I wouldn’t label Remedy’s Control as being much else outside of a shooter. It flirts with horror, it dabbles in sci-fi, but if we’re talking mechanical genres, shooter fits it best. Then the sequel, Control: Resonant, got announced and turned out to be an action RPG. The bones of the original game are still evidently there in some ways, though in a recent interview, creative director Mikael Kasurinen shared that right from the series’ early days, he’s long thought of it as an RPG.

“When I was thinking about Control, and it wasn’t called Control or anything like that, but I had this kind of thinking in my head that I wanted to create an RPG franchise,” Kasurinen told GamesRadar. “‘How do I get there?’ The question was, ‘what would it be? What’s the Remedy version of that?’ The way to learn is to start by doing, and that’s how Control was born.”

From Kasurinen’s perspective, the RPG foundations can be found in the original Control too, given that this was the first game Remedy had made with a non-linear map and side quests. “We’d never done dialog choices before, where you talk to a character [and] you can choose what to say. All that stuff was new … My intent was, ‘I want to find out what is the Remedy version of an RPG experience.’ That’s what Control was.” These certainly are RPG-like qualities! And Kasurinen explained that Control is “Remedy’s RPG franchise,” so they wanted to embrace and “fully commit” to the genre.

What’s been shown off so far of Resonant certainly looks like it’ll fulfill the action brief at least, and there are the likes of skill trees and various sorts of class builds you can craft for yourself, though to me the genre of RPG is as much of a general vibe as it is a way to establish mechanics. There’s no real way to know if that vibe has been achieved in the sequel, but we should find out this year, as it’s currently slated for release sometime this year.