Control Resonant Has a Secret Weapon in the GOTY Race

In 2019, the first Control received an amazing eight nominations, including for Game of the Year, despite only mild acclaim from critics. (It has a Metacritic rating of 82.) It went on to win Best Art Direction. Then, in 2023, Alan Wake 2 converted three of its eight nominations into wins, including in the key Game Direction and Narrative categories.

Remedy’s games are slap-bang in the middle of the Game Awards’ sweet spot: slick, graphically impressive, blockbuster action-adventures made with serious artistic intent. That Remedy makes these games outside the major publisher system only adds to their credibility.

The only thing getting in the way of this narrative for Control Resonant is the game itself. Not that it’s bad; it’s received pretty warm reviews from most, and actually has a better Metacritic rating than the first game, which has gone on to cult acclaim. But there are some loud dissenting voices (including Polygon’s), and even among more positive reviews there’s some dissatisfaction about the series’ perceived move into the more mainstream space of open-world action-RPGs.

Resonant has some mechanical weaknesses and feels safer and more diluted than the first Control — not to mention than the form-breaking Alan Wake 2. On paper, there are some stronger contenders in its genre category, like 007 First Light. Resonant has no hope of acting as a serious spoiler for Grand Theft Auto 6, and I wouldn’t even consider it a lock for a nomination (although I currently have it in our list of front-runners).

But it also has a big advantage: the sentiment toward Remedy. The Finnish studio has a reputation for being talented and cool. It also helps that it’s press-friendly creative director Sam Lake loves to give interviews and pal around with journalists. More than that, though, Remedy is an underdog — arguably, and paradoxically, more so than many much smaller indie outfits.

In particular, there’s a narrative forming that Remedy is in dire financial straits and desperately needs Control Resonant to succeed to insure its future. This has taken hold to the extent that the main game piracy subreddit is full of earnest posts advocating buying the game to support the studio.

It’s true that Remedy is not a money-making powerhouse, and that it was wounded by the failure of a misguided Control spinoff, last year’s multiplayer shooter FBC: Firebreak. But its most recent financial report declared modest profits and did not spell immediate doom and gloom. I would imagine that the in-development remake of the first two Max Payne games, made in collaboration with Rockstar Games, will have a bigger impact on Remedy’s financial future than Control Resonant.

But the story out there is that Remedy is a lone survivor, risking financial ruin to make original, artistically daring big-budget games its own way. The scale of Remedy’s games somehow makes its struggle to make them seem even more heroic than a tiny indie like Yacht Club Games, which really did risk financial ruin to make Mina the Hollower — even if the games are more commercial prospects at the end of the day.

It’s easy to root for Remedy, easy to want the studio to succeed. I think that sentiment extends to the Game Awards jury just as much as it does to reddit pirates, and it might tip some votes in Control Resonant‘s favor. If it gets a GOTY nomination, that will be a big reason why.