Interview: Control Resonant Is Twice as Large as the Original & Remedy’s Fastest Game Ever

1 month ago 13

Interview Control Resonant is Twice As Large As the Original Remedys Fastest Game Ever

Published Jun 14, 2026, 2:00 PM EDT

Tay Garcia is a Contributor at DualShockers and a Brazilian journalist who has been covering games professionally since 2017. Her work spans news, reviews, previews, lists, guides, and features, with a particular focus on horror, retro games, theories, puzzle games, Metroidvanias, Soulslikes, and story-driven titles.

Before joining DualShockers, Tay worked as an assistant editor and contributed to Jovem Nerd, one of Brazil’s largest pop culture outlets, as well as Editora Europa, a major Brazilian publisher known for gaming and technology magazines. She has also worked as a streamer, YouTube creator, and podcaster. Tay holds a B.A. in Journalism, has postgraduate training in Social Media, and is certified in professional video game journalism. She was also a member of Podcast UP, which won the Cubo de Ouro Award for Best Podcast in Brazil in 2021.

You’ve likely already played or heard of Control, Remedy Entertainment’s mind-bending universe that arrived in 2019 with a bunch of mysteries and left even bigger ones behind, leaving fans craving more of the shadowy, bureaucratic anomalies of the Federal Bureau of Control.

Now, the Finnish studio is preparing to plunge players back into the shifting concrete walls of the Oldest House with the highly anticipated Control Resonant, a direct sequel. But this time, the paranormal weight of the world won't rest on Jesse Faden’s shoulders. Instead, the sequel shifts its focus to a completely different protagonist: her brother, Dylan Faden.

10 Best Games For Twin Peaks Fans

From the light-hearted Darkside Detective to psychologically horrifying vibes of Silent Hill 2, here are the 10 best games for Twin Peaks fans.

As it turns out, this shift in perspective is bringing some mechanical and structural overhauls to the franchise – and I’m not the one saying that, but the Art Director himself, Elmeri Raitanen, is! I had the incredible opportunity to chat with Raitanen about what players can expect from this next chapter, and he dropped some heavy-hitting revelations about how the scale and pace of the experience have evolved, while also sharing details about his impressive 17-year trajectory at Remedy and the artistic challenges of designing a world around Dylan’s fractured psyche.

So, without further ado, here’s the full interview – grab your cup of coffee (I know this is not Alan Wake, but Remedy’s games always go well with coffee) and get ready, because the Bureau has never moved this fast and so mysteriously.

Speaking With Elmeri Raitanen, Art Director for Control Resonant

You have been working for Remedy for more than 10 years! So, can you tell me a bit about your journey inside Remedy?

Raitanen: Yes, I have worked for them for a while, 17 [years]! I first started as a cinematic compositor in the original Alan Wake, and that was in 2009. So I joined the end parts of the cinematic push of that project. Then, afterwards, there was a little bit of freelancing, and then I joined as a VFX artist for Quantum Break development. And I think I was the very first VFX artist by that title ever at Remedy. So before that, all of the games and the visual effects were done by basically the graphics programmers who wrote the code, so they also made the effects. We didn't necessarily have any tooling for artists at that point. They hired me and then were asking, “Okay, how can you do the same stuff for us in real time?” And then we started to develop the sort of VFX suit for Northlight.

And now, working as an art director for Remedy for the first time, what has been the most challenging part for you so far?

Raitanen: I guess it could be the amount of professional uncertainty that any creative director and art director has to constantly face. With something as subjective as art, there's no binary right or wrong answer. There's just a gut feeling or a reaction. I'm purely operating with my past experiences and my own taste. So I still have to constantly defend my decisions. [Whenever] I make a call, and every week I need to defend why I think that this is the right thing for this game. And nobody has the correct answer. I don't have the correct answer either! I just have a gut feeling that this might make a lot of sense for a Control game. And so, this is how we have been operating. But yeah, it takes a toll because we don't know how it's going to land. We just want to have this sort of a unique voice. And we put it out, and we hope that people actually like it.

