Control Resonant: Remedy's Open-World Sequel Gets Weird in NYC

Leaks ahead of today's Game Awards presentation suggested that the game makers at Remedy were returning to their Control game series, but even those leaks couldn't prepare us for what we're getting. Control Resonant is coming to PC, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5 and even MacOS in "2026," and it flips the series on its head by shifting control to the prior protagonist's brother - who trades guns for ever-morphing melee weapons.

In a pre-announcement video session, Remedy shared today's new trailer along with confirmation that the game shifts to an open-world recreation of Manhattan, which has been placed in a protective bubble while a threat has broken out. The previously trapped Dylan breaks free and takes hold of the Aberrant, a new, shape-shifting melee weapon, and we can see it morph from a massive hammer to a bulging steel staff to an ice pick. The latter implementation is used in one moment when Dylan climbs on a large creature, possibly Shadow of the Colossus-style, to stab its back.

Though Dylan will have access to "supernatural" abilities, including a cool attack that raises terrain from the ground to smash a large monster, it's currently unclear whether these will match the telekinetic, grab-and-throw abilities that his sibling Jesse wielded in the original Control. The combat we've seen thus far includes dashes, leaps and juggles that suggest a Capcom-inspired "Devil May Control" combat cadence, though Remedy did not answer questions about specific mechanics like parries. We will have to wait for more information about enemies that will wield new "paranatural attacks," jump from building to building and vary in scale - from massive to tiny.

Owing to its TGA-timed reveal and a lack of direct capture, our initial impressions are inherently limited - so we dress the following impressions in a few caveats. We don't know what platform was used to capture the trailer's real-time moments, and we are immediately impressed by the continuance of Control's handsome base, which operates at a console generation minimum that's one higher than the first series entry in 2019.

On the technology front, the studio would only confirm that its Northlight engine returns in this game while otherwise declining to answer our follow-up questions. "We're going to talk later about the technical advancements and all of that good stuff on the engine side," a studio representative tells Digital Foundry.

Owing to the brevity and intensity of the trailer, we cannot immediately discern clear advancements in the Control Resonant version of Northlight. At least at first glance, this trailer does not appear to include the same kind of path-tracing maximums found in 2023's Alan Wake 2.

The trailer's clearest open-world moment is a brief melee scuffle on the top of a building, in which two bodies cast clearly defined shadows that don't necessarily take into account the amount of bounce lighting that would pour in from a full skybox - while elements like nearby debris appear to "float" without equivalent shadowing.

Another sequence sees Dylan run between laser blasts, while said lasers reflect on the ground based both on the lasers' positions and the surfaces' material properties. Yet this doesn't appear to be a universally applied lighting phenomenon, as one monster glides towards Dylan while emanating some kind of red light that doesn't otherwise bounce onto other nearby surfaces.

And in spite of the new open-world content, the trailer also includes confined spaces that may be optimised to look atmospheric while running minimal RT effects. One moment is wholly indoors - a broken-apart home with exposed rooms that is mostly dark, save for lamps scattered in some of the visible rooms - but the resulting lighting profile appears to be pre-baked.

We're curious how much the game's lighting and rendering properties will scale up to maxed-out PCs or even PS5 Pro, owing to the combination of wide-open combat spaces and what appears to be Remedy's continued emphasis on otherworldly conditions like reversed gravity. And with an Nvidia GeForce RTX logo at the end of the trailer, we imagine the game's real-time rendering limits may stretch beyond what this trailer suggests. We'll have more on this and other TGA-timed announcements in future Digital Foundry coverage.