Control Resonant Pro Tips: 15 Advanced Tricks from Hundreds of Hours of Playtime

After four full playthroughs, two NG+ cycles, and more deaths to the Rift-Titan than I care to count, I've picked up some things that aren't in any tutorial. Some of these are combat tech that Remedy clearly designed but never explained. Others are just things I wish someone had told me before I wasted hours figuring them out myself.

Here's what I've learned, organized more or less by when you'll need them.

The form-switch cancel is the single most important technique in the game and it's never explained. Not once. Switch Aberrant forms during the recovery frames of any attack and you skip the recovery animation entirely. You're back in action about half a second faster. That half second is the difference between landing a followup combo and eating a counterattack. Practice it on the armory dummies in the prologue. By the time you hit the Pattern-Keeper, it should be muscle memory.

Pattern Residue, the respec material, is way scarcer than the game implies. You'll find maybe three or four in a full playthrough if you explore thoroughly. Don't waste a respec on minor Talent adjustments. Save it for when you've committed to the wrong build entirely. The late-game vendors sell Residue but the prices are honestly extortionate.

The health-on-kill Talent in the Survival tree is more valuable than any damage Talent in the first half of the game. Dead enemies heal you. In a game where healing items are rare and boss fights have no checkpoints, sustain beats damage every time. Keep at least one point in it until you have better Artifacts.

Artifact effects stack multiplicatively with Talent bonuses, not additively. A 10% Talent bonus and a 10% Artifact bonus give you 21%, not 20%. It doesn't sound like much. But stacking these across four or five Artifacts is how you hit the damage numbers that make NG+ feel like a power fantasy. Don't ignore apparently small Artifact bonuses. They compound.

You can Reach through enemy projectiles. The teleport has about a quarter second of invincibility. Against the Thread-Mother's projectile phase, you can teleport directly through the attack and end up in melee range while the boss is still recovering. It's riskier than dodging but the payoff is a full combo window. I honestly didn't figure this out until my third playthrough.

The Aberrant form rotation that works best against groups is hammer opener, dual blade followup, whip finisher. Hammer staggers the group, blades shred the priority target, whip pushes everything back to reset. Three seconds, three forms, one dead elite and a bunch of staggered adds. If you can execute this consistently, group fights stop being threatening.

The Rift-Titan is the hardest boss in the game and it's optional and it's in the mid-game. If you're struggling, just come back later. The boss doesn't scale. Getting the scythe early is nice but it's not worth fourteen deaths. I wish someone had told me this.

The FBC hotline phones in each zone have fully voiced one-sided conversations. The Midtown phone hints at the Echo of the Director fight. The Harlem phone mentions the Void-Caller hidden boss. The calls are genuinely well-written and they're easy to walk past. Look for red rotary phones on desks or walls. Most people I've talked to missed at least two of them.

Charged hammer slam from a ceiling deals the most damage of any single hit in the game. Shift onto a wall or ceiling above an enemy, charge the slam during the fall, and the impact scales with fall distance. Against stationary bosses, this is your highest damage punish. The Echo of the Director has several stationary phases where a ceiling slam chunks about a sixth of its health.

The Broker's Ledger Artifact in the Financial District requires Reach level 2 to access. You can't get it on your first pass through the zone. Don't spend an hour trying to reach the rooftop with level 1 Reach like I did. Just come back after Midtown. It's one of the best Artifacts in the game.

Dr. Yoshida's quest chain in Midtown spans three zones. Don't skip her dialogue. The final reward is the Pattern Analyst's Lens, which shows enemy health bars and alignment types. Matching your Aberrant form to a Resonant's alignment gives about 40% more damage. That's the single largest damage modifier in the game and it's hidden behind an NPC whose dialogue you can skip. Kinda wild when you think about it.

In NG+, you can equip two Aberrant forms simultaneously. This isn't just a damage boost. It unlocks form combination moves that don't exist in the first playthrough. Hammer and whip together create a wide-area shockwave. Blades and scythe together extend the scythe's pull range. Fists and anything doubles stagger buildup. The combat system in NG+ is deeper than the first playthrough lets on, and tbh I didn't appreciate how much deeper until I was halfway through NG+2.

The final boss has no checkpoints between its five phases. Bring the health-on-kill Talent and the Aberrant Core Artifact if you have it. The adds that spawn in phases three and four are your only source of healing. Prioritize them even when the boss is vulnerable. A dead player does zero DPS.

Don't try to 100% collectibles on your first playthrough. Several Artifacts and Talent Shards require ability levels you won't have until late game, and backtracking through Pattern-dense zones with respawning enemies is tedious. NG+ carries over your forms and abilities, which makes cleanup much smoother. The game is designed for multiple runs. Trust me on this one.

The Northlight Engine's path tracing is doing things I haven't seen in any other game. If you're on PC with an RTX card, enable DLSS 4.5 and RTX Mega Geometry. The performance hit is real but manageable. The Pattern effects in particular are designed around ray-traced lighting and they look flat without it. On console, performance mode over quality mode. The 60fps makes a genuine difference for the parry timing. If you're on macOS, MetalFX upscaling does a decent job but you'll want to drop some settings in the later zones where there's more Pattern density.

And honestly, there's probably a dozen more things I'm forgetting. The game is dense. Every time I think I've found everything, someone on the Remedy Discord posts a clip of some interaction I didn't know existed. If you find something weird, try interacting with it. Nine times out of ten, Remedy put it there on purpose.