Control Resonant's devs explain Strange York and its bosses

Control Resonant has been out for a week, and Remedy has started explaining how it built the thing. In a PlayStation.Blog feature published on 29 September, lead level designer Anne-Marie Gronroos, art director Elmeri Raitanen and lead gameplay designer Sergey Mohov talked through the art direction of the sequel, from its warped Manhattan to the design of its bosses.

Their starting point was deliberately unglamorous. Dylan Faden may fling himself across a city skyline, but Raitanen describes a "deliberate groundedness" in how he moves and fights, and Mohov points out that the Reach ability sweeps Dylan off his feet while Elevate costs him visible effort. Gravity shifting disorients him, and a character that stumbles is easier to care about than one that floats.

'Strange York', not New York

The sequel carries Control's Brutalist interiors out into a brutalised Manhattan, which the studio calls Strange York: in Mohov's words an "iconic movie-like retro version" rather than a survey of the real city. He notes that the last phone booth in real New York was removed around 2022; Remedy's version keeps them.

The studio balanced the strangeness with deliberate normality. The Central, the most ordinary zone, sits in the middle of the map so the paranatural areas have a baseline to push against, and the Federal Bureau of Control's office spaces are staged as believable workplaces first. Dynamic destruction does the rest: slam the ground and leaves lift off the street, hydrants spray and bins empty themselves across the pavement.

The Gap, the Sinkhole and the Resonants

The Gap is the game's starkest space, a grey otherworld that stands in for Dylan's psyche. Mohov says the team drew on film references, including the door in the sky at the end of The Truman Show, and Raitanen describes it as "the raw, honest concrete Dylan has felt under his bare feet during captivity".

The Sinkhole mission began as a prototype for gravity shifting, with deep-sea exploration and cave diving as references, and it turned into a fight across the floors, walls and ceilings of a warped apartment building once the team settled on a rule: anything that looks walkable is walkable. Bosses went the other way. Remedy asked the whole studio to send in ideas, built a prototype for each, and wrote behaviour specifications before concept artists got involved. Every Resonant is built on a theme, one of them drawing on mycelium and hive minds, with medieval iconography and church architecture shaping how majestic the creatures feel. The Deserter fights inside a factory built specifically to hold it.

Our opinion

Opening Control up is the interesting bet, and it is not an obvious one. The first game's power came from confinement: a building that rearranged itself around you, corridors that made the Hiss feel claustrophobic. Mohov says one zone in the sequel is larger than any zone in a previous Remedy game, and that boast reads two ways, because a bigger map is more room to move and more room for the pacing to sag between set pieces. The rule that anything walkable is walkable is the sort of constraint that keeps a large space legible, so Remedy has at least built itself a guard rail.

The DualSense detail is the one worth testing in the hand. Radio calls through the controller speaker and resistance on the adaptive triggers sound like garnish, but putting ability feedback into your fingers rather than on the screen is a real decision about where a player's attention goes, and that is the line between a gimmick and the reason a fight feels good. Remedy has earned the benefit of the doubt on atmosphere, so the only question left is whether a larger, more open Control can still feel as tight as the original.