Control Resonant's Manhattan setting can't match the Oldest House

Control Resonant eventually delivers the weird, memorable second half that fans of the original will want — but getting there means grinding through a setting that simply doesn't work as well as the one that made Control a classic.

The problem is the game's primary location: a glitched-out, twisted version of Manhattan. Where Control's Oldest House — the brutalist Federal Bureau of Control headquarters — built its strangeness slowly and deliberately, Resonant's city never earns the same effect. The Oldest House worked because it started mundane: concrete walls, muted colors, dead-end office furniture, the soul-crushing familiarity of a government building. That baseline made every floating body, every crimson-lit impossible corridor, land with real weight. The contrast between the everyday and the escalating supernatural was the whole engine of Control's atmosphere, and it's what made the game feel like an instant classic in 2019.

That approach shares obvious DNA with the Backrooms creepypasta — a concept that predates Control by only a few months, originating on a 4chan thread before Kane Parsons turned it into a box-office hit starting in 2022. Both lean on liminal space aesthetics: the power of the deeply familiar turned subtly, then overwhelmingly, wrong. A city like Manhattan doesn't carry that same baseline. It's already visually loud, already layered with meaning and spectacle, so glitching it out reads as spectacle rather than dread. Resonant loses the quiet, oppressive mundanity that made the Oldest House so effective as a horror engine.

The result is a first half that feels like a slog — a lot of backtracking through the weakest part of the game — before Resonant finds its footing in a second half that gets genuinely strange and memorable. The trouble is that first impressions stick, and most players will spend the bulk of their time feeling underwhelmed before the game clicks into gear.