Following a nearly seven-year development journey, Remedy Entertainment has unleashed the sequel to its 2019 hit video game “Control.”
“There’s this interesting kind of reverse symmetry when you look at both games,” “Control” franchise creative director and Remedy co-creative director Mikael Kasurinen tells Variety. “In the first game, Jesse arrives at The Oldest House looking for Dylan, trying to understand what happened to her brother. And her arc obviously then becomes a lot about herself, in many different ways. While she’s trying to look for Dylan and understand what’s going on, she becomes the director of this strange bureau called the Bureau of Control and it was, in a way, her fate to become that person. In a way, she found a place to be and she was happy inside The Oldest House.”
For “Control Resonant,” Kasurinen says “we turn it the other way around.”
“Jesse is missing, lost, we don’t know what’s going on with her and Dylan wakes up and then he starts his search for her and trying to understand again what is happening in the world,” Kasurinen says. “And he ends up dealing with the imminent threats and he finds Zoe, as Jesse found Pope early on [in ‘Control’]. So there’s a lot of this interesting symmetry between the characters and their journeys. But of course, Dylan’s thing is to try to find connections and a sense of belonging and all of those things that are unique to him and his arc. And as he searches for Jesse, we unlock more and more what she’s doing, what she’s dealing with and so on. And we start to understand her choices as well that she took early on in the story. Going further than that would be spoiling it, but both stories revolve around both siblings, and we just basically switch sides in a way.”
Durrie says he used some details from the first “Control” to develop Dylan’s character for “Resonant,” but notes that much of his previous performance wasn’t carried over due to the state of mind Dylan is in when the franchise begins — namely, being controlled by The Hiss.
It’s not only the main POV that the “Control” team has changed for “Resonant,” but also some of the game mechanics.
For those completely new to the world of “Control,” the sequel game is sure to be a challenge, but the creative team has found one way to make it a little easier to enter without all the proper backstory.
