Note: Some spoilers for Control Resonant’s “Recursions and Iterations” mission follow.
One of Control Resonant’s most memorable missions involves time travel — kind of. There are certainly multiple timelines intersecting, or maybe overlapping, or maybe running in parallel. As protagonist Dylan Faden, you meet some of the researchers who are trapped in and investigating these timeline anomalies. Dylan’s first encounter with the researchers is somehow not the researchers’ first time meeting Dylan. But before we can learn much more, time glitches out, and they all turn up dead.
That seems to be the end result in every timeline Dylan comes across, even toward the end of the mission. What does it all mean for this timeline, the one we’re playing? Did the act of tracking down the researchers change our timeline? Are we in a different timeline entirely?
I wasn’t sure what to make of it when I finished the mission, and I’m not alone — even the developers at Remedy had trouble keeping track of it all. “I don’t actually remember where we landed on with the writing,” says lead level designer Anne-Marie Grönroos, turning the question over to senior level designer Admir Burnic. “Like, are the researchers even there after the mission is done? Are they still living their life?”
Image: Remedy Entertainment
Burnic isn’t sure, and I tell them I’m not entirely sure, either. But that’s not really the point of the mission. Like many of Remedy’s best sequences, the “Recursions and Iterations” mission is more about the unease of knowing something is wrong but not exactly what it is, the subtle horror of realizing generally what’s been happening but not necessarily why. Maybe the narrative team did establish a canon ending for the researchers and all three of us just missed it, or maybe it was ambiguous on purpose.
“It’s funny, when you’re dealing with this sort of time-travel stuff, timelines, whatever, there’s always this aspect to it where it’s almost illogical,” Burnic says. “So anything kind of goes. I mean, it could be intentional. It could also not be intentional.”
Prepare for (being inspired by) Titanfall.
Toward the end of “Recursions and Iterations,” there’s a mind-bending combat sequence in which a bunch of Dylans, presumably from the other timelines, glitch in to join the fight. Burnic says this was a somewhat late addition inspired by “Effect and Cause,” a mission from Titanfall 2.
There’s this time-travel mission in Titanfall 2. I was really inspired by that. I wanted to do something along those lines, but I was looking for “What’s the Remedy version of it?” And at some point I had this idea of glitches of Dylan showing up executing enemies. I remember it was fairly late in production, so it was a bit risky. I knew I can’t just go and pitch this. I have other stuff to do at the same time. So I was finding something that was relatively easy to do, a way to reuse Dylan’s animations that we already have. So I remember just going to one of our animators and going, “Hey, can you just throw me some of these animations? I have an idea.”
Either way, the storyline was a consistent standout for Remedy’s playtesters, Grönroos and Burnic tell me. What they had to fine-tune — and very intentionally so — was the language and narrative of the physical space. In the final version of the mission, Dylan has to travel between three different research stations in the labyrinthine Underpass, an expanse of floating concrete islands, to search for the researchers. Ambiguity here was going to be a problem.
“In the beginning, it was, like, identical stations, and we would more rely on the narrative content inside of stations to [tell you] what happened there,” Burnic says. In the final version, the stations share the same layout but are in visibly different states of disarray and disrepair. “We found a sort of language we could use. Station A was, ‘They were here for two weeks,’ station B [was], ‘They were here for three months,’ and I think the last one was the extreme one, which was like, ‘Oh, this was 10 years into this.’”
The team used that concept as a guide to visually differentiate each station from the others. “And that came very much from a need,” Grönroos explains. “When we had people playtesting that mission before, they didn’t even know how many stations there were. Like, there were people who thought there’s one station, maybe there’s six stations, who knows, because they look so identical and the environment is not that easy to tell apart, either.”
There were, aptly, a lot of iterations of this, and art was just part of it. One of the biggest changes was mechanical: You need the Reach ability, which allows Dylan to essentially grapple over long distances, to access the Underpass area to begin with. This wasn’t an explicit requirement early on, but it makes the floating islands of the Underpass much easier to navigate. And “it was the navigation issues that were keeping this mission down” during development, Grönroos says.
But Dylan’s abilities presented their own problems. “If I remember correctly, we wanted to have certain beats, certain narrative moments, being represented to you first, and I think one of the biggest difficulties for me especially was that Dylan as a character is so powerful. The gaps he can close with his powers is quite insane, right? And it was so easy to break [the flow],” Burnic says.
“I remember at some point kind of realizing that, however you twist and turn it, you can never really guarantee that a player sees this, and trying to guarantee it will be a bad design because it will be too hand-holdy,” he adds. “It was more like these narrative moments were pieces of the puzzle, almost. So it doesn’t matter which one you get to first, but hopefully the player will be able to put them together once they have all the pieces.”
With a supremely powerful character like Dylan, Burnic says, “you need to lean into it and just design in a way where you can trust the player.” And with multiple timelines involved, seeing certain things out of the intended order wasn’t going to break the overall story of the mission.
I certainly got turned around a few times in the Underpass and doubled back to look for collectibles I might’ve missed. But I didn’t struggle too much, and I understood the story Remedy was trying to tell — maybe not every single detail possible, but the most important beats, and definitely the unsettling, otherworldly mood it created.
That was ultimately the “fragile balance” they had to strike, Grönroos says: trying “to have enough guidance that you understand what you are doing and where you’re supposed to be going” without holding the player’s hand.
“It’s in the DNA of the whole game, really.”
