Hi everyone. I’m Sergey, Lead Gameplay Designer on CONTROL Resonant. We’re getting really close to our September 24 launch, and the team here in Espoo (and Stockholm) is incredibly excited to finally share what we’ve been building.
If you’ve followed our gameplay trailers, you know Resonant marks a massive shift from the original CONTROL. We’ve traded the shifting, brutalist architecture of the Oldest House for the open, paranaturally warped streets of Manhattan. We’ve also swapped Jesse’s gunplay for Dylan’s shapeshifting melee weapon, the Aberrant.
Switching to a melee-focused action-RPG meant rethinking our combat loop from the ground up. You’re up close and personal with devastating extradimensional entities this time around. Surviving requires reading enemy animations, managing staggers and status effects, and nailing your dodges. Naturally, a new combat system brings a new learning curve.
Moving Beyond Blunt Instruments
Historically, difficulty in action games is handled with blunt instruments. Global modifiers - usually labeled Easy, Normal, and Hard - often just tweak enemy health pools and damage output under the hood. While that technically works, it can completely undermine the meticulous tuning of a combat system. Nobody likes fighting a damage sponge unless they’re doing the dishes, and lowering enemy health across the board can make your progression feel unearned.
Instead of a single difficulty toggle, we wanted to hand you a granular control panel. We recognize that players have vastly different needs and constraints. A player with motor control difficulties might find standard dodge timings impossible but have no problem managing the cognitive load of a complex resource economy. By exposing individual gameplay variables to you, we let you isolate the specific mechanic causing problems and adjust it without necessarily changing everything else.
A Granular Approach
CONTROL Resonant’s Assist Mode is a suite of customizable options. If you are getting overwhelmed by enemies swarming you from off-screen, you can turn down Enemy Aggression. Having trouble reading the wind-up on a boss's attack? You can widen the Perfect Dodge Window or lower the Enemy Projectile Speed. We spend weeks arguing internally about the exact duration, down to a frame, of a standard dodge window - usually over far too much coffee - but realistically, human reflexes vary wildly.
We also completely broke down the damage economy. You can independently tweak your Incoming Damage, your Outgoing Damage, and your Outgoing Falter (how fast you break an enemy's posture). If managing Dylan’s supernatural abilities is eating up your cognitive load during a chaotic fight, you can boost your Power Recovery Speed or turn up the Enhanced Melee Magnetizing so you don't have to worry quite as much about positioning.
And if you just want to explore Manhattan and experience the narrative without the stress, the classics are back: Immortality, One-Hit Kills, and our newest addition, One-Hit Falters.
The idea is to let you change the specific things that are getting in your way, rather than forcing you to choose an overall difficulty that changes the entire game.
Try It First
One thing we deliberately avoided was putting these Assist Mode settings up front before you even start your first playthrough. Every game is different, and you haven't played Resonant yet. Forcing you to make decisions about mechanics you haven't even interacted with doesn't make a lot of sense.
We really want you to try the game first. You can enable and disable Assist Mode in the settings at any point during gameplay. This encourages you to try the intended experience right out of the gate, get a feel for the rhythm of the combat, and then keep adjusting the sliders as you see fit later on.
To make things a bit less overwhelming, we’ve also authored a few baselines based on how different groups in the studio like to play. You can pick an Assist Mode Preset and fine-tune individual sliders from there.
Turning the Dials Both Ways
Here is the biggest change from the first game: you can now use Assist Mode to make the game harder.
We know a lot of action-RPG fans out there are actively looking for pain. In the original CONTROL, the sliders only allowed you to decrease the challenge. In Resonant, they go both ways. If you think the base game is too forgiving, you can crank up enemy aggression, shrink your perfect dodge window down to a few frames, and increase incoming damage until every single world encounter is a life-or-death nail-biter. You have complete control over the friction.
More Ways to Make the Game Your Own
Assist Mode is only one part of our approach to accessibility in CONTROL Resonant. We’ve also added options across the game to give you more control over how you interact with it.
On the Gameplay side, you can change actions from hold to toggle, remap controls for both controller and mouse and keyboard, and, of course, customize the individual Assist Mode settings.
For Graphics, you can disable effects such as motion blur, depth of field, lens distortion, film grain, and vignetting. These options let you adjust the presentation to suit your preferences and make the image more comfortable to play with.
We’ve also included separate volume sliders for audio, as well as a Hyperacusis Filter for players who are sensitive to certain sounds.
The Interface offers further customization. You can adjust subtitle size and backgrounds, display speaker names, use a localized overlay, and enable a color-blind mode for the interface. You can also hide individual HUD elements if you prefer a cleaner screen.
We’ve paid particular attention to movement as well. If you’re sensitive to motion, Shift Tunneling can help reduce the effects of rapid movement when using Shift.
Finally, you can independently invert the horizontal and vertical axes for both mouse and controller.
These options might seem like small things individually, but accessibility isn’t one-size-fits-all. Sometimes a single setting can make the difference between a game feeling uncomfortable and a game feeling right.
The Intended Experience
We talk a lot internally about designer intent. We do have a meticulously crafted, intended experience for CONTROL Resonant. It's balanced to be tense, demanding, and rewarding.
However, our philosophy is straightforward: if you run into a wall and the friction becomes too much, we would much rather you tweak the rules to overcome it than put the controller down and stop playing. Your time is valuable, and there’s no single right way to experience the game. Because of that, we absolutely do not gate any trophies or achievements behind these settings. Play the game exactly how you need to.
We can’t wait for you to get your hands on the Aberrant when CONTROL Resonant launches on September 24.
See you in Manhattan.
Sergey Mohov, Lead Gameplay Designer, Remedy Entertainment