Control Resonant Beginner Guide: Starting Your Journey as Dylan Faden
So you just booted up Control Resonant for the first time and the opening cutscene hits you with Dylan Faden waking up in FBC confinement, seven years after the events of the first game. Manhattan is gone. Well, not gone. Worse. It's been swallowed by something called the Pattern and now the streets fold into themselves and buildings breathe. Welcome to Remedy's nightmare.
I spent my first two hours just walking around the opening zone because honestly, the visual design is that good. But you're here for practical advice, so let me give you the stuff I wish someone told me before I started.
The Aberrant Is Your Everything
Dylan's weapon isn't a gun. It's called the Aberrant and it's a living weapon that shifts between five forms: hammer, dual blades, scythe, fists, and a whip. You don't unlock all five at the start. You get hammer and fists in the prologue and the rest come later, mostly from Resonant boss kills.
The hammer form is your starter and it's deceptively good. Big damage, wide sweeps, and the charged ground slam staggers most early enemies in one hit. Don't sleep on it just because it's the first thing you get. I made that mistake, switched to dual blades as soon as I unlocked them, and got absolutely wrecked by the first Resonant because I hadn't learned enemy patterns yet.
Here's a thing the game doesn't tell you: you can switch weapon forms mid-combo. Start a hammer swing, hit the form-switch button before the animation ends, and you'll flow directly into a dual blade flurry. The timing is tight but once you get it, combat opens up completely. More on that in the combat section.
Reach and Shift: Your Movement Tools
You get two traversal abilities early on. Reach is a short-range teleport that Dylan inherited from, well, his connection to Polaris and the Board. It's not just for getting around. You can Reach through enemy projectiles if you time it right, and some environmental hazards are clearly designed with Reach in mind.
Shift is weirder. It lets you redirect gravity so you can walk on walls and ceilings. Manhattan in this game is vertical in ways that mess with your head. Streets tilt ninety degrees, skyscrapers fold sideways, and there are entire combat arenas where the floor is optional. Learning to use Shift offensively, like dropping off a ceiling into a hammer slam, takes practice but it's where the combat starts feeling like something special.
One thing I noticed: the game never explicitly teaches you that Shift can cancel out of stun animations. If an enemy knocks you back, hitting Shift mid-air will reorient your gravity and let you land on a wall instead of ragdolling into a pit. It's saved me more times than I can count.
Your First Talents
The Talent system is where the RPG side of Control Resonant lives. You earn Talent points from leveling up and from defeating Resonant bosses, and you spend them across several trees that govern melee damage, traversal efficiency, Aberrant form bonuses, and survivability.
For your first five hours, I'd put points into three things. First, the talent that reduces the cooldown on weapon form switching. It's in the Aberrant tree, near the top left. Being able to chain forms faster means more damage and more survivability. Second, put at least one point into the health-on-kill talent in the Survival tree. The game is stingy with healing items in the early zones and you'll need the sustain. Third, grab the Reach distance upgrade. The base teleport range feels restrictive and the upgraded version lets you cross gaps that would otherwise require tedious wall-walking detours.
Don't spread your points thin across every tree. The mid-game expects you to have at least one specialization. You can respec later but it costs a rare item called Pattern Residue and you won't find much of that until the second half of the game.
Artifacts Are Not Optional
Artifacts are equipable items that modify your stats and sometimes add passive effects. You have limited slots, so you can't just equip everything you find. Early game, prioritize anything that increases Aberrant damage or reduces ability cooldowns. There's an Artifact called the FBC Duty Badge that drops from a side mission in the opening zone and it gives a flat 8% damage bonus to every weapon form. I used it for most of my first playthrough.
The key thing with Artifacts is that their effects stack multiplicatively with Talent bonuses, not additively. What this means in practice: a Talent that gives 10% hammer damage and an Artifact that gives 10% hammer damage don't give you 20%. They give you 21%. It doesn't sound like much but by late game, stacking multiplicative bonuses is how you hit the damage numbers that make New Game Plus feel like a power fantasy.
Early Zone Priorities
The first zone is a distorted version of Lower Manhattan. The FBC field office is your hub, such as it is. There's a vendor there who sells basic Artifacts and a workbench where you can upgrade Aberrant forms using materials you find scattered around.
Before you push the main story past the first Resonant fight, do every side mission in the zone. There are three of them and they reward you with the FBC Duty Badge I mentioned, a Talent point, and an Aberrant upgrade material that's otherwise hard to find until much later.
Also: read the collectible documents. I know, I know, nobody reads lore pickups. But Remedy put actual mechanical hints in some of these. One document in the FBC field office mentions that Resonant enemies are vulnerable to the weapon form that matches their Pattern alignment. It's a throwaway line but it's basically telling you which form to use against each boss, and the game never puts this information anywhere else.
Settings Worth Changing
A quick note on settings before I wrap up. If you're on PC with an RTX card, enable DLSS 4.5 and RTX Mega Geometry. The Northlight Engine in this game is doing things with path tracing that I haven't seen anywhere else and the performance hit is surprisingly manageable. If you're on console, switch to performance mode. The 60fps makes a real difference for the parry timing and weapon form switching. Also turn off motion blur. Always turn off motion blur.
The game launches September 24, 2026 on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and macOS. No last-gen console versions, which is probably for the best given what the Northlight Engine is doing under the hood.