I strongly recommend: Control Resonant (Review)

Control Resonant adopts the structure and aesthetic of a Ubisoft-style open-world game full of map markers and regional bosses.

But whereas in a Ubisoft game, the structure... is the experience, here the structure is the beginning of a process that is specifically designed to subvert expectations.

Rather than dictate the game's ultimate form, the structure is simply a scaffold that exists to let Remedy build other, more interesting things.

And it's hard to succinctly describe those interesting things because Resident is a deeply iterative game that layers its storytelling and game mechanics on top of each other throughout the game's entire runtime, such that by the end, You're running upside down on an inverted skyline while fighting enemies who are on a completely different planar axis to you and you're applying status effects and summoning minions while trying to complete a quest that sees you phasing through time and fighting alongside versions of your past and future self.

Everything I just listed here comes online bit by bit and then Remedy just keep building on all of it and taking it to new levels.

I'm not even joking when I say the final zone in this game is some of the best level design I've ever seen in a video game.

I'm not going to show it to you because I think you should just discover it for yourself, but it's genuinely unbelievable stuff.

At the same time, Control Resonant actively avoids many of the design approaches associated with modern day AAA open world games.

There is very little navigation assistance here and you will get lost a lot.

Some of the most interesting side quests are hidden away in unmarked locations, easily missed.

There are a lot of puzzles here and some of them are not easy.

You will get stumped, maybe a lot.

And you know what the main character says to himself when you're trying to solve these puzzles? And I'm not just saying this because we went through the whole Wolverine discourse, I'm saying it because games that are this size, shape, and structure almost always go to great lengths to help the player through them, but Remedy truly trusts in your ability to just figure shit out, and the result is an open world action game that is really different from anything you've played before, but the closest parallel is last year's Hell Is Us, which took huge risks with player agency, and those risks paid off big time.

There is a lot of combat in this game, too much I'd argue, and the enemies have a lot of health, too much I'd argue.

So it is a miracle that after rolling credits, I'd still happily pick up the controller again just for a little more combat.

It truly is brilliantly designed and it only gets better as your kit expands and as more enemy types come online.

Once Remedy dial in the numbers post-launch, I think people are really going to love it.

And we haven't even spoken about the signature Remedy weirdness, which is all here and it's all glorious.

Quirky characters, fourth wall breaking moments, memorable musically driven sequences.

At times the game shifts into an entirely different genre of game, but I won't spoil that part.

And then there's the art direction and the technical execution of all of this, and the taut, engaging writing, and the quest design that always seeks to bring in narrative gameplay and level design elements in surprising ways.

We complain that many games these days lack a cohesive vision or sense of authorship.

I would argue that the defining quality of Control Resonant is its composition, where a person or a group of people held all of this in their mind at once, combining disparate elements in a way that not only harmonizes them, but creates a vibrant... resonance.

This thing vibrates with so much creative energy that I really don't care about all the things that gets wrong because very few games are able to get stuff this right.

Control Resonant adopts the structure and aesthetic of a Ubisoft-style open-world game full of map markers and regional bosses.

But whereas in a Ubisoft game, the structure... is the experience, here the structure is the beginning of a process that is specifically designed to subvert expectations.

Rather than dictate the game's ultimate form, the structure is simply a scaffold that exists to let Remedy build other, more interesting things.

And it's hard to succinctly describe those interesting things because Resident is a deeply iterative game that layers its storytelling and game mechanics on top of each other throughout the game's entire runtime, such that by the end, You're running upside down on an inverted skyline while fighting enemies who are on a completely different planar axis to you and you're applying status effects and summoning minions while trying to complete a quest that sees you phasing through time and fighting alongside versions of your past and future self.

Everything I just listed here comes online bit by bit and then Remedy just keep building on all of it and taking it to new levels.

I'm not even joking when I say the final zone in this game is some of the best level design I've ever seen in a video game.

I'm not going to show it to you because I think you should just discover it for yourself, but it's genuinely unbelievable stuff.

At the same time, Control Resonant actively avoids many of the design approaches associated with modern day AAA open world games.

There is very little navigation assistance here and you will get lost a lot.

Some of the most interesting side quests are hidden away in unmarked locations, easily missed.

There are a lot of puzzles here and some of them are not easy.

You will get stumped, maybe a lot.

And you know what the main character says to himself when you're trying to solve these puzzles? And I'm not just saying this because we went through the whole Wolverine discourse, I'm saying it because games that are this size, shape, and structure almost always go to great lengths to help the player through them, but Remedy truly trusts in your ability to just figure shit out, and the result is an open world action game that is really different from anything you've played before, but the closest parallel is last year's Hell Is Us, which took huge risks with player agency, and those risks paid off big time.

There is a lot of combat in this game, too much I'd argue, and the enemies have a lot of health, too much I'd argue.

So it is a miracle that after rolling credits, I'd still happily pick up the controller again just for a little more combat.

It truly is brilliantly designed and it only gets better as your kit expands and as more enemy types come online.

Once Remedy dial in the numbers post-launch, I think people are really going to love it.

And we haven't even spoken about the signature Remedy weirdness, which is all here and it's all glorious.

Quirky characters, fourth wall breaking moments, memorable musically driven sequences.

At times the game shifts into an entirely different genre of game, but I won't spoil that part.

And then there's the art direction and the technical execution of all of this, and the taut, engaging writing, and the quest design that always seeks to bring in narrative gameplay and level design elements in surprising ways.

We complain that many games these days lack a cohesive vision or sense of authorship.

I would argue that the defining quality of Control Resonant is its composition, where a person or a group of people held all of this in their mind at once, combining disparate elements in a way that not only harmonizes them, but creates a vibrant... resonance.

This thing vibrates with so much creative energy that I really don't care about all the things that gets wrong because very few games are able to get stuff this right.