How about that Control Resonant! What was previously referred to as Control 2 now has its own name, and its own protagonist, Dylan Faden, the tongues-speaking brother of the first game’s heroine Jesse. Gone is her shapeshifting gun too, replaced with a shapeshifting bit of metal instead. The horrors of the Oldest House have spilled out into New York City, Jesse is MIA, and Dylan must bash his way through it all to find her in a Devil May Cry-esque manner. Interesting enough a setup, but I am bothered by one thing: Remedy say you don’t need to play the first game to play this one.
In a PlayStation Blog post that came with the official reveal last night, co-creative director at Remedy Mikael Kasurinen laid it out for us. “You don’t need to have played the first Control to experience Resonant,” he wrote. “It’s a new story and a fresh entry point into Remedy’s world of the Federal Bureau of Control – though returning players will recognize familiar echoes of Jesse’s path and the mysteries binding these two siblings together.”
This isn’t a surprising thing in that by the time Control Resonant releases next year, if it does, it will have been seven years since the first one came out (the same amount of time that has passed in-world). It’s just quite frustrating, because when the studio said the same thing about Alan Wake 2, it was only true on a technical level. Sure, it was easy enough to follow, but there really is so much to it that you’ll need to have played the first one to fully appreciate it.
Seven years in-world is obviously a convenient amount of time to help justify the lack of a need to play a previous game. It is just a frustrating trend that has been born out of a desperation to, I assume, make certain sales figures. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s co-director even said you don’t have to play Remake beforehand to enjoy it, which is nonsense of the highest order.
Sequels are not an inherently bad thing, and if you can only make them in a fashion where you need to bring in new people, thusly potentially alienating what drew people in in the first place, I question why you’re making a sequel at all. Hell, Remedy are trying to build a whole universe here – why not be brave and go the whole hog, try something actually new?
Mayhaps I am being a curmudgeon, I would like to note that I do think the actiony, whompy bits look Sick as Heck, and will be eager to check it out whenever it does end up releasing next year. But I won’t pretend that I don’t need to play Control.
