casts contorted spaces in a crimson shadow. Walls start to twist in impossible ways, rooms seemingly fold in on themselves, and eventually you’re confronted with architecture that’s impossible and yet still somehow mundane. The Oldest House’s true weirdness slowly unspools as you get deeper into the game, and the contrast between the everyday environment and the escalation of the unexpected mirrors both the game’s increasing difficulty and the ways in which weirdness seeps into its structure as well as its surface. It all works in conjunction to create a singular, unified experience.
Control Resonant picks up the story from Control, but with the same seven-year gap that separates the games in the real world. It starts in the still-familiar Oldest House, in the same rooms Control begins in, but very quickly heads outside—and not to the astral plane, where Control‘s otherworldly, ineffable Board hangs out. It’s set in a version of Manhattan that, on the surface, should feel roughly as familiar as the office rooms of The Oldest House. It might be familiar, but probably not from real life; you’ll feel like you’ve visited this slice of New York before, because it feels like the kind of generic, anonymous open-world city video games have been showing us for over two decades.
The same signs repeat too often, a handful of stores recur every other block, and almost none of the buildings have an architectural style distinct from one another. None of it is even recognizable as New York City, instead exuding the bland, unsettling vagueness of a movie or TV show that couldn’t afford to film in Manhattan and so uses some other city as a stand-in. (Does that mean it looks like Toronto? I haven’t been there enough to tell.) Everything seems off-the-shelf, like art assets from a pack, and although that doesn’t necessarily conflict with the game’s themes, it makes this world a real slog to travel through.
Too many times while playing Resonant I stood on the top of a cookie-cutter building looking down on streets that blended in with one another. I’d survey a city sprinkled with objectives, but that felt empty and lifeless. And although that’s probably intentional to an extent—a commentary on quiet city streets during the pandemic, an attempt at expanding on the signature strangeness of Control on a new and larger palette—it drains Resonant of both the charm and power of its predecessor.
No matter what you think about the quality of Remedy’s games, you’ll hopefully agree that they don’t typically feel interchangeable or uninspired. Remedy’s games usually have a strong, quickly established identity. Yeah, the studio’s inspirations might be a little too obvious, its homages too overt, but in a medium that rarely seems inspired by anything other than whatever best-selling game it’s ripping off, there’s nothing wrong with being a little too blatantly in love with Twin Peaks.
Control Resonant doesn’t have that, not at first. And it takes so much time and labor to get to the good stuff—labor that feels like the busywork of a rote open-world game, time that could be spent doing something you actually enjoy—that playing Control Resonant may not be a smart bargain to make. Its heights might be as special as Control‘s, but it takes too much patience and persistence to reach them.
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Source: Kotaku