Control is a series that has always managed to make the mundane feel extraordinary. A refrigerator that will kill everyone unless someone is looking at it; a telephone that only a single person can use without dying; a merry-go-round horse that could chase people around at lightning quick speeds. That sort of thing.
Opening up the world outside The Oldest House, I was worried that Control Resonant would lose some of its focus on the supernatural in favor of a more traditional, checklisty open world, but thankfully, Remedy just increased the scale.
Control Resonant has you playing as Dylan Faden, the previously mind-controlled brother of Jesse Faden, who was cleansed of Hiss corruption at the end of the first Control. After being in a coma for seven years, you’ve awoken to a breach in The Oldest House’s lockdown measures, your sister is missing, and a whole chunk of Manhattan is completely disconnected from reality.
You’re also introduced to a supernatural force known as The Patterning, which is completely opposed to the Hiss. Right in the middle of a supernatural war, and with an ever-expanding Mold problem acting as a third hostile party, your goal is to fight back while trying to find Jesse.
While it’s fittingly a lot to take in from a narrative perspective, this hostile trifecta of enemy factions contributes to making Control Resonant’s world feel more varied. You have the Downtown area, which is overrun with Hiss, full of vibrant reds and tall buildings, with people eerily floating through the streets. Then you have The Park, an area completely covered in blue mold with buildings peaking out from below. There are also areas of the world that have been completely Patterned, with buildings pointing in the wrong direction or upside down, requiring you to adapt how you traverse the world and fight enemies.
Control Resonant is set entirely within that chunk of Manhattan, and, while there’s only so much you can do re: skyscrapers and cityscapes, Remedy has managed to make each area feel incredibly distinct from each other, and you’ll even discover open world zones in the last place you’d expect. Remedy has worked wonders with limited space, and it’s resulted in one of my favorite open worlds to explore from a purely aesthetic standpoint.
As for what you get to do in the world, you’ve got all the standard open world affairs. There are side quests to find, some of which aren’t marked on your map and can be found naturally by exploring. These side quests are a highlight of Control Resonant’s open world, and are where you’ll get the sorts of showdowns with mundane objects that made the first game so unique, whether it be hunting down stereo speakers or saving people from a possessed karaoke machine.
Unfortunately, outside those quests, there’s not much else on offer. You can take part in random world events that have you fighting Hiss or Mold monsters, but there’s not much variety within those. They don’t change all that much depending on the zone you’re in either, so repetition sets in pretty quickly, especially if you’re trying to level up each zone to unlock rewards.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.thegamer.com/control-resonant-review/
