{"id":1502,"date":"2026-09-26T14:17:50","date_gmt":"2026-09-26T14:17:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/?p=1502"},"modified":"2026-09-26T14:17:50","modified_gmt":"2026-09-26T14:17:50","slug":"when-worldbuilding-becomes-too-much-how-control-resonant-struggles-with-its-own-lore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/?p=1502","title":{"rendered":"When Worldbuilding Becomes Too Much: How Control Resonant Struggles With Its Own Lore"},"content":{"rendered":"

Remedy Entertainment\u2019s 2019 paranatural shooter Control<\/em> established a distinct atmospheric identity that continues to resonate across the video game industry. Its setting, a Brutalist Manhattan office building known as The Oldest House, was meticulously designed and famously littered with paperwork featuring heavy black redactions. These redacted documents offered tantalizing glimpses into the mysterious operations of the Federal Bureau of Control, or explained just enough to deepen the overarching enigma while heightening the player’s sense of paranoia and curiosity. The presentation was so memorable that for many players, seeing blacked-out text instantly evokes the eerie corridors of Remedy\u2019s universe.<\/p>\n

It comes as little surprise, therefore, that Remedy decided to lean heavily into those proven storytelling strengths for its subsequent entry, Control Resonant<\/em>. Although the sequel shifts the action away from the claustrophobic confines of The Oldest House and out onto the Hiss-infected, chaotic streets of Manhattan, protagonist Dylan Faden still encounters a massive quantity of written notes and audio logs left behind in the wake of an apocalyptic event. However, what should stand out as a premier selling point for the sequel ultimately emerges as one of its minor yet persistent pain points: there is simply an overwhelming amount of lore to sift through.<\/p>\n

\"Control<\/figure>\n

This critique is certainly not a knock against the high quality of Remedy\u2019s writing. Every piece of background lore discovered throughout Control Resonant<\/em> maintains top-tier standards of narrative craftsmanship. For instance, something as mechanical as a tuning fork puzzle encountered in a subway station is cleverly elevated by nearby notes that paint a vivid, humorous, and tragic picture of a frustrated research team trying to figure out why they keep inexplicably teleporting around the tracks. These touches ensure that every piece of the game’s world feels narratively motivated rather than inserted merely for the sake of gameplay padding, a quality that frequently places Remedy head and shoulders above many of its peers as a major-budget developer.<\/p>\n

The core issue lies instead in the cadence and volume at which these narrative items are doled out to the player. In the early stages of the game, lore logs appear at a steady, manageable clip. They serve to set the scene effectively without demanding anything more than a quick, brief pause in the action. Unfortunately, the volume and frequency ramp up significantly the deeper the player ventures into the experience. During a mid-game mission set within an underground labyrinth, Dylan discovers multiple Federal Bureau of Control test sites scattered across a surreal, liminal space. Each of these zones is packed to the brim with text and audio logs arranged in close succession. Finishing one piece of text only to walk two steps and immediately trigger another creates a bottleneck of exposition that quickly turns exhausting.<\/p>\n

This pacing problem becomes even more pronounced when dealing with the game’s audio logs. When a player picks up a recorded message, it automatically begins playing without requiring them to navigate away from the gameplay screen into a menu. In theory, this design choice allows players to listen and move simultaneously, avoiding the need to halt every few minutes just to read text. In practice, however, these audio logs will abruptly stop playing if the player triggers nearby story-related audio. Because Control Resonant<\/em> is a dialogue-heavy experience, these narrative triggers are often positioned frustratingly close to where optional audio logs are picked up. Walking just ten feet too far cuts the recording short, forcing the player to head into a menu and manually hit play. For anyone wishing to absorb an audio log in full, standing completely still to ensure the dialogue finishes uninterrupted becomes the only reliable option.<\/p>\n

\"Control<\/figure>\n

While these issues rarely escalate to deal-breakers, they firmly occupy the category of notable design friction. Because all the lore is entirely optional and players can choose whether or not to engage with it, the friction does not break the core game loop. Nevertheless, it highlights a tendency for Resonant<\/em> to rely heavily on a tell-don’t-show approach to storytelling. This stylistic choice frequently disrupts the momentum of a game fundamentally built around fluid movement and frantic action. Furthermore, the sheer glut of loose paperwork feels less narratively harmonious here than it did in the original Control<\/em>. The first game was set inside the administrative headquarters of a secretive government office building, making scattered paperwork an entirely natural part of the environment. Finding sensitive secrets left out on tables reinforced the satirical notion that the Bureau was struggling to keep its house in order. In contrast, Resonant<\/em> shifts its thematic focus away from bureaucratic politics to center more intimately on a sibling relationship between Jesse and Dylan, making the endless piles of office notes feel like a distraction from the emotional core of the narrative.<\/p>\n

The phenomenon of the overwhelming lore flood is by no means exclusive to Remedy Entertainment. It has increasingly become a fashionable design trend across the industry, appearing in everything from compact titles like Pragmata<\/em> to massive open-world epics like The Blood of Dawnwalker<\/em>. When employed sparingly, environmental writing and optional logs can add rich color to a world, making it feel lived-in and authentic, much like the classic approach seen throughout the Resident Evil<\/em> franchise. Yet, in fast-paced action games\u2014such as Marvel\u2019s Wolverine<\/em>, which routinely forces players to halt momentum so that Logan can stand in place and listen to a tape recorder\u2014this approach can easily become a momentum killer, offering a less engaging medium for storytelling within an interactive medium.<\/p>\n

The desire for worldbuilding is not the core of the issue; rather, it is the integration of that worldbuilding directly into the fabric of active play. Trusty environmental design allows players to infer a story organically without having every detail spelled out explicitly. This very style mirrors the reality of exploring a massive, complex urban environment like Manhattan, where stumbling upon bizarre, inexplicable sights leaves lingering, unsolved mysteries that resonate years later. Ultimately, trusting the audience to piece together a narrative with a bit less exposition can yield an even more powerful impact.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Remedy Entertainment\u2019s 2019 paranatural shooter Control established a distinct atmospheric identity that continues to resonate across the video game industry. Its setting, a Brutalist Manhattan office building known as The Oldest House, was meticulously designed and famously littered with paperwork featuring heavy black redactions. These redacted documents offered tantalizing glimpses into the mysterious operations of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1501,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[555],"tags":[188,2618,556,125,2775,434,2619,1743,557,2774],"class_list":["post-1502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gaming-and-esports","tag-becomes","tag-control","tag-esports","tag-gaming","tag-lore","tag-much","tag-resonant","tag-struggles","tag-video-games","tag-worldbuilding"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1502\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}