Welcome, agent, to your debriefing on why CONTROL: Resonant is my Game of the Show of Gamescom 2026. I was lucky enough to get hands-on with the FULL build of the game, and I played over an hour of it until someone else arrived to take my spot, and it was their turn to have their mind blown.
CONTROL was a game I didn’t play at release, in fact, by the time I played the original game, there was already an Xbox Series X version with improved visuals and a duplicate set of achievements, which I intend to get back to one day. But the game blew me away. It’s set in the Oldest House, a location where the US government stores all items they discovered that are involved with supernatural phenomena. In the game, you play as Jesse Faden, who is hired on the spot as the new director of the FBC (Federal Bureau of Control), and the game focuses mostly on the Hiss as the main enemy and Jesse’s search for her brother Dylan, who is held captive there as well.
In CONTROL: Resonant, we play as Dylan instead, and he’s gifted with a set of extremely powerful abilities, allowing him to conjure up melee weapons, throw debris, or just fly around the levels. The demo throws you right into the action as you learn that the Hiss has escaped containment and everyone inside The Oldest House has been killed. The outside New York City hasn’t fared much better and seems to be torn apart. People are floating in the air, the Hiss has taken over others, and only a small resistance force is left to fend them off. Dylan meets another agent and decides to help her.
The game gradually teaches you about your new abilities, making you pick between 3 types of melee weapons, of which I picked a giant scythe (but the huge hammer seemed tempting as well), and later on, I was given another choice and went for what looked like nunchucks. Melee combat feels smooth and satisfying and rewards aggression. You can try to dodge, but there is no parry system, and instead it feels like offence is the best defence in this one, with enemies dropping restorative healing orbs upon being hit. Each of the weapons and abilities we get seems to have multiple skill trees tied to them, which was too overwhelming for me to dive into at this early stage, but it feels like we’ll all be able to make Dylan’s fighting style truly our own through our choices.
The traversal abilities were also gradually introduced with a double jump and a dash first, but eventually full-on flying/floating, which makes hopping from rooftop to rooftop pretty satisfying.
But what really steals the show for me in Remedy’s games is their writing. I have to admit that I skip through a lot of notes and written texts in most other games and always hope there are audio logs instead (like in BioShock) where I can keep playing as I learn more about the world. But in CONTROL, it always felt natural to get these (sometimes [REDACTED]) short stories and I’d read all of them because each note felt like a self-contained short horror story. Resonant continues this trend and also has the IRL footage videos that were pretty wild in the original as well.
Visually, the game is a stunner. And I don’t just mean that the graphical fidelity is nice. It’s the full visual design of the game that seems like it went next-level from the previous game. The very first boss fight you fight in the game kind of reminded me of Expedition 33 in all of the best ways. And the way the giant head flung cars at me or tried to hit me with electrical poles felt like a dance. I had a ton of fun with this fight and was delighted that I could keep playing beyond this point, whereas this was where the demo ended for others.
Jesse is the one who went missing this time, and Dylan is set on finding here, while helping out where he can to keep the Hiss and the many supernatural anomalies in check. We can traverse the city freely, as far as our abilities and clearance levels permit at this point at least and discover that enemies again have certain levels that tell you if you’re ready to face them or not. The FBC is working with you and no longer against you, but they’re still very much keeping their eyes on you.
All I know is that this little taste of the game has made me hungry for so much more, and this will likely be my choice for Game of the year if the quality carries on like this.
Robby lives and breathes video games. When he’s not playing them, he’s talking about them on social media or convincing other people to pick up a controller themselves. He’s online so often, he could practically list the internet as his legal domicile. Belgian games-industry know-it-all.