Control is pretty chaotic and surreal in many ways (and I mean that as a compliment, of course). And for you, as an art director, how do you balance this chaos with a clean, cohesive visual identity so as not to confuse the player?

Raitanen: Yeah! That's definitely been a really tricky thing in Control Resonance because, from gameplay speed and pace, this is by far the fastest game that we've done. So Dylan basically can't even walk – he's just running everywhere! And the melee combat is hectic. We can [do more] now, [since] Northlight supports a lot more enemies simultaneously in the scene than before. So our designers are actually taking full advantage of this. There's absolute mayhem and chaos going on, of course, during the encounters and combats. So then it becomes a thing for visual effects artists, designers, and even character concept artists. I mean, “How can we figure out this kind of suite of effects that work in tandem with the chaos?” So you have the Hiss that has a very specific, distinct look. Molde has a very specific, distinct look. This is how telekinetic abilities, for example, look. And we have to carefully balance and think about this visual hierarchy of the scene. Like, “what is most important for the player to notice (3:43) at this particular moment?” And it's never done. It's never ready. So we just keep iterating on. Still, the guys in the office right now are working on this balance and trying to make it tighter and tighter.

While playing the build, I felt some Alan Wake 2 vibes, especially towards the Evacuation Zone and the live-action scenes. Did you intentionally take something you’ve learned from the game to apply in Control Resonant?

Raitanen: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we took the learnings from Quantum Break into Control and from Control to Alan Wake and so forth. So we definitely are [taking lessons from Alan Wake 2]. I guess, at this point, people expect these sorts of weird things from us. And we noticed what sort of things work in, of course, the Alan Wake context. So now we’re just figuring out similar things that are more at home in the Control franchise.

There are some visual elements in Control Resonant that look like bugs and glitches, but intentionally! Is it as fun as it looks to think about these things and be able to put them in the game?

Raitanen: For sure! And it is a bit of an open secret, but we have fairly deliberately designed some visual effects in such a way that even if they might occasionally bug out or glitch, maybe it just adds to the experience rather than somebody immediately notices that and says, “hey, that was broken”. So we try to be so out there and weird and unique that you might not even know if something is not going right!

It was the Hiss, right? If a bug pops up, blame it on the Hiss!

Raitanen: Yeah, exactly! [laughs]

For me, especially in the Evacuation Zone, it looked like Control Resonant is going to have larger and more open scenarios when compared to the first Control or Alan Wake 2. Was that intentional?

Raitanen: I think in size-wise, this is a natural progression from Control, which was still fairly indoors, and then Alan Wake 2 was a lot bigger, but more terrain-heavy and had more foliage and forestry. And then now from that, I think Resonant is roughly twice as large from the game world point of view. And naturally, now we're just building it from modular city pieces. So yeah!

Hiss enemies look way scarier than in the first Control! Was that also intentional?

Raitanen: Partly, yes. So we have been thinking about the original Control, like, what is something that we can keep? And what is something that we can keep, but we need to evolve a bit? Also, and what is something that we need to drop? Because [there are things that] don't sort of work in the context of this game anymore. Hiss enemies, for example, have been a really good example of that, since it is, of course, a powerful paranormal resonance already in Control. But, for example, if you think about guards taken by the Hiss, they were still fairly normal humanoid things. So we definitely wanted to maket sure that in this fast-paced melee combat, all of the different silhouettes of the enemies are vastly different. And you can even, from a glimpse, you can see that, okay, that's probably a ranged enemy, and that's probably a heavy, bulky melee enemy) and so forth. So we definitely looked into the silhouettes and wanted to make sure that it feels more like otherworldly corruption and turbulent chaos rather than body horror. So that's something that we tried to avoid still.

And is there any specific moment or element related to the design that you are really eager for people to play and comment on?

Raitanen: Yes, absolutely. There will be these sorts of crazy tentpole moments in this game as well. But as we know from our past experience, they land the best when people don't know when they're happening! So naturally, I'm not going to spoil them now. I’ll just leave it in the air that people need to get the game and play it for themselves [to experience these moments]. But this sort of classic weirdness and left-field takes definitely are in this experience, and you can look forward to that!