Control Resonant First Impressions: Inside Remedy’s Most Ambitious Game Yet, Running Full Throttle on the RTX 5090

After seven years of near-silence punctuated only by cryptic teases, Remedy Entertainment’s Control Resonant has finally landed in reviewers’ hands, and having spent extensive hours with the game running at native 4K ultrawide on an RTX 5090, it’s safe to say this is one of the most technically staggering and creatively unhinged sequels of the year. What follows is a deep, detailed first-hand account of what it’s like to actually play Control Resonant right now, how it performs, what it demands from your hardware, and why Remedy’s decision to take seven years on this project is starting to make a lot of sense.

What Exactly Is Control Resonant?

For anyone coming in fresh, Control Resonant is a third-person action RPG set in an open-ended, modern-day version of Manhattan, New York City, where a supernatural crisis has broken containment and spilled out into the streets. Unlike the original Control, which largely confined its brutalist weirdness to the walls of the Federal Bureau of Control’s Oldest House, this sequel throws players directly into a city grappling with reality-warping phenomena in full public view — abandoned cars, empty streets, and bodies frozen mid-collapse are just the opening notes of a much stranger symphony.

Players step into the shoes of Dylan Faden, described by Remedy as “an unexpected hero looking for redemption.” Long-time fans of the franchise will recognize the name immediately, and without spoiling anything, his presence alone signals that Control Resonant is deeply invested in expanding the emotional and narrative stakes of this universe rather than simply recycling the format of the first game. The core gameplay loop mixes melee combat, paranatural abilities, and monster-hunting in a way that feels both familiar to Control veterans and meaningfully evolved for this sequel.

Scope, Length, and Structure: This Is a Genuinely Massive Game

One of the most striking revelations from Remedy’s own official review materials is just how much content Control Resonant actually contains. According to the developer, a straightforward playthrough of the main story will take between 27 and 30-plus hours, which already positions this as a significantly meatier experience than the original Control’s more compact runtime. For players chasing full completion — every side quest, every Dimensional Fault, every optional Resonant encounter — Remedy pegs that number at a hefty 40 to 50 hours.

That completionist run isn’t padding for padding’s sake either. Side quests apparently hand out valuable upgrade materials and, according to the developers themselves, “offer some of the more out-there story moments,” which for a franchise built on Twin Peaks-esque strangeness and bureaucratic horror is a genuinely exciting promise. Structurally, progression revolves around two core systems: Dimensional Faults, which grant Dylan new movement abilities, and defeating Resonants, which unlock new paranatural combat powers. Remedy is explicit that skipping these optional fights and traversal challenges makes the main campaign meaningfully harder, which suggests a level of systemic depth well beyond a simple linear power curve.

Practically speaking, this means exploration isn’t just flavor — it’s mechanically load-bearing. Fast-travel doors scattered throughout the world need to be manually discovered and unlocked, vendor trucks stationed in each zone offer useful (but deliberately not game-breaking) resources, and a central hub area called The Gap serves as the primary location for unlocking new skills, upgrading Dylan’s Aberrant, and crafting Artifacts. The developers themselves flag The Gap as a location worth visiting regularly, which tracks with how progression-driven the entire experience feels even in these early hours.

The Power Level System and Combat Philosophy

Combat in Control Resonant is tied directly to a Power Level system that combines Dylan’s personal ability upgrades with the strength of his Aberrant. Enemies display a number above their health bar indicating the recommended power level to fight them comfortably, and matching or exceeding that number is clearly Remedy’s intended difficulty curve. It’s a smart, transparent way of communicating challenge without resorting to vague difficulty labels, and in practice it makes engaging with side content feel purposeful rather than optional busywork.

For players who want to experience the story without fighting the combat curve, Remedy has built in a full Assist Mode accessible from the options menu. This isn’t a token “easy mode” either — it offers granular control over power recovery speed, incoming and outgoing damage, outgoing falter, perfect dodge windows, enemy projectile speed, melee magnetizing, immortality, one-hit kills, and even one-hit falters, all independently adjustable. Crucially, Remedy confirms there’s no penalty for using Assist Mode: Trophies and Achievements remain fully unlockable regardless of how these sliders are set. It’s a refreshingly modern, judgment-free approach to accessibility in a game this mechanically demanding.

