Withdrawal from Control

 So, I really liked Control.

Having now completed the main mission of Control's second DLC expansion, AWE, I'm at a point where there's not really any big story-relevant things to do in the game anymore - just some side-missions that don't really promise a lot of interesting revelations (I could be wrong, to be fair).

AWE, to me, leaned in to the game's strengths more than the Foundation one. Foundation was, I think, longer, and did delve into the deep lore of the FBC and the Oldest House, while AWE served primarily to confirm that Control and Alan Wake take place in the same fictional universe. But most of what I got from Foundation was simply a series of elaborate puzzles in the Astral Plane - one of those blank voids that tends to have more power as a setting the less time we spend there. AWE takes place in a lost and locked-down sector within the FBC - the Investigations Sector - where the darkness that is the main threat from Alan Wake has infected things and mixed like chocolate and peanut butter with the Hiss. In Wake's words, the two enhance one another in terrible ways - a sound made darker, a darkness made louder.

Returning us to the brutalist offices and warehouses of the Oldest House in contrast to the more natural (if weird) caves of Foundation, there's more of an invitation to speculate on the functionality of these rooms that are, admittedly, really meant as a challenge for traversal.

We're probably past the statute of limitations on spoilers here, but just in case: Spoilers Ahead:

Actually, also, Spoilers for Stephen King's Dark Tower series as well.

The structure of this... we could honestly call in a dungeon if we want to use classic gaming terms, is that an antagonist from Alan Wake, the psychiatrist Doctor Emil Hartman, was corrupted by the Dark Presence of that game (though I sense he was maybe not full shadow monster at the time of his arrest?) and was taken to the FBC for containment, only for The Hiss to infect him during the events of Control. The two alien influences have warped him into a horrific, distended monster (described by an NPC as looking like something from an 80s horror movie, back when they had to use practical effects - I imagine like something out of The Thing) who now stalks the Investigations Sector.

You thus have to turn the lights on in places where the Darkness has taken hold to flush The-Thing-That-Was-Hartman out and eventually confront him in one of the toughest boss fights in the game (though it may have been not quite as hard if I'd seen the radio where you can call in an FBC ranger for reinforcement).

The areas you visit are recreations of AWE locations, similar to the model of Ordinary that you find in the main game, and the two main ones each have a fun but pretty quick sidequest where you help cleanse the Altered Items found there.

Amidst your exploration of the sector, you make a couple visits to the Oceanview Motel and Casino, which could be my favorite element of the game in general. There's a whole post to be written about the use of surreal semiotics and how that relates to the New Weird. However, this iteration of the motel is eerily darkened, and it's in this version that we finally get a peak behind one of the other exit doors (ok, we also got to go through the janitor's door in the main game, but this lets us peak through the spiral door).

And it is there that we see the writer Alan Wake, trapped in the darkness. Given his presence seemingly on another plane, he's able to contact us through the Hotline, though it's a little different - we get his communications as if he's writing a story. And... the story we get is unnerving.

Once we beat Hartman (or rather, the thing that used to be Hartman,) we get one last message from Wake in which he says that he had needed to write himself a hero - that he created in his fiction a government agency and a threat analogous to the Dark Presence. He reveals that he actually wrote the Hiss chant - the nonsense that the floating, Hiss-infected agents speak - by taking words and phrases and jostling them around in a shoebox. Even some of the lines from that chant turn out to have some meaning - "the worm through time" is a way Wake describes Hartman's temporal unraveling as a result of his corruption by the Dark Presence.

It seems as if Wake wrote the FBC and even Jesse into existence to have an ally that could rescue him, and the Hiss as a villain to give Jesse a challenge to grow into her heroic status.

Now, this is a narrative gamble - reducing Jesse's existence and that of the FBC to some fiction being born out of a writer's head could threaten to reduce the power and otherworldliness of the cosmic forces that exist in Control.

But I think that here, the game is helped by its genre. You could read this as all fourth-wall-breaking or something like that, but I actually see this in a vein similar to how Stephen King, the character, is introduced in Stephen King the writer's epic opus, The Dark Tower.

The Dark Tower is a series of books I started reading when I was 17, and finished the seven book series the next year with the release of the final volume (an eighth "interquel" entry was written years later). King's known as one of the most popular horror writers of all time, but the Dark Tower in particular kind of defies such a simple genre classification. Indeed, I think that if we are calling Control more "New Weird" than horror, you could definitely put some of King's works into the former category more than the latter (here I will concede, however, that the term itself might be a narrower one than I've been using). King's influence on Alan Wake is not terribly subtle - while it's set in Washington rather than Maine, the aesthetic of the game is certainly Kingian.

