Maximizing CME as a Druid or Wizard

 So, I'm in a kind of middle ground between power-gaming min-maxxers and "vibes, man" character building in D&D. I like my characters to be powerful, because that's the fantasy of the game as far as I'm concerned. I don't do enough one-shots to actually get a chance to try out every whacky out-there build or joke character, so for a long campaign, I want a fleshed out character whom my fellow players will learn to love (or fear, as was the case with by Warlock in Descent into Avernus - very much a "glad he's on our side" kind of character) but who is also just mechanically working within expected parameters.

Broadly, the primary thing that I'm really skeptical toward is multiclassing. I think that there are for sure cases where a multiclass build makes sense for a character. In our Wildemount game, one of the two Paladins multiclassed into Warlock and it made perfect sense - the entire campaign, he's been haunted by the charred ghosts of his former comrades who were all killed in a magical firestorm at Blightshore (one of the major "don't go here" places in the Exandria setting,) and by accepting their direct aid, he's basically made a pact with them (though curiously, it seems to be a Great Old One patron, rather than Undead, as I'd have assumed. I don't really know what is going on with them, so all I do is mutter "got a light?" when the ghosts appear to the rest of the table).

Still, I generally try to build characters along a single class track unless there's a really compelling story reason. The only truly mechanical reason I'd do it is if I wanted to play a Pact of the Blade Warlock, because I think they get so, so many of their problems solved by just starting as a Fighter for their first level.

In that campaign, I've been playing a Wizard. I really can't complain at all about the class, as I've felt plenty powerful with the spells I've picked. Fireball is great unless you roll really awfully low, and even then, even if you're only getting like 14 damage out of it (which is only half of its average damage) it's still over a big enough area that that feels pretty significant if you're in a target-rich environment.

My usual go-to concentration spell is Summon Undead (while my character is a very classically heroic, quite naive young wizard who was basically just out of wizard school at the start of the campaign, his favorite professor was the Necromancy one, and so he likes summoning forth undead spirits to help,) which I think is a very worthwhile option, and if you can maintain concentration, a pretty spell-slot efficient one at that. It's also fairly versatile, with various forms of crowd control or just straight, safe ranged damage (in a fight against a bunch of humans working with a succubus, I was using Drow Poison on a Light Crossbow with True Strike, which was often setting up my Putrid Spirit to paralyze them - after I had knocked the fiend unconscious with the poison on the first turn of the entire combat, which he remained for like three rounds).

But while the Summon spells are great for sustained single target damage, I think it's pretty clear that there are ways to do bigger bursts of damage.

Conjure Minor Elementals, which in 2014 was mainly there to let you summon a bunch of Mephits or maybe an Azer or two, is profoundly different than it used to be. I've written about this spell many times before.

The "obvious" path to getting a lot of power with this spell is to use it on a character who is a melee/martial hybrid - someone who can get a lot of attacks in and thus multiply the 2d8 bonus the spell grants to your attacks as much as possible.

While I think that it's plenty powerful on a tier 4 Eldritch Knight, who get 4th level spells at level 17 and will eventually get four attacks per attack action at level 20, I think the damage winds up scaling up better with pure spellcasters. Bladesingers and Valor Bards are going to naturally want to use this (Dance Bards too, I guess). Bards, of course, will need to wait to get Magical Secrets to get this spell, as it's not natively on their list. The spell is actually only on the Druid and Wizard spell lists, though there are some subclasses (and I know for sure one or two of the Eberron Dragonmark spells of the mark) that will get it as well.

An Eldritch Knight will be able to make more attacks than a Bladesinger using this spell, but won't be able to upcast it. And with just one or two levels of upcasting, that benefit begins to fall off.

Druids, of course, can also build around weapon attacks - you can get martial weapon proficiency with the Warden Primal Order option, or you can just shape-shift, with Moon Druids in particular getting some forms that will be able to attack three times a turn.

But let's say that you really just want to stick to spells? What are the best options?

Well, the answer is pretty clear: you want non-concentration spells in which you (not a pet) are making lots of attacks. These attacks do need to be within a 10-foot range (though because my Wizard is a Scribes Wizard, I think I should be able to use my Manifest Mind to cast CME and move my floating book-spirit around while I pelt away from a safe distance and still get the damage bonus.

So, what spells?

