Control Resonant Swaps Guns for Shapeshifting Melee in a Warped Manhattan

The first Control handed you a gun that could become anything and an office building that kept rearranging itself. Control Resonant takes both of those ideas and pushes them further than anyone expected. Dylan Faden, the imprisoned brother of the original’s Jesse, steps into a Manhattan that has been cracked open by an extradimensional event — and instead of a Service Weapon, he carries the Aberrant, a shape-shifting melee weapon that can transform into scythes, hammers, staffs, swords, and more.

The Aberrant is not just a weapon with multiple modes. Between each zone, players can reconfigure Dylan’s entire ability loadout — swapping talents to match what the upcoming section demands. It is closer in feel to a roguelike build system than anything in the original game. Remedy calls this approach ‘building your perfect combat flow,’ and hands-on previews from June suggest that holds up: reviewers described experimenting with flaming energy punches and airborne diving attacks that combined into something genuinely expressive.

Dylan also moves differently to his sister. A new ability called Shift lets him exploit gravity anomalies in the environment — walking on walls, redirecting his momentum through rifts in the urban fabric. In a game set in a Manhattan-gone-wrong, that means entire sections of the city become traversal puzzles where up, down, and sideways have stopped meaning anything reliable.

The setting is both familiar and unrecognizable. Remedy is not making a conventional open-world game; instead, Control Resonant is organized into large, distinct zones — each one a discrete slice of a city that the Hiss and a mysterious organism called the Mold have consumed. The preview section called the Sinkhole included a Rubik’s Cube-like second stage that turned the environment itself into the puzzle. Remedy directly addressed the main criticism of the original — that its enemy variety was thin — by expanding the range of paranatural threats and giving boss encounters bullet-hell elements.

Dylan spent the events of Control in captivity, held by the Federal Bureau of Control itself. The FBC has now released him into a Manhattan on the edge of paranatural annihilation, charged with combating the crisis, while Jesse — who ended the first game as the new FBC Director — has gone missing. That absence is one of the story’s main engines: Dylan is not just fighting to save the city, he is fighting to find the person whose institution put him in that cell. Remedy has been building its Remedy Connected Universe across Control, Alan Wake 2, and several smaller projects, and this sequel sits at the center of it.

Preview impressions were enthusiastic, but some questions remain for the full release. The new dialogue system apparently allows NPCs to respond differently based on player choices — how far that branching actually extends in a full playthrough is something hands-on sessions rarely answer. The September 24 date places Control Resonant in a competitive window alongside Silent Hill: Townfall and Onimusha: Way of the Sword, and Remedy has stated the game needs to sell 3 to 4 million copies to break even. That is a significant commercial target for a studio of their size.

Control Resonant runs on Remedy’s Northlight Engine, updated with path-traced lighting and mesh shaders refined during Alan Wake 2. The PS5 version uses Tempest 3D AudioTech in ways that previews called outstanding — one section uses the sound of static televisions as a navigational guide through a collapsing building. Remedy describes this as their biggest marketing campaign to date.

Control Resonant launches September 24, 2026 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store. A Digital Deluxe Edition offers PS5 owners 48-hour early access beginning September 22. A macOS version is confirmed for later in 2026.

Tags: PlayStation 5, Action RPG, PC gaming, Xbox Series X, Control Resonant, Dylan Faden