Control, Altered State

At Gamescom, I was fortunate enough to get a hands-off look at the mold-ridden Manhattan Park. In Control Resonant, you play as Dylan Faden, the younger brother of Jesse, the protagonist of the first Control.

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You’ll explore lots of weird and wonderful places in Control Resonant.

Eat the Mold!

In this preview, we were treated to a look at Manhattan Park (or what’s left of it), and Dylan’s goal was to find and ingest four mold samples, as Dylan believes it will lead him to finding a resonant- a huge boss that unlock new powers for Dylan. We were told that these resonants can be tackled in any order outside of the first and last boss, and you can even ignore them altogether, but you will miss out on valuable unlocks. Manhattan Park is covered in a blue-green hue caused by the mold infestation, which has numerous corpses embedded in the mold that give off an unsettling vibe. At the start of the preview, we got to see Dylan take a shortcut that was previously opened up before the demo began. The developers said that the zones are quite large, and you can unlock shortcuts for quicker access to previous areas. These shortcuts were already open because Dylan’s already eaten three of the four samples required to find the resonant before our preview footage picked up.

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Aggressive Dominance

As we saw Dylan make his way through Manhattan, we got to see the aptly named enemy, The Mold. These grotesque, bulbous amalgamations launch projectiles at you that deal infected damage (damage over time). After a few combat scenarios against the Mold, Remedy told us that they want players to play aggressively, and by that, they don’t mean repeatedly mashing your buttons but using a more tactile approach. There is no block or parry, which is unusual for an action-based combat system, but there is still a dodge, and with perfect timing, a perfect dodge. Every enemy you defeat will reward you with a small portion of your health back, as well as a short-term damage-enhancing buff called Dominance.

So, as you can see, the goal is to take out enemies as quickly as possible so that you keep the buff on you at all times. During Dylan’s travels, one thing that stood out to me was that some enemies were armored. You can break the armor, but it’s more efficient to attack them from behind due to the lack of armor there. Aside from said armor, enemies do have weaknesses such as Ignite (burning) and Infection (poison), to name just a few of them.

Continuing through Manhattan for a bit, we saw Dylan pass the FBC Field Content Research facility and shift up a vertical wall via a button prompt, leading to a humongous Mold enemy, shaped like a large bulb with a trunk-like appendage hurling mines as well as other projectiles. Here, Remedy switched to some Dual Blades due to them having a critical chance buff before doing some drill-like attack that did some serious Falter damage; this is a yellow gauge under the health gauge. Think of Falter as a stagger gauge in other action games; fill it up to stun the enemy temporarily, allowing you to perform an execution on it.

With this enemy defeated, we see Dylan pass by a few more enemies and a world event in the form of a glitched-out traffic light; however, we didn’t get to see it in action, leaving it up to our imagination for now. Finally, Dylan finds the last piece of Mold Sample needed and happily eats it. During the scene that followed, the player was presented with a few dialogue choices. We were told by the developers that the choices won’t affect the ending, but they will affect how other people view Dylan.

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In Resonant you’ll need to change the gravity to avoid all types of environmental hazards.

The Collective

Eating the Mold allowed Dylan to find a resonant, The Collective, a large amalgamation of mold corpses with various emotions etched on their faces that, after a cutscene, Dylan battled. The Collective sits at the back and you can’t attack it until you deal with its tentacles on the walls on either side of it first. Here, you can use gravity shift on the walls with the tentacles while avoiding the projectiles they shoot at you. Once the two tentacles were defeated, you could head over to The Collective and attack a weak point, dealing damage to it.

During the following phase, more tentacles were spawned, as well as some smaller mold enemies. Once again, we saw Dylan make his way to the tentacles, use gravity shift, and one by one defeat them, allowing him to expose the main boss again. With another weak point destroyed, this sequence was repeated a few more times until the boss was defeated. Upon its death, we saw Dylan was rewarded with a choice of two new powers to select from.

We’re unsure if you can obtain the other power left behind, but you could check out the power beforehand by entering an area called “The Gap”, which is an area disconnected from the world that allows you to test out your builds, including the new power you obtained. Speaking of builds, there seems to be a fair degree of customization for Dylan. You can upgrade your Aberrant weapon and have access to three artifact slots that function like accessories. Finally, you have the choice of what powers and abilities you want equipped that you’ve unlocked from defeating the resonants.

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Unlike Jesse, Dylan comes armed to the teeth.

Control Resonant is shaping up to be a great game, keeping all the weirdness that Control is known for, but changing the way you play it. As a massive fan of the original Control, I was a little worried about the changes, but after seeing more of the game in action, I’m looking forward to it and to where the story takes us.