Control Resonant's bosses, open world design, and Fibonacci-scored fights detailed in extended Remedy interview

PC Gaming Show has released the full extended interview filmed in Finland earlier this year, giving the deepest look yet at Control Resonant — Remedy's upcoming ARPG sequel to the 2019 supernatural action game Control.

Resonant puts players in control of Dylan Faden, brother of Jesse Faden from the original game. Dylan spent most of Control locked in a cell due to his dangerously powerful abilities and his possession by the Hiss. After waking from a coma, he finds the Hiss have broken out of the Oldest House and are tearing through Manhattan — and a second threat called the Patterning is warping the city, turning people into monsters and bending reality itself. Creative director Mikael Kasurinen describes it as something that "affects time, it affects light" — not just rearranging the world but actively corrupting its inhabitants. Dylan's core traversal ability lets him flip gravity and walk on walls and ceilings, which fits right into the Escher-inspired visual chaos Remedy was going for. Art director Elmeri Raitanen says the team deliberately avoided looking at other games for inspiration, citing films like A Field in England and Paprika instead. His reasoning: "There's this tendency of people not taking risks, and games start to resemble each other quite a lot."

The bosses — called Resonants — are humans twisted into monstrous forms by the Patterning, and defeating them lets Dylan absorb their powers. Lead level designer Anne-Marie Grönroos explains that Resonant is more open-world than its predecessor, and while players need to defeat a certain number of bosses to progress, there are always more available than the minimum required. That means the developers can't always predict what abilities a player will have at any given point — one playtester didn't unlock gravity-shifting until far later than expected. Three Resonants are shown in the interview: a lava-spitting giant, a large floating head, and a former dancer caught mid-performance when the Patterning hit. Remedy worked with real dancers to capture her movement, and composer Petri Alanko built her fight's score around Fibonacci numbers — the beat pattern follows the sequence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on. Alanko also tied Dylan's audio identity to his character arc: early in the game, sounds associated with Dylan are built from pure sine waves — the simplest possible waveform — and grow more complex as he evolves.

The variability in boss order and power acquisition is likely to produce some wild challenge runs once the game is out. With Remedy's track record on the original Control — a cult hit that built a dedicated fanbase around its SCP-adjacent Federal Bureau of Control lore — expectations are high for Resonant to push that world further into genuinely strange territory.