Before you keep reading just know I’ll be spoiling the ending. It’s 2026 and we live in hell so if the worst thing that happens to you today is hearing how a video game ends, count yourself lucky. Now scram, kid. The adults are talking. 

Control and Control Resonant are identity stories. And there’s nothing a transsexual loves more than a story about the annihilating force of self. (Hi, it’s me, I’m the transsexual.) Moment to moment, Control Resonant is a very conventional game, but we’re not gonna be talking about mechanics. Go watch a Let’s Play if you wanna see the Devil May Cry of it all. We’re gonna get weird, because weird is what I do and I know that’s what you’re here for. Perv.

Control is Jesse’s story about the healing power of a cool leather jacket and breaking shit that deserves to be broken. Self-authorship by way of telekinetic super-violence. Resonant is Dylan’s story of breaking shit — himself included — because he’s too afraid of what it might mean if he didn’t. Dylan’s a fucked up kid and I got a soft spot for fucked up kids and I’ve never been shy about why that is.

Dylan is, like a lot of fucked up kids, self-destructive. And what is self-destruction if not a pursuit of self. Dylan and I are both a little clueless on that one. The self part. I’m not gonna get all Virginia Woolf about it. I just don’t think I know how to see a self from inside of it. Is recollection a self? Memories and experiences interleaved into a kind of story of me? That’s it right?

Because I have stories, I just don’t know how many are true. Dylan’s stories are fewer and written on FBC letterhead alongside the kind of words you’d use to describe a particularly troublesome bread knife. It does what we want, but sometimes cuts a hole in the universe. The FBC is nothing if not the St. Peter’s Basilica of lies. A brutalist cathedral with walls of Soviet housing bloc concrete, tasteful wood paneling, and a foundation of bullshit. Every story of self Dylan has is a product of this institution. 

When the thing putting you in danger is the thing that tells you who you are, it’s hard to tell where it ends and you begin. Dylan does what the FBC has told him he’s best at, and he wants to be useful after all the harm he’s told he caused. Utility can feel like a purpose, and a purpose can feel like a self. Like Maria Brink scream-sung on The In Between: I’ve got a killer in me to give me purpose. 

Dylan hurls his body at monsters of light and sound and civic infrastructure the way I did to monsters of meat and bone and the kind of lust that kills. Just replace the psychic powers with a great ass, and swap nightmare Manhattan rooftops for Portland basements with shag carpets. 

You can make a self out of stories, even the ones that are lies. Broken kids, we learn early on that to lie you need a truth to lie about. That means there’s something worth knowing, even in the not-knowing. If the self-story you’re handed is that you’re fucked up in the kind of way that means you can only and ever fuck all the way up, knowing the lie of it is also knowing the truth of it. Break those lies open and you find edges sharp enough to author a self. Maybe I’m not a monster, but someone wants me to think I am. 

That someone can be you, it can be not-you, and for me it was (and let’s be real, is) both. That’s why it’s hard to tell which of my stories are made of real things and which are made of something else. Even a memory can just be a story you remember telling. Your body knows the difference, the truest stories live in the body. A body is an animal, and animals don’t lie the way we do. Because for animals, there’s no truth to lie against, there’s just before and now and after. 

Listening to my body means paying attention when my nerves spark wet and bolt like a shot deer. That happened. That is true. That is real. I know because it hunted me. Being hunted teaches you how to run, but it also teaches you how to chase. To turn sharp and tear straight into the mouth of the thing that hurt you. Grab it by the insides, sink your hands and teeth into the hot red of its soft places, feel its bones snap between your jaws, find the things it took from you and suck them right out of the marrow and back into the wounds left by the taking. I do that with writing. Dylan does it with psychic violence just like his sisterself. 

That’s how he learns to listen to the truth in his body. It has Jesse’s voice because she is him and he is her, and if he is her maybe he can be a person worth being and not just a tool worth using. His animal-self starts making a story-self. A bone-self, making a blood-self. Once you have those, once you start to have those, once they start to know each other everything changes. An animal-self and a story-self, each one screaming the other into a song shaped like you. 

Resonant opens and closes on a wound. In its first moments, Jesse drives a four-foot nail through Dylan, and he spends the next twenty-hours-and-change using its jagged edges to carve himself a new story. Obedience that was something like love becomes rage that is love, and it kills him in the end because love is the best killer there is. He dies so Jesse doesn’t and since she doesn’t die he doesn’t either. He is her and she is him, and in both games they were each other, authoring and destroying selves to destroy and author new ones.