September was supposed to belong to Wolverine. Insomniac's PS5 exclusive had the whole month built around it, and then reality intervened. Per MSN's writeup, the game everyone's actually talking about is Control Resonant, Remedy's sequel that hits PS5, Xbox and PC on September 24 and has quietly walked off with the month's spotlight.

I covered the launch date when it was announced, and I'll admit I had it penciled in as a solid second act behind Wolverine. That's not how it played out. Remedy spent the years since the first Control building toward something bigger, and Resonant is landing as the game people can't stop recommending while the Wolverine conversation has gotten complicated.

If you've watched release calendars for a few decades, this pattern is old hat. The heavily marketed first-party exclusive absorbs all the oxygen, then a studio known for craft and weird ideas slips in and takes the crown. I want to say it was 2004 when San Andreas steamrolled everything in its path and yet everyone in my gaming circle was still raving about some strange little title that had shipped weeks earlier. The loud game sells consoles. The good game sells itself.

Control was already Remedy at full confidence. The Oldest House, the shifting architecture, the ashtray maze set to Petri Alanko's score. It was the closest a AAA studio had come to that late-90s PC weirdness, the Deus Ex and No One Lives Forever energy, where a game trusted you to keep up with its strangeness instead of sanding it down. Resonant leaning further into that lineage is exactly why it's connecting.

Wolverine's situation is less about failure and more about the gap between expectation and delivery, which is its own kind of brutal. I won't pile on here, we're still early in its post-launch cycle and Insomniac has earned plenty of goodwill. But a month is a zero-sum contest for attention, and right now Resonant is winning it.

The interesting wrinkle is platform. Resonant shipping everywhere simultaneously means the whole player base is having the same conversation at once, and that word of mouth compounds fast. Remedy has also benefited from modest expectations. Nobody was running countdown clocks for this one. It just showed up and was good.

Have you played the original Control? If you bounced off it, the sequel is apparently a friendlier entry point, though I'd argue the first game's disorientation is the point. Either way, September's best surprise is sitting right there, and it isn't wearing claws.