After King was hit by a truck in 1999 and almost died, he resolved to finish the Dark Tower series as soon as possible, and released the last three books in the heptalogy (yes, had to look up the spelling for that) over the course of 10 months.

Those last books are somewhat divisive, and one of the most divisive things they did was a this strange fourth-wall-breaking move: in the 5th book, the main characters encounter Father Callahan, a character from King's earlier novel Salem's Lot. King has often done crossovers between the characters in his stories (even in the more sci-fi 11/22/63, the main character meets the kids from It when he visits Derry in the late 1950s) so this in itself isn't that odd. But then, at the end of Wolves of the Calla (Dark Tower book 5,) the characters discover a copy of Salem's Lot, by Stephen King.

In the next book, the characters actually travel to Maine - but apparently not in the fictional version of our world that the story has visited before, but rather one in which Stephen King himself is there, writing the very series of books that they are the protagonists of.

The thing is, there's a justification for this in-universe. While you could, without a lot of effort, view fictional King's need to finish the book lest the entire multiverse collapse in on itself as a kind of metaphor for the destruction of the real King's oeuvre, thus rendering the stakes of the story (whether the eponymous cosmic lynchpin survives or not,) a kind of smaller, more humanistic but less epic scale, in-universe, King is revealed not to be truly the creator of this whole cosmos, but rather someone who has been fated/doomed to have to be the one to speak it into existence - complete with a mystical name for it, the "Ves'-Ka Gan," or the Song of the Turtle (the Turtle being a powerful totemic spirit who guards/is one of the last anchors holding the Dark Tower up).

In other words - just because King is sort of writing Roland Deschaine and his Ka-Tet into existence doesn't, in the world of the books, mean they're any less real.

I think a similar effect is in play for the relationship between Alan Wake and Jesse Faden. Yes, he might have needed her to be real so she could (one day) save him, but once conjured to reality, she is no less real than he is (maybe more, given that she is at least (most of the time) on the "real" plane of existence).

One of the major ideas in Control is that a kind of Jungian collective unconscious can shape reality. One of the reasons the FBC is so secretive and covers things up is that there's a real danger that simply allowing all of humanity to know that things like Altered Items exist could increase the chance that more will come into being.

Indeed, you could almost imagine that the very conspiracy theories about secretive government agencies that cover up paranormal phenomena were able to, thanks to their popularity, conjure these things into reality.

As I see it, one of the central conceits of Cosmic Horror is that we might find out that empiricism is a lie. The empirical, scientific worldview is one that basically says that expanding our knowledge is always a good thing - the more we know, the more we can find better ways to do things and, ideally, improve the human condition. But it's also built on a premise that the world fundamentally functions on consistent rules. The goal of empiricism is to discover an objective factual reality that is unbiased by the observer's preconceptions, desired result, or judgments. I suspect that early cosmic horror writers were in part reacting to the massive scientific progress being made, particularly the mind-bending theories of Albert Einstein, who really threw the rather intuitive Newtonian physics for a loop by developing General Relativity and laying the groundwork for the even more mindblowing Quantum Physics.

The latter, of course, being a branch of physics that contains unknowables - such probabilistic events that defy determinism, or objects that exist in ambiguous states until one forces them to choose one by measuring it - seems to call into question the very idea that we can get a sense of objective reality in the first place.

I mean, scientific empiricism points to its consistency as proof that it is the best way to investigate reality. But, this genre kind of invites us to ask: what if it's only consistent because we believe in it enough to make reality act that way?

Hey, this is about a video game, right?

The only bummer to having finished this DLC is that now I feel like I've well and truly finished Control. AWE was released in 2020, the year after the game proper came out (there's some speculation that the DLC's relative short length was probably due to the onset of the Covid pandemic) and so I suspect Remedy studio is moving on to their next project.

I don't know if Control's likely to have a direct sequel, though this shared universe approach does seem likely to allow elements of it to find their way into the studio's next game. AWE ends with a warning going off about a new AWE happening in Bright Falls (the setting for Alan Wake) and a shot of a group of concentric rectangles that looks suspiciously like another one of the symbols on the doors found in the Oceanside Motel.

I guess I'll be keeping my eye out.

EDIT: Oh, duh. I looked at their website. It's Alan Wake 2. Guess that answers that.

EDIT x2: Oh shit, they're also making a Control 2. So... cool! I kind of thought they'd be doing some new IP within the same world, but I'll take this.