Control Resonant’s Unsettling Board Dialogue Is Carefully Crafted Gibberish
Control Resonant’s mysterious entity The Board has become a focal point of player intrigue, accompanying protagonist Dylan Faden as an incomprehensible supernatural presence bound within a shape-shifting artifact. Throughout the game, The Board provides booming words of encouragement and motivation, yet its dialogue remains largely unintelligible without subtitles, prompting many players to speculate that it conveys hidden meaning beneath the noise.
According to Remedy Entertainment’s audio lead Lucas Pierrot, however, The Board’s indecipherable speech is entirely intentional by design. The character speaks in “gibberish” with no affiliation to any actual language. This approach leverages a psychological phenomenon where players’ minds unconsciously project their own interpretations onto ambiguous audio, making them perceive patterns and meaning that don’t exist.
The louder and more chaotic the audio becomes, the more likely players are to convince themselves they’re hearing actual words, even when the dialogue is fabricated nonsense. This clever audio design choice makes The Board feel genuinely otherworldly and mysterious while simultaneously offering each player a unique interpretive experience. Rather than having the supernatural entity communicate coherently, Remedy embraced the unsettling and ambiguous nature of its dialogue, impossible to fully comprehend while seeming tantalizingly close to understanding. This design reflects Control Resonant’s broader commitment to embracing supernatural weirdness and player perception over straightforward communication.