Test Config Specifications:

• Monitor: MSI MAG342CQR E2 Curved Gaming Monitor
• Motherboard: MSI PRO Z890-S WIFI Motherboard
• CPU: Intel Core Ultra 7 265K
• RAM: 32GB (2X16) Corsair Vengeance Performance DDR5 Memory
• Primary SSD: Western Digital SN850 500GB PCIe Gen 4 SSD
• Secondary/Game SSD: 480GB Crucial SATA SSD, WD Green 960GB SATA SSD
• Power Supply: Antec HCG-1000-EXTREME PSU
• GPU: INNO3D GeForce RTX 5090 X3 OC
• CPU Cooler: DEEPCOOL GAMMAXX L360 ARGB
• Cabinet: MSI MAG PANO 130R PZ 
• OS: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro

Running Control Resonant on the RTX 5090: The Real Performance Story

This is where things get genuinely exciting from a technical standpoint. Testing was done at native 4K ultrawide resolution with every graphics setting maxed to Ultra, including Ultra Ray Tracing, and the results paint a clear picture of just how demanding — and how rewarding — this game is to run properly.

At native resolution with Ultra Ray Tracing engaged, the RTX 5090 holds a steady 60-70 FPS through everything from quiet exploration sequences to chaotic paranatural combat encounters involving destructible environments and dense particle effects. That’s a genuinely strong result considering how aggressively Control Resonant leans on ray-traced reflections, path-traced lighting, and dynamic shadow work throughout its environments.

But engaging DLSS alongside 4x Frame Generation is where the experience transforms entirely. Frame rates jump to a remarkably smooth ~162 FPS, and — this is the part worth stressing — the perceptible difference in image quality is minimal. Fine details, reflections, and lighting consistency all hold up impressively well even with the frame generation multiplier cranked to its highest setting, which speaks to just how far NVIDIA’s DLSS 4.5 technology has advanced. According to NVIDIA’s own reviewer’s guide for this title, GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs are capable of delivering between 189.5 and 328.1 FPS at 4K using full Path Tracing combined with the complete 6x Multi Frame Generation configuration, numbers that sound almost absurd until you’re actually sitting in front of them during a real play session.

Why Control Resonant Is a Genuine Showcase for DLSS 4.5 and Path Tracing

Remedy has clearly built Control Resonant, powered by the studio’s proprietary Northlight engine, as a technical showcase as much as a narrative one. The game supports full Path Tracing, which follows light through multiple bounces across a scene for far more consistent direct and indirect illumination than traditional rasterized lighting. In practice, this shows up most obviously in three areas: path-traced reflections that capture environmental detail even outside the camera’s direct view (car bodies, wet streets, and glass storefronts all pick up dramatically more accurate detail), path-traced indoor lighting that lets shadows and light transport behave naturally around office furniture and interior architecture, and path-traced shadows that respond dynamically to the size, position, and direction of every light source in a scene.

Complementing this is NVIDIA DLSS 4.5, which introduces a second-generation transformer model unifying denoising and Super Resolution into a single AI network. This is a meaningful architectural shift from earlier DLSS versions — rather than treating upscaling and ray-reconstruction as separate processes, DLSS 4.5 analyzes both temporal and spatial engine data simultaneously to reconstruct sharper, more temporally stable, higher-fidelity frames. The improvement is most visible in exactly the scenarios that tend to break older upscaling solutions: fine geometry, reflective surfaces, disoccluded areas revealed by camera movement, moving light sources, and fast camera pans. During hands-on testing, none of these trouble spots produced the ghosting or smearing artifacts that older DLSS implementations were sometimes known for.

