Don’t overthink The Board’s dialogue in Control Resonant

If you have spent hours trying to decode the mysterious, booming messages from The Board in Control Resonant, it turns out you might be wasting your time. According to the developers at Remedy, those cryptic vocalizations aren’t hidden lore or coded instructions—they are intentionally nonsensical.

As reported by Eurogamer, Remedy audio lead Lucas Pierrot explained in an interview with Gamespot that The Board’s communication is “basically gibberish, not affiliated to any language.” The design choice relies on the player’s own perception, allowing you to project your own interpretation onto the sounds. Whether you think The Board is praising your combat execution or sneering at your performance, that intent is entirely in your head.

The audio design behind the mystery

To achieve this, the audio team crafted a voice that sounds intentionally difficult to parse. While the subtitles provide a rough interpretation of the speech, they often shift between varying terms for similar concepts, ensuring that the dialogue never settles into a definitive meaning. This ambiguity was intentional from the start, with the team aiming to create an entity that feels simultaneously scary, unsettling, and occasionally funny.

To make the “gibberish” feel coherent, Pierrot revealed a clever technical trick. By layering in a “pulse” sound along with a “low, soft kick,” the team gave specific words a sense of physical weight. This helps provide a rhythm and punctuation to the audio, tricking the brain into feeling like it is processing actual sentences.

Why it matters

For players, this revelation changes how you experience the game’s narrative atmosphere. Instead of hunting for deep-seated secrets or hidden agendas within every line of dialogue from The Board, you are encouraged to embrace the uncertainty as part of the game’s supernatural aesthetic. It highlights Remedy’s focus on player-driven narrative experience, where your personal reaction to the game’s weirdness is just as valid as the actual audio design.

With Control Resonant reaching one million sales at a record pace for the studio, many new players are currently encountering this strange entity for the first time. If you find yourself stuck or unsure of which paths to prioritize while navigating these unsettling interactions, checking out resources like Eurogamer’s walkthrough can help you make sense of your upgrades and activities without needing to worry about decoding the alien speech.