The only cantrip I'm aware of that does multiple attacks is Eldritch Blast, so if you can get this spell on a Warlock, it'll be very good. But we're looking at the classes that get this spell natively. An attack cantrip will certainly benefit from the spell, but you're only really adding 9 damage a turn on a hit. Not really what you want for a fourth level spell (the skeletal spirit from Summon Undead is going to be hitting for like 12 twice a turn cast at 4th level).

The only Druid spells I could find that aren't concentration but call for attack rolls are Elminster's Effulgent Spheres and Syluné's Viper, each of which only allow one attack as a bonus action. This could mean, coupled with a cantrip like Starry Wisp, you could get two attacks out of this, but that doesn't seem all that exciting.

Wizards, however, I think, will feast on this:

Chromatic Orb could hit multiple times, though you'd need to have all your enemies packed tightly within your 10-foot emanation to get the benefit of the CME.

Scorching Ray is probably your first, easily accessible, really powerful option here. At its base 2nd level, Scorching Ray shoots three bolts that each do 2d6 damage, meaning that with the 2d8 bonus from CME, you're already more than doubling the damage you do with the spell. Upcasting Scorching Ray is going to add additional bolts, rather than making each bolt more powerful, which is great, because it's a further multiplier of your damage. Casting CME at 4th level and Scorching Ray at 3rd, you'll be getting 4 bolts that are each hitting for about 16 damage apiece. If they all hit, that's 64 damage.

Steel Wind Strike is the next option. This will effectively extend the range of your CME because you'll be teleporting around for each strike, and your emanation travels with you. The trick is that this only gets full damage if you can hit all five targets - it has to be spread out, not concentrated on one target like Scorching Ray can. Still, each hit will land for 6d10 (33 on average). With 2d8 added to each of those, you'll be hitting for an average of 41 each. If you can somehow also get advantage, that'll be great, because all the damage is doubled on a crit. To compare, if we were casting Scorching Ray at 5th level with a 4th level CME, we'd be getting 6 rays each dealing 2d6+2d8 (again, 16 average) and so in theory we could do 96 damage total. Against 5 targets, of course, Steel Wind Strike is doing a total of 205, but we can't concentrate it on a single target. (Also, SWS doesn't upcast). Incidentally, if were were to flip that Scorching Ray option, casting CME at 5th and SR at 4th, we're looking at 5 rays, but each is now dealing 2d6+3d8, or about 20.5 on average, for 102.5 total. So, yeah, I think if you want to build around this, you probably want to use an upcast Scorching Ray for single targets and Steel Wind Strike for situations with 3-5 targets.

One spell that you might not initially think of (I have to credit Colby over a D4: D&D Deep Dive for this one) as working with these is Contingency. This 6th level spell lets you effectively pre-cast a 1st-to-5th level spell at an earlier point that will take effect when its trigger occurs. This could be something like casting Water Breathing when you're fully submerged (not necessary for my Triton, but I get it) but in this case, it's less of an emergency than an opportunity to cheat the action economy: if you come up with a special word or phrase as the trigger, you can cast this the night (or some days) before you need it so that you can get CME running and still have your action and the ability to cast a spell with a spell slot on your first turn. For as insane as the damage of CME is, you always need to put a little asterisk there that you still typically wind up doing no damage on the first round of a fight, and so if the fight only goes two rounds, the insane damage output of these spell is effectively halved. But if you set up a contingency, you will (at least for one major fight) be able to hit the ground running.

Like Druids, Wizards get access to the aforementioned Elminster's Effulgent Spheres and Syluné's Viper, but these aren't going to be really maximal, damage-wise.

Spellfire Flare (also from Heroes of Faerun,) however, works great with this. Like Scorching Ray, it's a low level spell that adds additional bolts when upcast rather than just adding damage to the attack. Each attack does 2d10 Radiant damage, and at base 1st level, it does just one bolt. Targets won't benefit from half or three-quarters cover against it.

    Ok, so how is it, damage-wise? Do we replace Scorching Ray with this?

    The problem is that it does fewer bolts - when upcast to 2nd level (Scorching Ray's base level) it will do 2 bolts, which means that it's always one fewer shot than Scorching Ray. On the other hand, the actual bolts hit harder, for 2d10 (11) rather than 2d6 (7). At 2nd level, in fact, without CME, it's already slightly outpacing Scorching Ray with 22 average damage compared to 21.

