The Studio: Remedy's Rise to AAA Sovereignty

Remedy Entertainment — the Finnish studio founded in 1995 — has spent the past decade quietly building one of gaming's most creatively distinctive bodies of work. Alan Wake established their love of metafictional horror. Control won multiple Game of the Year awards in 2019 with its brutalist aesthetic, telekinetic combat, and conspiracy-drenched SCP-inspired worldbuilding. Alan Wake 2 in 2023 pushed the Northlight Engine to its technical limits and created one of the most visually daring games of the generation.

For Control: Resonant, Remedy is self-publishing for the first time — having acquired full ownership of the Control franchise from 505 Games in February 2024 for €17 million. Co-financing and co-production comes from Annapurna Pictures, the company behind films like Hereditary, Midsommar, and Beau Is Afraid — a creative partnership that signals the tonal ambitions of what Remedy is building. The initial development budget of €50 million makes Resonant the most expensive project in the studio's history, with Remedy estimating it needs to sell between 3 and 4 million copies to break even.

The Story: Dylan Faden Inherits a Broken World

In the original Control, Jesse Faden was the protagonist — a young woman who arrived at the Oldest House looking for answers about her missing brother and ended up becoming the Bureau's new Director. Her brother Dylan was briefly seen in captivity, experimented on, possessing extraordinary parautilitarian abilities — and then the game ended without resolving his fate.

Control: Resonant picks up that thread and runs with it. Dylan has spent years in confinement at the hands of the FBC, the same organization his sister now directs. Now, at the height of a catastrophic supernatural crisis, the Bureau deploys him — their most dangerous asset — into a Manhattan that is coming apart at the seams.

A mysterious cosmic entity has escaped containment. The Hiss — the reality-corrupting force from the first game — has spread beyond the Oldest House and is now actively reshaping downtown Manhattan. Buildings shift. Gravity inverts. Physics becomes negotiable. The Bureau calls it an Incursion. For everyone living in the city, it is the end of the world as they know it.

Dylan's mission: contain the Resonants — powerful corrupted entities born from individuals consumed by the Incursion — and, somewhere in the chaos, find his sister.

Game director Mikael Kasurinen described the two games as "expressions of two different siblings" — Control is Jesse's story, cold and controlled; Resonant is Dylan's, more volatile and instinctive. Players do not need to have played the first game to understand Resonant, though the rewards for those who have are significant.

The World: A Warped Manhattan

Where the original Control was almost entirely set inside the brutalist corridors of the Oldest House — a deliberately claustrophobic, maze-like structure — Resonant explodes outward into the open city. Manhattan itself has become the paranormal environment, its streets, buildings, and infrastructure twisted by the Incursion into something simultaneously recognizable and fundamentally wrong.

The game is not an open world in the traditional sense. Remedy describes it as built around large, distinct, and expansive zones filled with side activities, hidden encounters, and optional discoveries. A strong central narrative guides progression, but the structure allows significant freedom to explore and uncover what's been left behind in the chaos. One of the early zones showcased — the West Incursion Zone — shows Manhattan's street grid reshaped into a shifting landscape of impossible geometry.

Gravity Anomalies are a defining feature of traversal: entire areas where gravity and orientation shift completely, turning walls into floors, ceilings into platforms, and creating combat arenas that exist on multiple planes simultaneously.

Gameplay: Melee-Forward, Ability-Driven, RPG-Expanded

The most significant mechanical shift from the first game is the emphasis on melee combat. Jesse's Combat in the original Control was built around the Service Weapon — a telekinetically enhanced pistol with multiple forms — and the iconic ability to hurl objects with her mind. Dylan fights differently.

His primary weapon is the Aberrant — an otherworldly, shapeshifting melee weapon that transforms between multiple forms: Hammer, Blades, Scythe, Fists, and additional forms being kept secret until release. Where Jesse's combat style was about ranged telekinesis punctuated by weapon fire, Dylan's is close, brutal, and physically direct. Remedy describes it as a complete reimagining of what Control combat feels like at a mechanical level.

Dylan's supernatural abilities complement his melee focus:

Reach allows him to traverse impossible gaps and navigate geometry that defies physics. Shift allows him to redirect momentum mid-movement, making vertical and inverted spaces fully explorable. Both abilities transform movement into a combat tool — in Gravity Anomalies, the ability to reorient your sense of "down" mid-fight is the difference between surviving and being overwhelmed.

Resonants — the game's major boss enemies — are corrupted remnants of once-powerful individuals consumed by the Incursion. Each one represents a different manifestation of the supernatural crisis, and defeating them unlocks new abilities for Dylan. This creates the RPG progression loop: exploration leads to confrontation, confrontation leads to expanded capability, expanded capability opens new areas and combat approaches.

A full customization system allows players to configure which Aberrant forms and supernatural abilities they carry into combat, creating a build system more expansive than anything in the first game.

Remedy's Connected Universe

Control: Resonant exists within Remedy's Remedy Connected Universe (RCU) — the shared fictional universe that connects Control, Alan Wake, and their related projects. Alan Wake 2's DLC expansion The Lake House contained an optional scene in October 2024 that directly teased Control 2's existence — a moment that sent the gaming internet into a frenzy. Resonant continues that thread of interconnectedness, with Kasurinen confirming that the game is built to reward players familiar with the full Remedy universe while remaining accessible to newcomers.

Platforms and Release Window

Control: Resonant launches in 2026 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC via Steam and Epic Games Store, and Mac. No specific release date has been confirmed yet — the game was reported to be in alpha development stage in March 2026, suggesting a second half of 2026 release is most likely. Remedy is self-publishing — no platform exclusivity deals.

Conclusion

Control: Resonant is the game that Remedy has been building toward for the past decade. Every lesson from Alan Wake's atmospheric horror, Control's telekinetic spectacle, and Alan Wake 2's visual ambition has been absorbed and applied to a project at a scale the studio has never attempted before. Dylan Faden has been waiting in a cell for years. Manhattan is burning with impossible fire. Reality is failing. The Bureau needs their most dangerous weapon.

The Resonants are waiting. Dylan is ready. And Remedy, as always, has something extraordinary planned.