'Control Resonant' Swaps Jesse for Dylan — and Reverses the Story

Remedy Entertainment released "Control Resonant" on Thursday for Steam, the Epic Games Store, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S — the sequel to its 2019 hit "Control," delivered after a nearly seven-year development journey.

The new protagonist is Jesse Faden's younger brother, Dylan Faden, played by Sean Durrie. Jesse goes missing at the conclusion of the events at The Oldest House, and Dylan wakes up to search for her while battling a preternatural crisis engulfing a reality-warped Manhattan. He unleashes his powers and masters the different forms of his shape-shifting melee weapon, the Aberrant, against dangerous enemies and monumental bosses.

"There's this interesting kind of reverse symmetry when you look at both games," franchise creative director and Remedy co-creative director Mikael Kasurinen tells Variety. "In the first game, Jesse arrives at The Oldest House looking for Dylan, trying to understand what happened to her brother. And her arc obviously then becomes a lot about herself, in many different ways."

Jesse becomes the director of the Federal Bureau of Control. "In a way, she found a place to be and she was happy inside The Oldest House," Kasurinen says.

For "Control Resonant," Kasurinen says, "we turn it the other way around."

"Jesse is missing, lost, we don't know what's going on with her and Dylan wakes up and then he starts his search for her and trying to understand again what is happening in the world," Kasurinen says. Dylan deals with the imminent threats and finds Zoe, as Jesse found Pope early on in the first game. "Dylan's thing is to try to find connections and a sense of belonging," Kasurinen notes. As Dylan searches, the game unlocks more of what Jesse is doing, and players start to understand her earlier choices. "Both stories revolve around both siblings, and we just basically switch sides in a way."

Durrie says the team signaled Dylan's future from the start. "When they told me about the project and were pitching it to me, we got to the very end and they're like, 'And he's not dead. He's in a coma,'" Durrie recalls. "While they didn't get into the details of where we are today, I knew that they had things up their sleeve right at the beginning."

Durrie built the character from specific pieces of the first game's backstory. "I took, in particular, the events of the first game of why he was victimized, letting the Hiss in, his guilt from that, his need for atonement and then now his need to want to rediscover his humanity," he says. Dylan had lived in the house since he was 10, then was thrown into a cell and forgotten. "Performance-wise, he's infected by The Hiss in the original 'Control,' so he doesn't act like that anymore, but his memory of it is, his guilt, quite frankly, of it and what he did, even if it wasn't under his control."

The mechanics changed too. Fast-paced first-person action combining a weapon with preternatural abilities remains what Kasurinen calls "a kind of a 'Control' recipe." The bigger shift: "Instead of a gun, Dylan uses a melee weapon." The team pushed the sandbox further, letting Dylan utilize gravity anomalies through shift and attach himself to different surfaces, and built a wide range of enemy types to fight — or avoid — rather than one single enemy.

Newcomers get an entry point in Zoe. "Zoe's character will be helpful if this is the first venture you've had into 'Control,'" Durrie says. "She's kind of asking the questions that you may be asking. But if you are well-versed in the lore of 'Control,' you'll jump right in. So either way, we're ready for people to play."

Kasurinen calls Zoe "crucial for Dylan, crucial for the storytelling" and "very much the player perspective into the situation. Like, what the hell is The Hiss? And who's Jesse? Who are you?"

With the sibling roles reversed and the Aberrant replacing Jesse's gun, "Control Resonant" sets up whether Dylan's search for belonging can match the arc that made his sister director.