Control Resonant: Platform Availability, Release Dates, and Pricing

Control Resonant releases digitally on September 24th, with physical editions following on October 15th. The game is available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via both Steam and the Epic Games Store, with a Mac version confirmed to arrive later in the year. Pricing is set at $59.99 / €59.99 / £49.99 for the Standard Edition, with a Digital Deluxe Edition available at $69.99 / €69.99 / £59.99 (regional pricing may vary). The game is published and developed entirely in-house by Remedy Entertainment.

Console Performance Modes: What PS5 and Xbox Players Can Expect

For console players wondering how Control Resonant scales across hardware, Remedy’s technical documentation lays out a detailed breakdown of available modes:

PlayStation 5 owners also get DualSense haptic feedback support, full 3D Audio, and an Activities system that tracks progress across Dylan’s main story and Resonant side-quests directly through the console UI, with Game Help support arriving post-launch.

PC Requirements: What You Actually Need to Run This

For PC players plotting their upgrade path, Remedy’s requirements chart is refreshingly granular, breaking things down not just by standard presets but by ray-tracing tiers as well:

Across all tiers, Remedy recommends 16GB of system RAM, Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit), and a hefty 120GB of SSD storage. On the software side, the PC version supports NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 and AMD FSR 4.1 upscaling and frame generation, full ray tracing and path tracing, uncapped framerates, DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction, and native HDR and ultra-wide display support — the last of which, having tested it extensively, genuinely transforms how immersive the game’s environments feel compared to a standard 16:9 setup.

Day-One Build Quality and What’s Being Patched

According to Remedy’s own review code notes (covering PS5 build 01.200.00, Xbox 1.20.0, and PC 1.2.3.0), what press and early players are experiencing is essentially the full day-one experience, not a rough pre-release build. The studio has confirmed a patch landing prior to the embargo lift that will add final localized subtitles for roughly 300 lines of dialogue (a tiny fraction of the game’s total of over 15,000 voice lines), fine-tune localization subtitle timing, brighten some of the game’s darker areas slightly, apply targeted performance improvements in specific problem spots, and fix a broad range of smaller bugs. Remedy has also set up a dedicated feedback channel for reviewers encountering issues, underscoring just how actively the studio is monitoring launch-week stability for a game of this scale.

How It Actually Feels to Play

All the specs and charts aside, the thing that stands out most after real hands-on time is how directly that performance ceiling translates into feel. Control Resonant’s combat is fast, chaotic, and constantly moving — Dylan’s paranatural abilities send debris flying, enemies falter and stagger with heavy visual feedback, and the camera is rarely still for long. Running at a locked ~162 FPS with DLSS and 4x Frame Generation active makes every dodge, every Launch ability, and every burst of movement feel instantaneous rather than floaty, and scenes that would visibly stutter on lesser hardware stayed completely smooth throughout testing, even during the game’s more surreal, reality-bending sequences.

The curved ultrawide aspect ratio adds another layer entirely. Control Resonant’s environments — rain-slicked Manhattan streets, the oppressive brutalist geometry of the Oldest House, and the shifting, non-Euclidean spaces the story ventures into — are clearly composed with widescreen framing in mind, and the additional horizontal field of view makes both exploration and combat encounters feel substantially more immersive than they would on a standard 16:9 monitor.

Control Resonant: Early Verdict

Based on extensive first-hand impressions, Control Resonant looks and plays like Remedy’s most technically ambitious project to date, and pairing it with an RTX 5090 makes unmistakably clear just how far ray-traced, DLSS-powered gaming has come heading into the back half of this decade. Between its expansive 27-to-50-hour scope, its transparent and flexible accessibility options, and a genuinely next-level showcase of path tracing and DLSS 4.5, this is shaping up to be one of the defining technical benchmarks of the year — and that’s before accounting for whatever Remedy’s writers have planned narratively, which, if the original Control is any indication, is bound to get considerably stranger from here.

A full, in-depth review covering the complete story, combat systems, and performance benchmarks across a wider spread of hardware configurations is coming soon.

For more GPU performance breakdowns, AAA technical analysis, and the latest gaming hardware coverage, head to our technology section on TechnoSports, and stay tuned for our full Control Resonant review.