Control Resonant moves the sequel away from the Oldest House

From the Oldest House to a Warped Manhattan

As a sequel to 2019’s Control, Control Resonant makes an explicit effort to stand on its own terms. The lockdown inside the Oldest House has finally lifted, and Dylan Faden is charged with saving Manhattan from a dual onslaught of the Hiss and a new paranormal entity. Yet, in moving the action to the streets of New York, Remedy trades away the precise brand of psychological dread that defined the first title. The Oldest House ceases to be a piece of memorabilia as Dylan hops across a distorted cityscape.

Within the established universe of Remedy’s games, the Oldest House is classified as a “place of power,” fundamentally altered by paranatural forces. Externally, it masquerades as a mundane government building. Its brutalist architecture, somber tones, and imposing height lend it a specific brand of bureaucratic weirdness. But as the lore establishes, the building existed prior to becoming the Federal Bureau of Control headquarters. Rather than being constructed or rented, it was discovered, remaining visible only to those actively seeking it out and conceiving of its existence first.

The Architecture of the Unknown

The interdimensional structure connects to disparate dimensions, featuring corridors that twist into mazes and doors that open to remote parts of the planet. As noted in the game’s design, the location was never terrifying simply because an entity inside slaughtered staff and left them floating in static poses. Instead, the dread arose from how the physical space actively contradicted human assumptions about logic and reality. A structure built with doors, windows, and walls is expected to respect physical laws. When it fails to meet those foundational expectations, players are pulled straight into an eerie world.

This unsettling environment mirrors literary explorations of haunted architecture, such as Shirley Jackson’s description of Hill House in The Haunting of Hill House—a place standing against the hills holding darkness within because no live organism can exist sanely under absolute reality. Similarly, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves presents an interior whose illogic becomes a living nightmare. Without relying on overt monsters, these settings weaponize a primordial fear: minds challenged by the impossible. Control harnessed this exact mechanism, forcing players to explore a building where a standard corridor might unexpectedly open into a massive, alien structure too large to fit within the physical frame of the building.

Level Design Versus Existential Dread

Instead of utilizing the suffocating, mind-bending halls of the Federal Bureau of Control, Control Resonant ejects players onto the streets for urban combat against bizarre entities. The urban layout mimics an Inception-esque design where streets rise vertically as massive walls or buildings shift to horizontal positions, defying gravity. Ghostly doors scattered across the map allow instantaneous teleportation between zones, while hidden passageways inside coffee shops harbor waiting Hiss creatures.

While this setup provides a dynamic gameplay playground, it sacrifices the inherent, mysterious dread of a closed environment. Non-Euclidean urban design primarily functions as functional level design rather than an existential threat. When a street stretches out vertically, it challenges traversal mechanics rather than fundamentally breaking a player’s assumptions about the permanence of physical reality in the same unsettling manner as the shifting rooms of the Oldest House.