Control Resonant Hands-On: Remedy Brings Dylan Faden to a Hiss-Ravaged Manhattan

Remedy Entertainment gave press hands-on time with Control Resonant today, and the results are cautiously enthusiastic. This is the direct sequel to Control (2019), but it is not what fans of the original probably pictured. Dylan Faden, the brother of first-game protagonist Jesse, steps into a Manhattan that has been half-devoured by the Hiss, the interdimensional invaders that spent the entirety of the first game locked inside the Oldest House. Now they are outside. Streets fold into each other. A six-inch crack in the pavement grew into a bottomless pit within hours. Control Resonant is a hack-and-slash action-RPG, not a third-person shooter, and it hits PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series on September 24, 2026, with Remedy confirmed as both developer and publisher.

What Remedy Changed and Why

Creative director Mikael Kasurinen, who helmed the original Control, explained the thinking behind every major departure. Jesse's arc was about stepping from the ordinary world into the Federal Bureau of Control, discovering the building's impossible architecture and its supernatural bureaucracy from the outside. Inverting that for Dylan means placing a character already shaped by the FBC's weirdness back into something that should feel familiar, except New York City is no longer recognizable as New York City. The Hiss energy once contained by the Oldest House's walls is bleeding out across the borough, and the FBC has carved emergency structures called firebreaks into what remains of the skyline.

Kasurinen talks explicitly about creepypasta and internet horror as the aesthetic foundation, the same vein that made the first game land. The Backrooms. Liminal spaces. Mundane locations that carry dread by being off by just a few degrees. That sensibility is fully intact in Resonant. It is just placed against a city rather than a skyscraper. Birds are locked into the same tortured flight patterns on a loop. Red smoke walls block off whole streets. Dead bodies hang suspended above the concrete. The Oldest House, the unassailable fortress of the first game, is rubble.

Dylan himself is a different kind of lead. Jesse stepped into the Oldest House as an outsider and grabbed authority she did not know she had. Dylan is timid. His voice quivers. He stammers through his thoughts. Seven years have passed since the events of Control, and his possession by the Hiss and the coma that followed have left visible marks on him. Actor Sean Durrie drew from the experience of being a middle child, someone who wants to be seen and carve out their own identity. Remedy added more dialogue choices this time around, not to branch the story but to let players build some personality into Dylan before the chaos takes over entirely.

The Aberrant and How Combat Actually Feels

The Aberrant is the centerpiece weapon, a shape-shifting supernatural object that opens the game in three primary forms: a Bloodborne-adjacent saw cleaver, a crowd-clearing scythe, and a whip Dylan picks up early in the preview session. The scythe is the immediate standout. Kotaku's coverage describes landing hits on Hiss enemies as feeling like ripping chunks clean off of them, which is the same tactile weight that Control's Service Weapon delivered at its best. That punch-through quality transferred from firearm to melee in a way that is not obvious on paper but apparently works in play.

Further into the session, a freeform section with more skills unlocked showed the full picture of what combat can build toward. Ground pounds. Psychic punches. Air zips into cinematic executions that refill resources. Sidestepping into uppercuts that launch enemies upward for air juggles. A heavy hammer swing for armored opponents. Dylan fought a bus. The combat is deep, and Remedy only showed the edges of the skill trees during the preview, but they are extensive. Augments stack on augments. Players who want to go looking will find something to chase for a long time.

The one concern the preview names honestly is that this breadth comes with early signs of AAA bloat. The skill trees are large. The opening act is front-loaded with lore and mechanics simultaneously. That is not necessarily a deal-breaker for a Remedy game, where the studio's track record earns patience, but it is worth flagging now rather than treating it as a surprise in September.

The World and What the Hiss Escaping Actually Means

The first major boss encounter ends with something called a Resonant Entity, described as looking like an art installation that somehow came to life and decided to kill you. Its appearance also teases that there are forces operating beyond the Hiss, possibly connected to Jesse's supernatural companion Polaris or the Former, entities from Control's lore that carry serious weight for anyone who went deep on the first game's documents and world-building. Remedy has spent over a decade building the Remedy Connected Universe across Max Payne's spiritual lineage, Control, and both Alan Wake titles. Control Resonant appears to be the moment where that web finally pulls tight.

Community Reaction So Far

Response to today's coverage has skewed toward optimism, though with a consistent undercurrent of skepticism about the genre shift. The concern is fair. Remedy's pedigree is third-person shooters with cinematic ambitions, not hack-and-slash action-RPGs. The counter-argument, which the hands-on coverage appears to support, is that the studio clearly studied the genre before committing to it. Fans invested in the Remedy Connected Universe are enthusiastic about Dylan's story and what it implies for Jesse, Alan Wake, and whatever comes next. More casual players are waiting to see whether the combat depth holds up across a full game rather than a curated preview slice.

The CriticalPixel Take

Control was one of the strangest AA games to somehow break through into genuine cultural currency, and it did it without a massive marketing push or a clear genre box to sit in. Remedy is not making that same quiet bet with Resonant. They have described this as the studio's biggest marketing campaign ever, and a September 24 release date puts it directly into the most competitive window of the year. That confidence is either justified or it is the kind of overspend that ends studio autonomy when the numbers come back short.

What the hands-on suggests is that the combat direction is intentional and not a desperate pivot. Dylan's Aberrant has personality. The Hiss-altered Manhattan has a visual coherence that extends the original's brutalist weirdness rather than abandoning it. Kasurinen is still running the creative vision. Those are all good signs. The larger question is whether the audience that loved the Oldest House will follow Remedy into an open-ish city with skill trees and air juggles, or whether Control Resonant finds a different crowd entirely and leaves the cult fanbase behind. September 24 settles that argument either way.