I'm a big fan of the work of Remedy from their early work with Max Payne to finding their grove with the odd and quirky supernatural mystery games like Alan Wake and Quantum Break. They've always made really interesting often though provoking yet also fun games which is a pretty major achievement to manage to combine those things.
Out of their recent work Control was a fantastic game it's mix of gunplay and supernatural power shenanigans set against an SCP esq Federal Bureau of Control a secretive and quite weird government agency tasked with monitoring objects of power and protecting the world from Altered World Events. They managed to build a compelling story in that first game of an outsider entering that weird world in search of her brother kidnapped and experimented on by this government agency and through circumstances becoming the director of the FBC and having to try and fix the horrors that had been unleashed there by their actions and triggered by events from their own past. It had that right mix of good gameplay compelling somewhat mysterious story telling and interesting and complex characters.
They also knocked it out of the park in the game design creating a mix of the mundane government offices rooted sometime in the past and never updated with some truly surreal and mind bending fantastical places.
It was a great game and so when they announced they were making a sequel I was intrigued.
Control Resonant set some number of years after the events of the first game swaps from newly appointed director of the FBC Jesse Faden from the first game to her aforementioned brother Dylan Faden as the protagonist. The setting is also changed rather than isolated inside the Oldest House the supernatural office building and hq of the FBC from the first game we are instead out into New York. Although it's a somewhat altered NY as a result of some of the supernatural enemies from the first game also having escaped out and it's now lousy with the Hiss the Mold and some new enemys.
It's also been physically altered with bizarre changes to the space streets and buildings bent at angles or cut through with gaps making it disconnected and isolated. This separation plays into the level design in that each chunk of the map is a small ish section you can run around in often with specidic enemy types or particular design features (the later areas get pretty wacky) it's not open world the game has something like 7 zones you can explore each with its own secrets and missions.
Rather than the mystical Service Weapon from the first game Dylan has access to the Aberant a shapeshifting melee weapon. This marks another departure from the first game rather than gun fights we are getting up close and personal in this one. Something Remedy are not known for so it was somewhat of a concern they might not pull this off.
The Aberant has various forms it can switch between and you basically a light form a heavy form and then a finisher combo. Other forms can be unlocked as the game progresses and have their own progression paths and upgrade trees. For the light you can select Cleaver Daggers or scythe. With Dagggers being close in but higher crit Scythe longer range and wider sweep attack but less damage and crit and cleaver being a middle ground. For heavy you have Whip Spear or my go to big fuck off hammer. The heavy attack also has a charged attack that does more damage and more falter. Falter is a key part of the combat you use your attacks to build up falter on enemies which is shown by an additional yellow bar in addition to their red health bar and when it maxes out you can do an execution attack and this gives you a buff called dominance that massively boosts you attack power. So the early game rythm is build falter on minor enemies get dominant and kill the big boys while dodging and weaving like a mad man.
this system quickly expands with two additional systems the traits and the resonant powers. Each of the zones will have a resonant boss somewhere in there and your goal is to take those beings out. Usually getting to them involves some fun puzzling or mission paths but the quest collimate in a big multi stage boss fight often with some sort of unique mechanic like they spray fire or telekinticly hit you with clubs made of traffic lights.
Once you've killed these resonants you get the option to unlock their power for your own and you get a choice of two to three options for each boss that have slightly different versions of their powers. For the fire boss you can get either the ability to infuse your weapons with extra fire damage as they hit or the ability to just spray out waves of fire in and ark in front of you. Some of the abilities give you the option to have little turrets or other summons that then attack your enemies or the same attack type but you can wield it directly.
These selections offer you a trial run in a sort of arena and you can freely swap between the options to try each of them before locking in the choice. And after that you can respec and chose different powers at any point by buying a respec token for some of the ingame currency and I think you get a few free anyway.
These powers and your aberrant abilities are further augmented by the traits which are a series of selectable specializations that boost certain builds, For instance as I said there are turrets you can summon and there are several summonable abilities and there are traits that boost those and give you bonuses like more health regen when you are near your summons or more damage for them or additional status effects. It makes for a fairly deep set of customization of builds.
Once you have a few of the powers the flow changes a bit to building up falter as well as applying various status effects like burn throwing down a turret or power then refilling your magic power by smashing the monsters with your heavy attack.
