GameWatcher speaks to Control Resonant’s Franchise Creative Director Mikael Kasurinen and Lead Level Designer Anne-Marie Grönroos about how the latest game changes perspective for the superbly strange series.
The mind-bending world of Remedy’s Control was one that fans couldn’t get enough of once it released in 2019. Since then, many have been awaiting the next instalment of the franchise, and when it was announced as Control Resonant at last year’s Game Awards, it looks quite different. Instead of Jesse, you play as Dylan, and instead of the Service Weapon, you have a transformable melee weapon. While certainly a shock, the essence of Control looked to be in full force there.
I got to preview Control Resonant at Summer Game Fest and consider it one of my favourite demos there. After my demo, I got a chance to talk to two of the team members from Remedy in attendance at the event: Mikael Kasurinen, the Franchise Creative Director, and Anne-Marie Grönroos, Lead Level Designer and one of the minds behind some of the most iconic segments in Alan Wake 2 and Control. We chatted about the changes from Control to Control Resonant, the technological advances since 2019, and what fans and newcomers can expect from Remedy’s next big title.
A Change Will Do You Good
Michael Murphy: How did you decide to change the genre of Control Resonant from a shooter to a more hack-and-slash?
Mikael Kasurinen: Well, there are two sides to it. One is that Control, as a franchise, is all about shifting protagonists of the ongoing story of our world. We wanted to establish that right away with the second game (Resonant), so that people kind of get what the franchise is about. Part of why we want to do it is that it gives us these opportunities to tell new, interesting stories. At the same time, we can mix up the gameplay as well, because different characters have different approaches to how to deal with things.
Then, when we look at the siblings (Jesse and Dylan Faden), we want them to kind of feel like two sides of the same coin. So, if Jesse uses a gun, then Dylan obviously uses a melee weapon and so on. There’s this interesting kind of a yin-yang thing that they’re kind of doing together.
Also, melee is cool. It’s visceral, it’s fun, and I think it was also something that the studio was excited about overall. We’ve been doing third-person shooting for, like, what, 25 years, 30 years? It’s nice to do something else, so I think that’s exciting as well.
Anne-Marie Grönroos: The movement is such a big part of the game. Naturally, when you have melee combat, you need to go right where the enemies are, you need to zip around very fast, you can’t stay put at all.
Mikael: Yeah, there’s something more intuitive about, like, having a melee weapon, where, for instance, in the first game, we had some kind of problem where Jesse had a gun. People tend to then kind of stay away from the enemies and sort of, like, hide behind corners and so on. But instead, what you do want is for people to use the power to leap into the middle of the enemies, be aggressive, keep moving, and so on.
So, yeah, it’s, like, a lot more intuitive and organic when you have melee, but when it happens by itself.
MM: What was the decision behind switching protagonists from Jesse to Dylan?
Mikael: I think the siblings’ stories, both of them, their trajectories revolve around each other. In the first game, Jesse comes to the oldest house to try to find out what happened to her brother. They got separated when they were kids, and they’ve had two very different lives. When you kind of zoom out, you see a larger pattern or the idea that we’re doing.
Jesse comes from our world, steps into The Oldest House, learns about all of the paranatural stuff, the FBC, and so on. She goes into the rabbit hole. Then, she becomes the director of the FBC and eventually finds Dylan, who’s been taken over by the Hiss.
For Resonant, we’re kind of reversing that journey, in a way, since Dylan has always been inside The Oldest House. He was taken when he was 10 by the FBC, and ever since, he’s been inside there. The paranatural world is normal to him, being controlled by the FBC. They wanted him to be the director, and that went wrong, as he was taken over by the Hiss. He then ended up in a coma after Jesse cleansed him and was trapped in his own mind for seven years. So, he’s never had a proper life or existence or any kind of connections and so on.
So, his journey is very much from this very inhuman world, a paranatural world, without any kind of connection, stepping into the real world, the human world. So, there’s a poetic kind of balance between the two different things we do.
Expanding the Universe
MM: The Old House has leaked into the real world and caused everything around it to twist and morph. How did it feel as a level designer/arr designer to have more freedom in being creative?
Anne-Marie: Well, it’s both a freedom and a constraint (laugh). So, when we go outside to Manhattan, we have much bigger areas to work with.
In the first game, most of the time, when you came into some room, we blocked the entrances, enemies attacked, and now you’re just trapped there until you kill all the enemies. And, for Resonant, we can’t really do this here as much. Actually, once you get the flying ability, we can barely do that at all. So, we had to figure out other ways to incentivise combat that, maybe, these enemies are guarding something.