    But Scorching Ray has an edge on number of bolts. So, if we toss in a base level CME, and then cast, say, a 4th level version of each of these, what are we looking at? Scorching Ray is doing 5 bolts for 2d6+2d8 each, so 80 damage. Spellfire Flare is doing 4 bolts for 2d10+2d8 each (20 apiece) so... 80 damage. Huh. Didn't expect to hit the level at which they were totally equal. And I guess further upcasting favors Spellfire Flare because Scorching Ray is adding 16 while Spellfire Flare is adding 20 with each further upcast.

    However, if we upcast CME as well, the balance tilts toward Scorching Ray. With a 5th level CME and 4th level attack spells, we're looking at 2d6+3d8 with 5 bolts at 4th level (102.5 total) versus just 4 bolts of 2d10+3d8 (24.5 each) for a total of 98.

    Honestly, I think the choice between Spellfire Flare and Scorching Ray is really a bit of a judgment call. If you're upcasting CME, Scorching Ray does better, and likewise if you're not upcasting Scorching Ray or Spellfire Flare very high.

    However, Spellfire Flare has two other factors that really help it: it's Radiant damage, which is far less often resisted than Fire damage (and lots of monsters are fully immune - again, as a Scribes wizard this is less important to me) but also, the ability to ignore partial cover means, situationally, you're going to be hitting more often. Truly, both are strong options, and I think it mainly depends on how much upcasting you're doing and with which spells.

Crown of Stars has the same issue as the Effulgent Spheres and Viper spells - while sustainable, you only get one attack per turn. That attack does do 4d12, but you're only increasing that 26 average by 9 with CME each turn.

And yeah, that's about it, as far as I can tell.

To review:

I think your best options for maximizing the power of Conjure Minor Elementals with spells alone are Scorching Ray, Spellfire Flare, and Steel Wind Strike.

The latter does a lot of damage on its own, but must be treated as an AoE option - you can't concentrate its power on a single target. Scorching Ray and Spellfire Flare are both really solid options, but you might need a spreadsheet to figure out which is optimal in which circumstance, as the sliding scale of upcasting will change which comes out on top. You can, of course, pick and prepare both, but I think you'll probably just want to pick one or the other.

Remember that this is for burst damage - to maintain this amount of damage round after round, you're going to need to expend a lot of spell slots. But if you really want to melt a boss quickly, it's a good way to go.

Expedition 33's DLC Bosses are Basically All Like Simon

 Earlier this year, when I played through Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (a truly French title for a game, one that commits what I tend to consider a sin of implying a franchise with a first installment by giving an original work a subtitle, as if it were a sequel) I found it to be thrilling and challenging, but while I got stuck on one or two bosses (the first fight against Renoir was very tough for me) I generally found the overall challenge of the game to be pretty reasonable.

Then I hit Simon.

I'd literally gotten past all the other really tough post-game bosses, like Clea or the souped up Lampmaster you fight after visiting the three workshops. But Simon was just, like, an order of magnitude tougher - the moment that truly broke me was when I finally thought I'd beaten the guy, only for him to reset to phase 2 with full health and a more relentless series of attacks.

I wound up cheesing him - finding a build online in which Maelle boosts her damage to absurd degrees, partially aided by Sciel empowering her and using Intervention to let her go again, which was enough to let just a single Stendahl wipe out the entire health bar.

These new bosses are tempting me to do the same.

Farming for Chroma to buy everything off of all the merchants, I actually hit level 99 on every character (the cap,) so there's no way to reduce the difficulty on these challenges simply by generally getting tougher.

As far as I can tell, the new bosses are:

(Spoilers Ahead):

Armorers, Weapons, and Replicating Items - +2 vs Flametongue

 I've become a big user of D&D Beyond, after spending most of my early D&D years pretty strictly with paper character sheets. While the service is, I think, very convenient (on principle I feel like I ought to buy the new Eberron and Forgotten Realms books physically, but for the time being I only have the digital versions) there are areas where the programmers have certain interpretations of the rules that I disagree with. These interpretations might not even be meant as a strict reading of the rules as much as a way to get the character sheets working, so they are to be taken with a real grain of salt.

As an example, you can get the plan for Gleaming Armor as an Artificer, but in D&D Beyond, but the site makes you pick, say, Gleaming Half Plate, and then that's what you get to replicate. This does make it pretty simple for you to then make the replicated item, but I think that as a DM, I'd rule that you could swap that plan for any other gleaming armor any time you wanted (such as when you hit level 3 as an Armorer).

