Talents

Overview

Talents are one of the three published buildcrafting pillars in Control Resonant, alongside Combat Abilities (gained by defeating Resonants) and the Aberrant's form choices. They are passive modifiers that improve the synergy between Dylan's supernatural abilities and his melee output, and they live inside the Gap, the diegetic mind-palace menu space the player enters between fights.

Exclusive Branches

The talent system is deliberately gated. Remedy has stated that a single playthrough cannot unlock every talent, with exclusive branches limiting which combinations a given Dylan can ever access on one save. The studio's published framing is that exclusivity forces the player to make a build commitment rather than chasing a finishing fantasy of every node lit at once. New Game Plus expands the talent layer further: NG+ unlocks additional talent nodes that connect to abilities and Aberrant attacks the base game cannot reach, which is the main reason a buildcrafting-focused player ends up in NG+.

Named Examples

Public press has used one specific talent as an illustration:

Hit and Run is the named example that material published before release used to demonstrate how talent rows feed into the moment-to-moment Aberrant loop. Remedy has not published a list of individual talents, and this page will add the released game's talents as they are documented. Unlocking a first talent earns the Steam achievement Promising Recruit ("Unlock a Talent."), and unlocking 30 earns Versatile Expert ("Unlock 30 Talents."). The Hit and Run row hints that talents stack passive percentage modifiers and status applications on top of existing inputs (in this case, the dodge attack), rather than gating new inputs behind unlocks.

How Talents Interact With Other Layers

Where Powers Come From

The build layer is not filled from a shop. Combat abilities arrive by defeating Resonants, and the traversal abilities arrive from the world itself. Gameplay footage released in August 2026 showed Reach, the grapple traversal ability, being earned at the end of a self-contained underground mission in the Manhattan subway rather than bought or unlocked from a menu. In the released game that mission is Jesse Sightings: The Subway Fault in the Evacuation Zone, one of the Jesse Sighting quests that each grant a traversal ability, according to guides.

Skill development itself is shown happening in a personal space rather than on a flat screen, which keeps the progression layer inside the fiction the same way the Gap does for loadouts. What that means in practice for a talent build is that the tree is spent between excursions, but what feeds it is earned in the field.

Trees, Points and Zone Progression

Remedy's own description of the Gap, published on September 15, 2026, says that upgrades for Dylan and for the Aberrant are unlocked there, that builds can be tested there, and that the Gap can be entered at will with a near-instant transition in and out. The talent layer is spent in the same space as the loadout, which matches the earlier footage.

The tree is not a single trunk. The June 2026 hands-on build described a skill tree for each Aberrant form, and a hands-on with the finished game published on September 18, 2026 refers to multiple skill trees, so talents should be read as several per-weapon trees plus the shared passives rather than one list.

Talent Points come from the zones, not from Dylan. The released game has no character level: each of the seven zones of Manhattan levels up instead, and Steam achievements track it directly, with Field Work ("Reach level 3 in any Zone.") and Field Control ("Reach level 5 in every Zone."). Everything done in a zone, from quests and World Feats to map reveals, crates and Fast Travel Doors, earns that zone XP. Each zone level grants a Talent Point, along with more Source, resource and health drops in that zone and new vendor stock, according to guides to the released game, which put the cap at 15 levels per zone. The full system is on the Zone Levels page.

Reviews of the finished game describe the same frame: everything done in a zone, from kills to treasure to quests, feeds that zone's level, and zone level-ups unlock perks such as an upgraded merchant, more treasure markers and better health drops. Talents are bought with Talent Points; the materials gathered in the field pay for Aberrant upgrades and artifact crafting.

Respecs exist and cost Reset Items. According to guides to the released game, spending one in the Gap resets one layer of the build at a time: the talent tree, the Aberrant form upgrades, the Combo Finishers or the ability picks, and at the Mural a single Reset Item re-chooses every ability pick at once. Reset Items are sold by vendors in limited numbers and also come from some quests. The launch hotfix 1.3.3, released on September 24, 2026, made respecs permanently cheaper, stocked more Reset Items at all vendors, and made the first Resonant boss, The Artist, drop two Reset Items instead of one.

One first-party control touches the talent economy indirectly: the Assist Mode slider Power Recovery Speed changes how quickly the resource that pays for combat abilities returns, so a build that leans on ability talents can be tuned from the options menu as well as from the tree.

October 1 Talent Fixes

Unconfirmed Details

The following were not covered by first-party material before release and have not yet been checked against the released game: the total number of talent nodes, the structure of the tree's exclusive branches, the costs and prerequisites for each row, and the talents that NG+ specifically unlocks. This page will be updated as the released game is documented.