Wednesday, October 23, 2024

The Lake House's Implications for Control 2

 I just beat the second and final DLC for Alan Wake II (sadly I found I needed to downgrade to the lowest difficulty on the final boss - I don't mind scrounging for resources between fights, but I'm terrible at doing it during a fight). The Lake House takes place within the eponymous FBC facility that was built to monitor Cauldron Lake after the 2010 AWE in Bright Falls (aka the events of the first Alan Wake game).

Naturally, given the presence of the FBC, there are some big ties into Control, and some things that portend what we might be dealing with in the next Control game (not counting FBC Firebreak).

Let's talk about all of that past the spoiler cut:

The central plot of the Lake House is, to an extent, just another branch off of Alan Wake's story. As seems to happen from time to time, we have Casper Darling to blame for unwittingly setting people on the path to doom. While the Lake House's original purpose was to simply contain the Dark Place, he directed the married chief researchers, Doctors Jules and Diana Marmont, to start researching it - mostly just to give them something new to do.

Darling's actions here I interpret as totally benign. He makes a joke about "who came up with the Shadow" as the name for the Dark Presence, probably because he feels a need to inject a joke into everything, and Jules Marmont, who did come up with that name for it, feels deeply, horribly insulted and belittled.

The Marmonts had initially possessed complementary skills that made them a great team - she was a brilliant researcher and he was good at the office politics. But something - possibly Alan Wake's writing - turned this into a source of mutual resentment. Diana felt that her husband was getting all the credit for her hard work, while Jules felt that he wasn't being treated seriously as a scientist. They split off into different research projects that began to sabotage one another, all while going to crazier extremes in an effort to outdo the other.

And that led to the "acquisition" (read: kidnapping) of artists to try to replicate the effect on reality that Alan Wake's writing had had. The most catastrophic of these was Rudolf Lane, a painter that we met in the first game at the Cauldron Lake Lodge, being exploited by Emil Hartman. Lane was pushed to paint over and over, losing his love for the craft and eventually painting with what is implied to be his own blood, killing himself to create a work of art sufficient for the research.

And, you know, with the Lake nearby, that means unkillable paint monsters (or at least unkillable except for a weapon you get late with very limited ammo). The Dark Presence leaks into the Lake House, and both Marmonts as well as some of the staff are Taken.

Jules is presented as the primary threat - we don't really know what has happened with Diana - but when we get to the lowest level of the facility, beneath the water line, as Jules is about to attack us, Diana attacks him, smashing his head apart with a piece of concrete. There's a moment here where you're almost tempted to wonder if she's actually just trying to defend you, but then she speaks and it becomes clear that she's also Taken.

But let's talk about what happens shortly before we get to that final confrontation.

On sublevel 4 (the boss being on sublevel 5) we go into a vast archive room with a ceiling that looks like the shifting concrete of the Oldest House. There's some spatial distortion here, but we can come to a brightly-lit office where we can discover, among other things, a new Poe song and a vague implication that Anne "Poe" Danielewski, the real-life singer (who made This Road for the base game) might have been one of the artists that the Marmonts experimented with, but that she somehow used a song she composed within the Lake House to escape (there's some ARG stuff - a link to the This House of Dreams blog and something else I haven't really explored yet). But there is also some material - some drawings brought in by Casper Darling, by an artist he suggests they refer to as P6.

Yep, those sketches, seemingly in black and red pencil, are by Dylan Faden. We see someone falling, leaving a red streak as they do, a tree with red leaves, a face with a big red circle in front of it, and a sort of abstract one of a figure on some kind of slope.

After we turn the lights for this office off, though, we see that it's now in total disarray, with a film of Diana ranting about her husband.

And then we find a light cord.

Estevez, being a well-trained FBC agent, knows exactly what to do. We pull the cord three times, the familiar blues and yellows flashing, and we find ourselves in the Oceanview Motel and Casino.

But... not the lobby.

We're in an endless corridor, getting turned around if we try going the wrong way. But there's a door that is open a crack. It has a symbol we've seen before: a kind of pair of concentric "C"s. Stepping through, we see the thick-trunked trees, the grey concrete walls, and a strangely interlaced image of the Director - some of Trench, some of Jesse Faden (possibly in that same concentric circle motif).

And as we walk up some stairs, we see a sign saying we're in the Panopticon, which Estevez knows all too well is in the Oldest House.

We walk into an impossibly vast room, the edges fading into darkness. And in a containment cell, with his hair fully grown back, none other than P6 himself, Dylan Faden.

Estevez asks him what is going on, but Dylan is struggling. He clearly doesn't want to be possessed by the Hiss anymore, but either it or something else is still clinging to him. We hear both his words but also seemingly his thoughts. None of the Hiss chant, but it's enough to make it seem like he's really struggling to maintain, ahem, Control.

Estevez tries to confirm that she's in the Oldest House and to figure out what the hell happened there (crazy that all this time later and most of the FBC has no clue what happened. Jesse and her crew must have the most insane case of cabin fever at this stage). But Dylan is just barely hanging on, and says he should be in the containment cell (which I do note does not have a toilet - not sure how they handle that).

And then we get this flash as Dylan tells Estevez to let his sister know "he tried." Then, we see a whole lot of cryptic imagery - red flowing out into a city, the city folding in on itself, a bunch of other stuff that flashed by too quickly for me to really register it all.

And then, Estevez is back in the Lake House, the way forward open to her.

Given the original concept art for Control 2, which is the only image we've explicitly gotten about the game, I do think we're going to be going outside of the Oldest House, but we still might be confined to New York City itself - not that that's a small setting, of course. Will it still be the Hiss that threatens everything? If so, what might we learn more about its nature?

I will say, I was worried for Estevez, appearing in the Oldest House without wearing an HRA. I wonder, even, if this quick little sojourn inside of it might have actually been the crack that broke the containment.

Control's AWE expansion did hint at Alan Wake II, but plot-wise, it was more concerned with tying things up with Hartman (though of course, the Lake House shows his putrid legacy lives on). We did get some hints about Alice Wake's "haunting" by "Scratch," but that wasn't really central to that expansion.

I think the story of Rudolf Lane and the Marmonts here is somewhat one-and-done. It's spooky as hell but I'd guess we're not going to worry too much about any of that coming up again.

The terrifying vision that Dylan gives us after we meet him is sure to be important, but I'm maybe most intrigued by the fractured Director portrait we find - as if Jesse's legitimacy as Director is under question (which, honestly, is fine given that she got the job from a petty supernatural entity that she doesn't trust).

It pains me that we're probably not going to find out anything more about Control 2 for a long time, but I'll eagerly await online analysis of all of this stuff.

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