A lot of them are just out there in the city, and the players can decide whether they want to engage these particular enemies at this particular time or not. There’s a lot of that and a lot more. Not just with combat, but when it comes to traversal, there are so many different ways the player can get from point A to point B. There, it’s more about making it readable and the navigation of getting the player to understand that, yeah, we have these global landmarks and what’s the direction you’re going to. We want to try to make these paths more readable, like, can you get up the roof up here? Maybe you can get there later on when you get some other abilities.
That has been really tricky. It’s easier if you have something that’s completely unplayable; you will never get in here. But, when you have something like, you will get here, but not yet, then it’s really hard to sometimes convince players to stop trying to get up on the roof, because it is not for you yet.
Mikael: There’s tons of collaboration between environment art, game design, and level design, because you want to ensure that the movement is good, but then at the same time, know all the metrics, like how tall the building can be, how high can you jump and so on. So that also kind of created a framework that we had to adapt to.
There was actually tons of prepping and designing the environments and so on from the perspective of visuals, so that we could adapt them through the level design process.
Anne-Marie: It’s also because the world is so big that we can’t really be on constant watch for every single thing. Everyone in the team just needs to know that this is what we are building, and these are the rules for how to build it.
MM: For fans of the first game, what can they expect from Control Resonant?
Mikael: What I hope it to feel like is like returning home, but it’s been seven years, so time has kind of gone by a bit, and this is a new perspective. It’s the same world, expanded out from The Oldest House. All the things that you love or hate, regardless of Hiss and Mold and these creepy phenomena, they’re all there.
There’s a new threat that is affecting Manhattan and so on, so there’s something unexpected going on there, regarding how you control the characters and the different abilities that you have. There’s a lot of overlap with Control of that, so I would like to imagine that people feel like returning home in many ways, but with, let’s say, some new furnishings. There’s a bit of a new setup, but it is still very much a Control experience.
Anne-Marie: In terms of gameplay, the exploration is still there, and the sense of mystery is still there. Even though the combat is different, I would say the feel of the game is still, in many ways, very similar to the first one.
The New Power Generation
MM: Was there anything in Control that you wanted to do in terms of mechanics or visuals, but now in Resonant, you can do?
Mikael: We actually did a big upgrade to the engine, Northlight, just to be able to do Control Resonant. It was just literally not possible with the previous iteration of Northlight.
So, I think the first two to three years went into just us working together with Northlight on what the different things are that we need to change to make sure that we actually can create this more urban, open-ended environment and do all the things that we wanted to prolong.
In regard to how to handle conversations, storytelling, that’s an entirely new system that we’re now utilising, where we want the gameplay to be something that is natural to have storytelling occurring during gameplay. In the previous game, conversation often tended to be that you’d talk with the characters, but now, we do a lot more things where you want the mood.
There’s also more ongoing conversation with Zoe a lot through the radio, and you can actually make choices in the conversation while you do other things. So, there are a lot of things that we wanted to bring on board, and just to get that open-ended sense of the world, that was a huge update, as well as the conversation system.
Anne-Marie: On the open-ended side of the world in the first game, I remember how the first game was built, that all the sectors were separate, and the executive elevator teleports you from one sector to another. But even back then, we were kind of wishing to have this more Dark Souls kind of structure, where these things are interconnected, there are shortcuts, surprising shortcuts from one sector to another, but we couldn’t really do that in the first game, so you just teleported from one to another.
But with Resonant, it’s still based on hubs, but the hubs are actually physically interconnected now with each other, so they kind of create this web through the world.
Another thing that we couldn’t really do, because we were indoors in the first one, is to have this sense of seeing something cool in the distance, and then you start approaching it, and then finding out what the cool thing is. Since you were pretty much going straight to one room at a time, we couldn’t do any of that.
Mikael: That’s actually a good point. I think it’s the first-ever Remedy title in the connected universe that you can walk through the entire world without any loading screens. I think it’s pretty neat.
MM: Anne-Marie, you had a hand in creating the We Sing level from Alan Wake 2 and the Ashtray Museum in Control. Without spoilers, will Resonant have something similar in nature?
Anne-Marie: I would say there are definitely crazy levels that are not something you would expect.
Mikael: We can’t say more than that (laughs). It’s very much a Control experience.
Control Resonant is out September 24, 2026, on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.
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