Control Resonant Composer Says He Avoided Re-Doing Inception, Calls Exit From The Oldest House a Relief

Control Resonant takes place in a warped Manhattan, a new setting compared with the first game's interior location, The Oldest House. The sequel offers more open-world exploration and pushes players toward side content alongside the main story. Its surreal art style and gravity-defying buildings have been compared to Inception, but Alanko said copying the film would have diminished Remedy's storytelling. "I tried not to re-do Inception," he said. "That would've been a tad tacky and would have reduced Remedy's concept to something less worthwhile. I don't personally believe in replicating or redoing, although in some rare cases an homage is fitting, actually, but such cases are indeed very few."

He added that it was "a great relief that we exited The Oldest House and used the nightmarish Manhattan-like surroundings for the game setting." The scale of the buildings became a source of inspiration, especially for depicting Dylan within such a huge world. "It's beautiful, epic, majestic even," Alanko said. "There's so much more to the scenery than just the buildings; it's about the scale and the feeling, feeling small and replaceable... how would you represent Dylan there so that one felt he'd be irreplaceable? That was the source of the backbone of Dylan-related pieces in the game."

Alanko said that "accentuating Dylan's starting point was an origin point for conceptualizing the music and among the first things I did." He described Dylan as "a blank slate, a tabula rasa," who is "to recover and become first a human, then something else." That idea shaped the music, he said: "Hence the descending nature of the harmony of 'Tabula Rasa' and the clangorous percussion — it's an introduction to Dylan and Hedron, in simple terms, a little like a concert overture."

He also said the undulating noisy sounds toward the end could represent breathing, or breathing again after a coma, for both the protagonist and the antagonist. "I wanted to express the fragility and how brittle Dylan actually was, from how little he started, and where he ended up," Alanko said.

Control Resonant is playable now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Series S, and PC.

Editor's Summary Petri Alanko said Control Resonant's move from The Oldest House to a nightmarish Manhattan gave the soundtrack a new scale and a focus on Dylan, while he avoided imitating Inception. He described Dylan as a blank slate and said the harmony of "Tabula Rasa" reflects the character's fragility and recovery. Control Resonant is available now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Series S, and PC.