Control Resonant’s Creepy Board Dialogue Was Deliberately Designed as Gibberish

What exactly is The Board in Control Resonant? While there are still plenty of unanswered questions about the otherworldly entity that accompanies players on their journey through Manhattan, one thing is certain: it is loud, incomprehensible, and impossible to understand without subtitles. Some players believe The Board is conveying a specific message when listened to closely, but according to developer Remedy Entertainment, it is simply an audio trick that makes you hear what you want to hear.

In an upcoming interview with GameSpot, audio lead Lucas Pierrot explained that The Board speaks in “gibberish,” leaving the character open to interpretation.

“An important part of the design is that The Board is basically gibberish, not affiliated with any language,” Pierrot said. “So when you hear a word, you tend to hear what you want to hear … and that is quite neat in terms of audio design, because players can fulfill their own fantasies. Do you want to hear The Board praising you for performing an Execution? You can! Perhaps you hear it saying ‘Absolute cinema, Combo!’ and so on, but if you’d rather think it is arrogant and feels only disdain for slaying a weak enemy … you can hear that too!”

Pierrot explained that The Board has a partial language in place, allowing players to sense a degree of intelligence behind it. That structure lets The Board feel “scary, unsettling, or even funny sometimes,” and the one rule governing its audio design is “the pulse,” a “low, soft kick” used to emphasize certain words. “I used this to give weight when necessary, to create a nice flow. You could see it as some sort of trick to articulate sentences. It gives rhythm and punctuation,” Pierrot added.

After its launch in September, Remedy has continued to refine Control Resonant with updates. For more on the game, you can read about how its scary buses are one of its best features, all the cool little details hidden in the background, and why it outshines its predecessor.