Arhi Makkonen on designing a moulding and hissing New York for Control Resonant

• Feature
• Interview

Control Resonant seeks to twist NYC into something paranatural while still feeling like The Big Apple.

Lexi Luddy September 10, 2026 2:00 PM Remedy 1

Level design is one of the more undervalued disciplines in triple-A game development. While 2D platformers and action games of the 8- and 16-bit era lived and died by the spaces you moved through, designing spaces you exist in (and directing players through them), can sometimes be forgotten when hyping up cutting-edge graphics, complex combat systems, or engaging with actors’ performances. That doesn’t mean it's no longer important; in fact, what is the point of existing in a game world without, you know, the world?

That is what fascinates me so much about modern level design. For as much as every aspect of game development intersects with another at one point or another, all those Venn Diagrams exist within the biggest circle, which is the world itself. Level design is both bound to and shapes everything from movement, combat, and audio design to art direction, lighting, and progression. That’s why I was so excited to pick the brain of Senior Level Designer at Remedy, Arhi Makkonen, at Gamescom 2026, only a few weeks before Control Resonant released.

Welcome to the big city

Before even getting to the challenge of integrating with other systems, Makkonen and their team first had to find a way to create a world that was identifiably New York, extremely messed up and contorted, but also easily readable for players trying to explore. This was a very different challenge to both the first Control and Alan Wake 2. The Oldest House of the first game was a contained space full of the paranatural and so could contain endless inexplicable geography as long as it maintained the brutalist edge. On the other hand, Alan Wake 2 (for the most part) clearly separated the reality of Bright Falls and the otherworlding Dark Place, so the challenge for Control Resonant was to show the real New York being subsumed by the supernatural.

“That was a huge process.” Explained Makkonen, “So I was designing our zone so that [they are] open-ended structures and [have] big areas… To me, it was super important that it needs to feel like Manhattan. So it has yellow taxis, and it has a feel, but we are not trying to replicate any actual location in the game; it just needs to feel like [New York], and then we add the supernatural, paranatural layer on top of it, which can be anything.

To hear Makkonen tell it, it sounds like Manhattan acted as something of a guiding light that could be warped by the darkness of the paranatural. “It could be mold, or there’s a hissified [environments]... so that’s kind of the interesting part for me. Manhattan is the baseline,” explained Makkonen, “and it’s almost more [of a] kind of [restriction this time] because it needs to have the grid system and all that. So it has been a lot of work to actually make that interesting, because it’s not completely open; there are paths, and we want to guide [player] around and all that.”

Guiding lighting

This is where other disciplines start intersecting with Makkonen and his team. Lighting has always been one of the most versatile tools in the toolbox for designers to help guide players. Need a player to look up at the ceiling? Shine a spotlight up there. Need the player to just walk forward and stop trying to run around an empty valley? Have rays of light cascade in from the mouth of the canyon. As such, the deliberate placement of light sources became such an important role that we gave people who focused on it a title: “Lighting artists.” However, as years have passed by, tech has changed, and prebaked lighting is becoming less emphasized in favour of real-time solutions, particularly through the use of dynamic ray tracing techniques for a more realistic look.

With Control Resonant being something of a graphical showcase, I was curious if the shift towards ray-traced lighting (and simply having to support both ray-traced configurations and non-ray-traced ones) created a challenge for level designers and lighting artists trying to keep players on track. Makkonen explained it as what sounded like a real the more things change, the more they stay the same situation, saying, “Design-wise I would say that we still communicate [in a] similar way with the lighting artists… Communication is super important between the design [and artists], and we need to be saying [a lot of] what we want in the levels…. "But I’m very happy that they are so good at figuring out how the ray tracing and all that goes [in the scene].”

Freedom to float

The player knowing where they are meant to go is all well and good, but getting them to go there is a whole different ballgame. While by the end of the first Control, Jesse could float through all of The Oldest House, she was usually confined by the walls of the building. In Resonant, her brother, Dylan, is similarly inclined to aerial traversal; however, since the game takes place, in large part, on the misshapen streets of Manhattan, the team had to get creative in keeping the player within a reasonable range. Some of this involved working with the narrative team on both pacing and locales, but some of it required a more direct approach.

Makkonen described the basic structure of the game and how that shaped the world, ”So we basically have these more open hubs, and then they are connected [to each other with more linear paths], and when you are inside that bubble, then it’s very open, and then you can go anywhere in there. But… as a designer, I want to have those handcrafted paths, and I want to have things that I know the player is looking at [for] direction.” He continued, “We can have a narrative beat in here… [but] it's super difficult, and then because Dylan is so agile - he can go anywhere - [then] every time we try to block the player, [telling them], ‘Please don't go there. Let’s first [go] on the roof and then on the rooftops.’ That has always been super hard.”

Makkonen describes this process both as a challenge and something that demands close collaboration. With that in mind, I asked him if, as a team lead, he ever struggled with juggling his own team and talking with others, or if Remedy’s flurry of recent releases over the last decade can create a pipeline for that kind of communication. “That is [a] constant challenge, of course,” he said, “and I think that all developers say that the communication is the hardest [part of a project]. Like tech is easy, but then the communication’s always the hardest… But that’s part of the job. Level design is in the middle of all the teams and [trying] to connect everything.”

Dreams and nightmares

The freedom of a world unbound by the laws of reality isn’t all headaches, though. Makkonen just made clear that first a litany of potential issues had to be overcome. “It felt, from the start––to be honest, it felt impossible [at] the start. There were just so many technical problems.” Between Dylan flying, dashing, running on ceilings, and the floor shifting upright at 90 degrees, there was a lot for the team to work out. “Like motion sickness, and navigation and just understanding [the space], but we [put] a lot of effort into making it work, and I think we found a spot where now it just feels natural.”

Makkonen made sure to highlight back when we were discussing lighting that he wasn’t technical lead; however, despite that, he did acknowledge the importance of Remedy’s in-house engine, Northlight, for this sort of iteration and design work. “Yeah, they are basically on the same floor and in the next room, and working with the Northlight [team] and then our gameplay team… that is just like– it’s just constant support with them, and that’s great.

The result of this communal effort is evident in the gameplay I saw at Gamescom: the actual space of a hiss and mould-infested Manhattan, while otherworldly, felt like the city I have visited before. Moreover, some of the slight uncanniness actually really works with Remedy’s continued Finnish lilt on Lynchian tropes.

My main concern is less the atmosphere and moment-to-moment exploration feeling bad – the demo I saw more than assuaged my fears on that front – what I am worried about is the grander exploration that comes with this kind of game. While I loved the first game, very few people would go to bat for that game’s map, and so my deepest hope is that it is easier to track my location compared to everything in Resonnant than it was in that game. Although even saying that has my head spinning trying to figure out how you depict New York folding in on itself and overlapping out of reality, in a 2D map. Thankfully, there isn’t long to wait to find out if Remedy cracked that problem too, so I might just have to interview Makkonen again after the game releases to hear the story behind that design conundrum too.

Control Resonant is releasing on September 24th on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X│S. This interview was conducted on-site at Gamescom 2026.

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Lexi Luddy Contributing Editor

Lex Luddy is a freelance writer and journalist. She has written for Vice, Fanbyte, PLAY Magazine, Gayming Magazine, Push Square, startmenu and more. She can be found on BlueSky @basicallilexi.bsky.social talking about Like A Dragon, Kirby, and queer representation in media.

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