Control Resonant director on skipping yellow paint: 'Nothing better than feeling like you found your way'

Control Resonant director Mikael Kasurinen has explained why Remedy's new open-world action RPG deliberately avoids yellow paint markers — the shorthand for on-screen guidance that highlights climbable ledges, interactive doors, and objective paths. In a recent appearance on the Dropping Frames podcast, Kasurinen called it a conscious design decision rooted in his theory of what makes games genuinely satisfying.

Kasurinen frames good game design around three pillars: competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Of those, autonomy is the one yellow paint directly undermines. He pointed to the "fart trails" in the upcoming Wolverine game as a recent example of over-guidance, contrasting it with Resonant's approach of using lighting, in-world props, and environmental storytelling to nudge players rather than spell things out. "If it feels like it's like 'go here,' it's not anymore a decision for the player. Somebody already decided for you," he said. His goal is the opposite — players who feel like they personally figured something out. "Nothing fucking better than it feels like I found my way to do it," he added.

Kasurinen openly acknowledges the risk. Control Resonant will feel "impenetrable" to some players at first — they won't know where to go or what to do, and that friction can alienate people fast. But he frames that discomfort as intentional: players need to be active participants, not passive observers. The original Control, released in 2019, already leaned into cryptic environmental storytelling and a deliberately disorienting Federal Bureau of Control setting, so Resonant's philosophy is a natural extension of that DNA, now stretched across a much larger open world.

The game is out now on consoles and PC. Whether the no-hand-holding approach wins over a broader audience than the original remains to be seen, but Kasurinen is betting on longevity over accessibility — "that's the thing that will truly, at the end of the day, stand the test of time," he said.