Control Resonant: Dylan-Jesse Switch in Sequel, Adding Zoe to Story

Following a nearly seven-year development journey, Remedy Entertainment has unleashed the sequel to its 2019 hit video game “Control.”

Released Thursday for Steam, the Epic Games Store, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S, “Control Resonant” picks up after Jesse Faden, the protagonist of the original “Control” game, goes missing upon the conclusion of the events at The Oldest House.

The main character for the “Control” sequel is Jesse’s younger brother, Dylan Faden (played by Sean Durrie), who battles a preternatural crisis engulfing a reality-warped Manhattan, unleashing his powers and mastering the different forms of his shape-shifting melee weapon, the Aberrant, to face dangerous enemies and monumental bosses.

“There’s this interesting kind of reverse symmetry when you look at both games,” “Control” 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. While she’s trying to look for Dylan and understand what’s going on, she becomes the director of this strange bureau called the Bureau of Control and it was, in a way, her fate to become that person. In a way, she found a place to be and she was happy inside The Oldest House.”

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. “And he ends up dealing with the imminent threats and he finds Zoe, as Jesse found Pope early on [in ‘Control’]. So there’s a lot of this interesting symmetry between the characters and their journeys. But of course, Dylan’s thing is to try to find connections and a sense of belonging and all of those things that are unique to him and his arc. And as he searches for Jesse, we unlock more and more what she’s doing, what she’s dealing with and so on. And we start to understand her choices as well that she took early on in the story. Going further than that would be spoiling it, but both stories revolve around both siblings, and we just basically switch sides in a way.”

“Control Resonant” star Durrie says when he was brought on for the original game, the team prepared him for the idea of Dylan taking the lead in the sequel.

“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 says. “And so 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 says he used some details from the first “Control” to develop Dylan’s character for “Resonant,” but notes that much of his previous performance wasn’t carried over due to the state of mind Dylan is in when the franchise begins — namely, being controlled by The Hiss.

“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,” Durrie says. “So I took his backstory of living in this house since he was 10, and then at one point in time, getting thrown into a cell and forgotten about and so that’s where we really started to find the bits that really made it through to the second game. 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 and what the end result was and now telling the story of him rediscovering himself.”

It’s not only the main POV that the “Control” team has changed for “Resonant,” but also some of the game mechanics.

“In regard to the first game, having this sense of fast-paced, first-person action was already a key thing,” Kasurinen says. “Combining the use of a weapon with preternatural abilities, all of those elements were already there and we knew that. And I think that’s a kind of a ‘Control’ recipe, in many ways. And it sounds like a small thing, but of course it is a bigger thing that we switched the weapon. Instead of a gun, Dylan uses a melee weapon. And we wanted to go a lot further into how you can feel like you jump into this interesting, colorful sandbox and making sure that the environments are as versatile as they can be and find many different ways for Dylan to navigate those environments, including being able to utilize the gravity anomalies through shift and attach himself to different surfaces. And then to create an interesting wide range of different types of enemies for you to fight against, and also avoid. Like in the first game, that we don’t get stuck with one single enemy, but it’s more like a composition of enemies that you have to face. I think that larger philosophy was already there in the first game, and I think we were able to go a lot further into that direction with the second game.”

For those completely new to the world of “Control,” the sequel game is sure to be a challenge, but the creative team has found one way to make it a little easier to enter without all the proper backstory.

“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.”

“Zoe is, of course, a big new character,” Kasurinen adds. “Crucial for Dylan, crucial for the storytelling and all of those elements. It’s very much the player perspective into the situation. Like, what the hell is The Hiss? And who’s Jesse? Who are you?”