The combat offers a good challenge without being too difficult there are some situations where you can get overwhelmed especially if you're combat level gets a bit low compared to what you are fighting (a mechanic where as you kill off bosses and do things in each of the zones they increase in difficulty level but also unlock more rewards) this is maybe one of the few missteps or perhaps just a poorly explained mechanic. Your weapon has a power level based on how far up the upgrade path you've unlocked. But what it doesn't tell you is that it counts all the paths of all the weapon shapes as the total power not just the one you have selected.
It somewhat encourages you to specialize in one set of forms for the aberrant since you can only select one light form one heavy and one finisher and also telling you resources are scarce which to some degree is true. But this can leave you very under leveled, initially I just focused on my chosen options trying to max out their respective skill trees and that meant I didn't take any of the other options or upgrade any of the other paths. This led to me being under leveled at some point which made fights quite a bit harder I just wasn't doing enough damage. I tried switching weapons and so upgraded one of the other paths and that bumped up my overall weapon power and things got more manageable again. It's one of the games few missteps that it both wants you to specialize and yet also wants you to put points into other weapon forms and trees you have no intention of using. You can switch to the other weapons combinations just by reseting your loadout but you can only have one of each of the three options equipped at a time so its a little bit of a confusing way to go about this.
In addition to combat abilities you also can unlock movement powers. These start with the basics like double jump the floating levitation from the first game and a double air dash and progress to things like an ability to magically fling yourself at certain hotspots on the edges of some buildings or certain surfaces. Where it gets really weird is when you unlock shift. This is the resonant signature power that allows you to shift your personal gravity onto certain surfaces making what was a wall or a ceiling into a floor. This power starts off small with a few sections of the map having these roads that suddenly go from flat to vertical and back again creating a barrier and with Shift you can just run up to them stick to the wall and run up it. It only gets more wacky from there with whole levels turned around on themselves like something out of Christopher Nolan's warped nightmares. Whole sections of the later maps where there are multiple layers buildings bent 180 degrees so they are above you facing down but with shift you can run up a wall and start walking on their ceilings such that what was down is now up. Later levels bend around to have sections at all angles layers of streets and buildings above and bellow all at the same time and often the traversal puzzles are about finding how to get to something that is above you but by moving through a convoluted series of shifts till you're reoriented with the ceiling now the ground.
If you've ever played the first game and got through the Ashtray maze and how trippy and mind bending that was as a set piece. Some of the normal level sections of this game are 100 times weirder places where you have to navigate apartments such that the rooms are on the inside of a cube each face a floor facing up each of the walls able to become a floor to run up. It really goes hard.
It also uses these mechanics to add to the world such that certain areas are ability gated such that you need the right ability to get to them. A very metroidvania style of thing
The game expands on some of the mysteries of the first game and the story of both Jesse and Dylan with the empahsis on his path and the things he was subjected to. He makes for an interesting character someone taken against his will made into a experiment by people who saw him as a weapon and treated him as such pushing him even though he was just a child when they took him in. How when that backfired and his abilities cause deaths they just locked him away to rot and in desperation he let the Hiss of the first game in and caused even more deaths as a result. He's someone who hasn't had a lot of chances and has been subjected to some pretty horrible things but has also a lot of regret for the things he caused. Unlike Jesse from the first game he comes with baggage and a history such that some of the other characters don't trust him they see him as a dangerous monster and only allow him out because they have no other choice.
The main quests are well designed the side quests are also pretty good with some fun creative stuff. One mission has you escaping a pocket world by picking the right supernatural taxi with a series of spot the difference puzzles. My favorite of these involved looking at the taxi's shadow using a portable light. The right vehicle had a taxis shadow but all the others had things like vans or forklifts or other things. There was a mission where I had to stop a supernatural karaoke machine that was killing people by making them dance forever and to fix it I had to complete the song by picking the right next words than rhymed with the previous section.
Its a great game fun crunchy combat with great powers to deploy and a fairly good system for build crafting. Interesting levels with weird and wonderful designs areas gated by fun movement mechanics and big enough to offer some varied environments with things to find and secrets to unlock without falling into the massive open world slop where a thimble full of content is spread over a thousand miles of map. These are relatively contained and the fast travel points make moving around the larger area no issue. The platforming and traversal is fun and there is that feeling of momentum.
The boss fights are challenging and make for more impactful focused fights with some fun mechanics and spectacle. You always get that darksouls esq boss intro as you enter one of their arenas.
They took some risks with this and they seem to have payed off, it's not just more of control its definitely its own thing but in that same world with its own rhythm and combat systems story and characters taking the bits that made that game good expanding them and replacing others.
All in all its a really good game and another great entry in the remedyverse