Control Resonant’s Dylan Faden inside an in-game art gallery featuring the work of Rathin Ghosh. Screenshot: Remedy Entertainment, captured by Game File
In the weird version of Manhattan depicted in the recently released video game Control Resonant, around the corner from buildings besieged by flying red monsters, on city blocks that are sometimes mirrored in the sky, there are some ordinary places.
There’s a chain of gyms called Pulse Fitness and some coffee shops operating under the banner Atlantis.
Explorers of the game’s supernaturally-ravaged New York City will also find several art galleries. Each is a fully modeled interior space for players to walk through. They’re franchised, too, all called Könstig, which is almost the Swedish word for “strange.”
One gallery exhibits colorful paintings of women, their skin marked with stripes. Another has photographs of twisted, gnarled trees.
There’s no fighting in the art galleries, no red Hiss monsters to worry about. Some of the galleries contain boxes filled with power-ups for Dylan Faden, the player’s brooding and battle-ready protagonist. One of them has a puzzle Dylan needs to solve.
But the art galleties mainly function like their counterparts in the real Manhattan: as an exhibition space for art.
The art is real.
Some of it was made by the artists at the game’s Finnish development studio, Remedy Entertainment.
A lot of it, I was delighted to recently learn, was made by their parents.