Control: Resonant Director Says Skipping Yellow Paint Was a Deliberate Choice

Control: Resonant makes a conspicuous choice in an era when many large-scale games are eager to highlight the correct path: it does not broadly coat its climbable routes, key entrances, and discoveries in bright yellow paint. Director Mikael Kasurinen says that restraint was not accidental. It was a considered part of how Remedy wants players to engage with the sequel's bigger, more exploration-driven world.

Speaking on the Dropping Frames podcast, Kasurinen described the decision as a way to protect a player's sense of agency. Rather than using highly visible color coding to identify every ladder, doorway, chest, or route forward, Control: Resonant is designed to communicate through elements inside its world. Lighting, environmental objects, level composition, and other contextual details are intended to point players in useful directions without turning the act of navigation into a sequence of explicit instructions.

That approach may be especially notable because Control: Resonant, now available on PC and consoles, is a substantially larger game than 2019's Control. Remedy has positioned the new entry as an open-world action RPG sequel with a greater emphasis on moving through and investigating a large map. Bigger worlds often create more pressure to make the intended route immediately readable, particularly when players may be returning after time away or attempting to reach a specific objective quickly. Kasurinen's comments suggest that Remedy saw the potential uncertainty of exploration as central to the experience, rather than simply a problem to eliminate.

Guidance without giving away the answer

The yellow-paint conversation has become a familiar one among game players and developers. Brightly colored surfaces have frequently been used as a visual shorthand for interaction: a painted ledge means it can be climbed, a marked doorway signals progress, and conspicuous environmental treatment can funnel players toward the next required encounter. The technique is effective because it makes information instantly legible. It can reduce confusion, limit wasted time, and help ensure that players see expensive handcrafted content.

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But Kasurinen believes the same clarity can undermine the feeling that a player has solved something for themselves. In discussing the subject, he framed strong game design around a balance involving competence, autonomy, and relatedness. For navigation and exploration, autonomy is the key concern. Players should feel they are interpreting what they see, forming an idea, and choosing how to proceed.

His objection is not to guidance in general. Control: Resonant still guides people; it simply attempts to do it less directly. That distinction matters. An open-world game with no readable signals at all can become frustrating or arbitrary. A game with too many overt signals may become mechanically efficient but emotionally flat, with the player following a route that already appears to have been entirely decided on their behalf.

Kasurinen's ideal lies between those extremes. Developers still construct the spaces, establish themes, decide what deserves attention, and shape the route through a game. Yet the final experience should leave room for the player to make sense of that work. When someone notices a useful lighting cue, recognizes the significance of an object in the environment, or takes a chance on an unusual-looking passage, the hope is that the resulting progress feels earned.

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"If you want to get the most out of this world, you have to participate," Kasurinen said, summarizing the philosophy behind the game's exploratory design.

Why uncertainty is part of the intended experience

Kasurinen acknowledged that this design can create a difficult opening for some people. Players may initially find Control: Resonant hard to penetrate, unsure what the game expects of them or where their next meaningful lead is located. In many contemporary games, that kind of early friction would be treated as something to smooth away immediately through stronger HUD directions, map icons, highlighted routes, or unmistakable environmental markers.

For Remedy, however, some degree of uncertainty appears to be an intentional invitation. Kasurinen said he wants players to take part in the work of understanding the world, not remain outside it as passive observers waiting for the game to identify every answer. The process of looking, testing an assumption, getting turned around, and eventually finding a way forward is meant to be part of the game's value.

That is a risky position. Accessibility and clarity are not insignificant concerns, and highly directed navigation can make games easier for a broad range of players to enjoy. Overt traversal markers can be particularly helpful to people who have limited playtime, have difficulty parsing dense visual environments, or simply prefer a faster-moving action experience. Kasurinen openly recognized that refusing to direct players more forcefully can alienate some of them quickly.

Still, he argued that the risk is worthwhile because uncertainty can create a more durable connection between the player and the game. A route that is discovered feels different from one that is merely followed. The player may remember the visual clue that caught their attention, the wrong turn that sent them somewhere unexpected, or the moment when scattered environmental details finally made sense. Those memories are harder to generate when every important interaction is labeled at a glance.

A larger world built for return visits

The director's comments also reveal what Remedy hopes will make Control: Resonant last beyond a first completion. Kasurinen does not want the game to feel like an experience players simply move through by doing everything they are told, then set aside. Instead, he wants the world to encourage second thoughts: questions about alternate choices, missed paths, unexplored areas, and whether another approach might have led somewhere else.

That ambition fits the move from the original Control to an open-world action RPG structure. In a more compact and tightly controlled setting, environmental ambiguity can support tone and mystery. In a larger game, it can potentially foster a longer-running cycle of exploration and discovery. Players who are not certain they have exhausted an area may return later with a new perspective. A place that seemed like background decoration during one visit may prove to be a clue on another.

Kasurinen connected that lingering doubt to real life, where choices often feel meaningful precisely because their outcomes are not completely obvious at the time they are made. The game's goal is not necessarily to make players permanently lost. It is to preserve the productive question of whether they chose well and what else might have been possible.

For players who enjoy taking notes, revisiting locations, and reading environments for subtle information, that philosophy could make Control: Resonant particularly rewarding. Its world is intended to be examined rather than consumed as a chain of highlighted destinations. The act of paying attention is not separate from progress; it is one of the tools progress requires.

The broader yellow-paint debate

Kasurinen's stance arrives amid a wider design debate that often gets reduced to whether yellow paint is good or bad. In practice, the issue is more complicated. Visual signposting is a language, and its usefulness depends on the type of game, its camera, its pacing, its art direction, and the audience it hopes to reach. A demanding platforming sequence may need immediate readable signals. A horror game may use ambiguity to make spaces unsettling. An open-world RPG may need to balance freedom with enough clarity that players understand its core systems.

What Control: Resonant is rejecting is not communication itself, but a very explicit form of it. Remedy is betting that environmental guidance can be strong enough to support exploration without feeling like a command. The game's level design must therefore carry more responsibility. Lighting needs to draw attention naturally. Props need to feel meaningful without appearing artificially placed. Paths need to be inviting without becoming visually obvious in a way that breaks immersion.

That is a demanding target, particularly in a game that combines action RPG systems with a broad explorable setting. If the clues are too subtle, players may conclude the game is withholding information rather than encouraging observation. If they are too conspicuous, the no-yellow-paint principle becomes largely cosmetic. The success of the approach will depend on how consistently the world teaches players what to look for and whether discoveries feel logical in retrospect.

Participation is the point

Ultimately, Kasurinen's explanation is a statement about the relationship between designer and player. Remedy has crafted the world and placed the information needed to move within it, but it does not want to make every conclusion for the person holding the controller. Control: Resonant asks players to look closely, make their own decisions, and live with a little uncertainty.

That will not be every player's preferred style of open-world design. Some will reasonably want clearer direction, especially when they have limited time or want to focus on combat and story. Others may welcome a game willing to leave them alone long enough to think. Kasurinen's view is that the latter experience can be the one that stays with people: not a journey where they obediently followed the indicators, but one where they felt they truly found their own way.