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Back in May, myself and some of the fantastic PC Gaming Show team went to Finland to interview the brilliant creative minds at Remedy. We learned a lot about Control Resonant, the upcoming ARPG sequel to 2019’s Control. We showed you a snippet of those interviews in our June PC Gaming Show, but now, we’ve declassified the full video.
In case you need a refresher, Resonant follows Dylan Faden, brother of newly-appointed FBC director Jesse Faden, who spent most of the original Control locked in a cell because of his dangerously powerful abilities and possession by the Hiss. After waking from a coma, he discovers the Hiss have escaped the Oldest House and are running rampant in Manhattan, New York. Simultaneously, or maybe because of their incursion, the island is being affected by an otherworldly threat called the Patterning. It’s turning people into monsters and making everything look weird.
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“It’s not simply a matter of ordering things in a predictable way, it’s affecting the people,” says creative director Mikael Kasurinen. “It affects time, it affects light.” Everything in the city is topsy turvy: Fortunately, Dylan has the ability to flip the gravity and walk on walls and ceilings—or are those ceilings and walls? It’s hard to tell.
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Remedy didn’t look to other videogames for inspiration. Instead, the work of M.C. Escher was used for inspiration, as were films like A Field in England (a real trip that I’d encourage everyone to watch) and Paprika. But why not games? “There’s this tendency of people not taking risks, and games start to resemble each other quite a lot,” art director Elmeri Raitanen says.
What intrigues me most about Control Resonant is the Resonants themselves, people who have been twisted into monstrous bosses. Dylan can defeat them and gain their power, but you’re not forced to fight all of them, or even specific ones, lead level designer Anne-Marie Grönroos explains. Being a more open world game than its predecessor, Resonant may require you to defeat a certain number of bosses, but there will be more than that number available to fight, and developers can’t always be sure what powers you’ll have at any given time.
This can lead to some unpredictable outcomes: The devs told me about one playtester who didn’t get the gravity shifting ability until much later than they’d expected. That variability will make it interesting to see what sort of challenge runs emerge when the game launches.
Personally, I’m gonna go for all the bosses, they look awesome. We get a good glimpse of a giant that spits lava, a big floating head, and a smaller, more elegant Resonant who was once a dancer, performing in Manhattan when the Patterning struck.
Remedy worked with real dancers to get her movements right, and the score for her fight was very important, too. “I went through quite a lot of my kitchenware and built a rhythm based on Fibonacci numbers,” composer Petri Alanko says. So beats in the music follow a pattern of 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on—you take the last number and add it to the number before it to get the next. Isn’t maths neat?
That’s not the only sonic trick Alanko used. Because Dylan is figuring out who he is without the Hiss possessing him, he’s basically been reborn. “In the beginning, almost all the sounds that are related to him, they are formed of sine waves, which is basically the simplest form of sound,” Alanko says. “Whenever he’s evolving as a person, or as a weapon, some other frequencies, other nuances, other textures, the tonal effects behind whatever Dylan does, gets more complex and more, let’s say interesting.”
While Dylan and Jesse are related, don’t worry about the Control universe going the way of Star Wars and only caring about one family. Kasurinen, the creative director, says he envisions a whole world, filled with different stories and characters. He took inspiration from pen and paper roleplaying games, and wants to create a universe with rules, but where players can see it from different perspectives.
You’ll be able to see Resonant properly for yourself when it launches September 24. You can pre-order it on Steam. And don’t forget to check out our upcoming PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct, airing September 20.
