I’ve been playing a lot of Control Resonant recently, and it’s very, very good. But if I had to choose my favorite part of Remedy’s weird open-world action game, I would easily pick, without any hesitation, the deep and strange voice of the omnipresent supernatural entity known as The Board that functions as your spooky boss. That shit is rad, man.
A little context: In Control Resonant you play as Dylan Faden, the supernaturally gifted brother of Jesse Faden, the main character from the first game. For various reasons, Dylan has found himself in possession of a powerful artifact that is essentially a shapeshifting rod that he can use to beat nasty monsters to death. But this strange rod is also seemingly connected to The Board, a mysterious and otherworldly entity that bossed his sister around in the last game and is now his handler/boss/guardian/benefactor in Resonant.
And this is what The Board sounds like in Control Resonant whenever it talks to Dylan:
Fucking rad. The Board sounds like a demonic burp combined with a vuvuzela from hell being played underwater. I’ve been mostly playing Resonant with fancy headphones, and whenever The Board pipes up, it shakes my brain in a way that is both unnerving and oddly satisfying.
The Board also speaks briefly during combat, after you do a cool execution. It almost sounds like The Board is saying “COMBO” in its deeply unnatural, ear-shaking tone. I love it. Every single time The Board says “COMBO” or whatever during a fight, I smile.
I’m not the only person who loves The Board’s new voice. (It didn’t sound anything like this in 2019’s Control.) Plenty of people online have praised the strangely deep and menacing pops and groans it makes online. Former Kotaku video guru and current Aftermath writer Chris Person made one of my favorite pieces of Board appreciation media so far with this Simpsons mash-up:
Anyway, I love The Board so much. Maybe it’s an evil entity that will eventually wipe out humanity? That’s possible. I’ve not completed the game, and this is the Control universe. Things get dark and weird. But even if The Board is vile and dangerous, I don’t care because it sounds so damn cool. I mean, listen to it sing. How could I be mad at it?
