This game is absolute GARBAGE. It's not fun. At all.
Control 1 is one of my favorite games of all time too. Sucks they thought it was best to appease the Reddit-Gamer-Chuds rather than making a good game.
It’s simply bad in every way and only idiot gamer-chuck pretend to like it.
So the first / original Control is vastly superior to Control Resonant because, for all its flaws, it at least understood that a video game should occasionally aspire to be something other than a masturbatory exercise in artistic self-congratulation. The original had a genuinely compelling atmosphere, an intriguing central mystery, and a wonderfully bizarre setting that made exploring the Oldest House feel like uncovering something genuinely strange. Its brutalist architecture actually served a purpose, creating an oppressive, unsettling environment rather than functioning as an enormous concrete monument to the developers’ own perceived brilliance. Even the combat, repetitive as it could become, had a satisfying physicality to it. Hurling office furniture at supernatural assholes was inherently entertaining. The original Control understood the value of spectacle, mystery, and occasionally letting the player have some goddamn fun. Resonant, by comparison, feels like somebody systematically identified everything enjoyable about its predecessor and replaced it with the sort of pretentious, mechanically overwrought horseshit that makes Reddit gamer-chuds ejaculate into their limited-edition collector’s editions.
Where the original Control was a flawed but fascinating game with a distinct creative identity, Resonant feels like a cynical attempt to manufacture a cult masterpiece specifically for terminally online dipshits who believe enjoying deliberately obtuse entertainment makes them intellectually superior. The original didn’t need to constantly remind you how clever it was. Its weirdness emerged naturally from its world, its characters, and its wonderfully deranged supernatural bureaucracy. Resonant takes that same creative DNA and apparently subjects it to seventeen rounds of Reddit-approved intellectual masturbation, producing something that mistakes needless complexity for depth, tedium for sophistication, and player frustration for artistic integrity. It’s the difference between a talented filmmaker making a strange, ambitious movie and a film-school graduate spending three hours explaining why his footage of a slowly rotating chair represents the existential collapse of Western civilization. The original Control was weird because it had interesting ideas. Resonant is weird because it desperately wants you to think it has interesting ideas. One is a memorable supernatural action game. The other is a fucking personality test for people who describe themselves as connoisseurs of interactive media without the slightest trace of embarrassment.
Wow, well....that was a whole lot of words to say absolutely nothing lol.
If you strip away all the crying about "Reddit-chuds" and "masturbatory metaphors" your argument is basically just the original Control was weird and fun, while Resonant is pretentious and unfun. Okay, fair enough....but you never actually explain what Resonant actually DOES that makes it pretentious. Like you didn't even provide a single example
You keep saying it mistakes complexity for depth, tedium for sophistication, and frustration for artistic integrity, but where are you getting any of this from? Is it a specific mechanic, a certain scene, some corny dialogue or a story decision that makes no sense?
Instead you spent like three paragraphs explaining how the developers supposedly think they're smarter than everyone else but just double down by calling it pretentious in increasingly elaborate ways and expect all your superfluous insults to actually carry the argument.
It's funny because you're actually doing the exact thing you're accusing the developers of doing....writing a bunch of shit about how something is trying too hard to seem intelligent, without giving anyone a concrete example of what you're talking about.
128
u/warriorsam9 11h ago
Control resonant right now I think but it's really hard to chose. What a year!