For fans of Remedy Entertainment, the 2019 supernatural shooter Control remains a high-water mark for environmental storytelling. Its setting, the Brutalist monolith known as The Oldest House, was a masterclass in atmosphere. The game’s lore was not just supplementary; it was the lifeblood of the experience. Players were drawn to the stacks of redacted documents and classified memos left behind by the Federal Bureau of Control (FBC), creating a sense of mystery that turned every corridor into a detective story. That aesthetic—the blacked-out text and the cryptic, bureaucratic dread—was so iconic that it has become synonymous with the Remedy brand.
It was only natural, then, that the developer would lean into this successful formula for the sequel, Control Resonant. By shifting the action from the isolated confines of The Oldest House to the chaotic, Hiss-infected streets of a wider Manhattan, Remedy has opened up the canvas for a grander, more expansive narrative. Yet, as players guide the protagonist, Dylan Faden, through this apocalyptic cityscape, they are met with a deluge of worldbuilding material that feels less like an invitation to discovery and more like a barrier to engagement. While the quality of the writing remains undeniably top-tier, Control Resonant grapples with a common modern design flaw: it simply offers too much to read and hear, often at the expense of its own pacing.
The Problem of Narrative Pacing
To be clear, the issue is not the quality of the content. Every note, journal entry, and audio log encountered in Control Resonant is crafted with the same meticulous attention to detail that fans expect from the studio. For instance, a relatively straightforward environmental puzzle involving a resonance-tuned fork in a subway station is elevated significantly by the surrounding documentation. These logs offer a haunting glimpse into the frantic, doomed efforts of a research team trying to comprehend why they were caught in a recurring temporal loop. It is this kind of narrative integration that elevates Remedy above many of its peers in the big-budget space; the world feels motivated and alive, rather than existing merely to facilitate gameplay.
The fundamental problem lies in the density and frequency of these deliveries. In the early hours of the game, the flow of information feels calibrated—a few logs here and there to establish the stakes, easily consumed in a brief pause before returning to the action. However, as the player pushes deeper into the campaign, the volume of these collectibles spikes dramatically.
In one mid-game sequence set within an expansive underground labyrinth, the game forces a bottleneck. Dylan encounters a series of FBC test sites, each one packed to the brim with text-based lore and audio recordings. They are laid out in such rapid succession that it creates a sense of narrative exhaustion. No sooner does a player finish absorbing the contents of one file than they are greeted by another, creating a "lore treadmill" that disrupts the kinetic energy of the game’s combat-heavy design.
Audio Logs and the Friction of Gameplay
The frustration is compounded by how Control Resonant handles its audio logs. In an effort to keep the game moving, the developers opted to have these logs autoplay upon collection, theoretically allowing the player to continue moving through the environment while absorbing the story. In practice, however, this creates a significant point of friction.
These audio clips are programmed to stop abruptly if the player triggers a scripted story event or enters a dialogue-heavy cutscene. Because these narrative triggers are often placed in close proximity to where the player finds the collectibles, it is incredibly easy to accidentally cut off a piece of exposition by simply walking ten feet forward. This forces the player to open the game’s menu, navigate to the log, and manually restart it, effectively turning a "fluid" experience into a chore. To truly listen to the story, the player is often forced to stand completely still in the middle of a dangerous, monster-infested zone, completely breaking the immersion that the developers were clearly trying to preserve.
A Shift in Focus
Beyond the technical hurdles, there is a question of thematic consistency. In the original Control, the abundance of paperwork made sense. The game was essentially a workplace drama set inside a government office building; finding classified secrets scattered across a desk or an archive room felt like part of the job. It painted a vivid picture of an agency that was perhaps too comfortable with, or too overwhelmed by, the paranormal.
Control Resonant takes a different narrative path. The heart of this sequel lies in the personal, intimate story between the siblings, Jesse and Dylan Faden. When the game floods the player with disparate, disconnected pieces of FBC lore, it occasionally distracts from that core emotional hook. The sprawling, high-concept worldbuilding, while impressive in isolation, sometimes feels at odds with the more grounded, character-driven journey of the protagonists.
The Industry-Wide "Lore Flood"
This is not a criticism unique to Remedy Entertainment. The "lore flood" has become a fashionable, almost expected design choice in modern action games. From the intricate, sprawling backstories found in compact titles like Pragmata to the sheer volume of world-filling documents in massive open-world games like The Blood of Dawnwalker, developers seem increasingly committed to telling stories through text.
When implemented with restraint, this approach adds texture and color to a digital world, making it feel truly lived-in. The Resident Evil series remains the gold standard for this, using files to build dread and clarify context without ever forcing the player to stop playing for extended periods. Conversely, games like Marvel’s Wolverine have been criticized for forcing players to stand in place, listening to tape recorders or reading digital screens, while the action grinds to a total halt. This method of delivery is rarely the most exciting way to engage an audience, especially in titles that emphasize fluid movement and high-stakes combat.
Less Is Often More
The desire for deep worldbuilding is commendable, but there are other, more integrated ways to achieve it. Environmental design—the ability to look at a room and intuitively understand what happened there—is a powerful tool that often requires no text at all. It allows the player to become a participant in the storytelling process rather than a passive recipient of lore dumps.
There is a lesson to be found in the real-world Manhattan that Control Resonant draws upon for its setting. One can walk down a street, stumble upon a bizarre piece of street art or an unexplained architectural anomaly, and walk away with a lingering sense of mystery. Those unsolved riddles often leave a deeper, more lasting impact than a document that spells out the entire history of an object or location.
Control Resonant is a remarkable achievement in terms of atmosphere and creative ambition, and its minor issues with pacing do not diminish the overall quality of the experience. The lore is optional, and players can engage with it at their own pace if they choose. However, for a studio as talented as Remedy, the real challenge moving forward may not be how much story they can write, but how much they can trust their players to discover on their own. In the future, perhaps the most powerful narrative choice will be to simply say less, and let the world speak for itself.