In the Tasha's version of the Armorer, they explicitly called out that the weapons built into your armor counted as valid targets for your Artificer Infusions - your level 9 feature made it clear that your helm, boots, chestpiece, and weapon were now separately valid targets for infusions. This meant that with Enhanced Weapon, you could make your Thunder Gauntlet or Lightning Launcher into a +1 (and later +2) weapon.

There is some ambiguity, though, with the new version. Our armor has a built-in weapon, but how does that relate to replicating items? Each of the now-three weapons is still considered a simple weapon (Thunder Pulse and Force Demolisher being melee, Lightning Launcher ranged,) but if you're wearing magic armor (which you probably are, either from something found in-game or created via replicate magic item,) does that mean that the weapon is already bearing the, say, +1 bonus to AC as its sole magical enchantment?

I think the Rules as Written here are a little unclear, and I could even concede a very strict reading that prevents you from creating separate magic weapons with Replicate Magic Item. But that strict reading, in my opinion, goes against the fantasy and spirit of the subclass, and it also hobbles them unfairly - while a Battle Smith is going to be able to wield any number of magic weapons (even beyond the possible replicated items) the Armorer is already limited to the type of weapon linked to their armor model (taking the True Strike cantrip does open up some additional possibilities, though it doesn't get to scale with Extra Attack).

Thus, while I recommend going over this detail with your DM before you pick this subclass, I'd encourage most DMs to interpret things in the following ways:

-That a suit of armor that is turned into Arcane Armor will gain one of these weapons, as clearly shown in the subclass features. (This isn't even an interpretation so much as plain reading of the text.)

-That an Armorer can select one of these special weapons and replicate them via a Replicate Magic Item plan like +1 Weapon.

-That these weapons can be "installed" as "modules" into the armor, replacing the unenhanced version of the weapon that comes naturally with the Arcane Armor.

-That the +1 bonus to attacks and damage gained at level 9 with these weapons will stack with the magical bonuses they get from a magical replication.

    This last aspect, I think, open to question: my initial interpretation of the +1 bonus was that this was something of a consolation prize for the lack of magical enhancements. WotC has a nasty habit of failing to give subclasses with built-in weapons (like Soulknives or Beast Barbarians) bonuses to match the kind of magical enhancements that will aid other magic users. But if we use this more generous interpretation, it means that, instead, the weapons will at least be able to scale up slightly beyond our replicated items. Our +2 Weapon plan could now effectively give us a +3 weapon, which is the best kind of +X weapon.

So, now, there's an interesting question:

At level 10, we can start replicating +2 weapons. But at level 14, we can make Flame Tongue Weapons.

Flame Tongues used to only be swords, but now any melee weapon can count. Thus, while the Lightning Launcher is out of luck, with our above stipulations, we ought to be able to interpret the Thunder Pulse and Force Demolisher as valid Flame Tongue weapon options.

Previously, I'd always kind of doubted the power of a Flame Tongue because it lacks the attack bonus that even a +1 weapon gets. But I think as I've come to understand the math of D&D a little better, I think that adding 2d6 fire damage on each swing, which is already far-exceeding any +X bonus to damage, is even going to overcome the +X attack bonus.

I wanted to present a kind of hypothetical scenario to compare the damage output of these options. Just to get the full potential, I'm going to also jump to level 15, where all the Armorer weapons get a damage boost. The Lightning Launcher remains the highest damage weapon for an Armorer (thanks to the once-per-turn bonus d6) but the Force Demolisher gets a decent boost by changing from 1d10 to 2d6 (it's not as big as the Lightning Launcher's 1d6 to 2d6, but it's certainly better than the Thunder Pulse's 1d8 to 1d10. And, of course, you can't make a Flame Tongue Lightning Launcher anyway).

Technically the Flame Tongue requires a bonus action to activate, and it goes out if it's stowed, sheathed, or dropped, but here's an interesting question: as a built-in weapon for our armor, will we ever do that? We might want to deactivate it if we're trying not to be noticed (as it shed bright light) but I think battle-to-battle there's not really any reason to worry about it being out there, all aglow. While activated, the weapon deals 2d6 additional fire damage. That's pretty massive - that's a whole Greatsword's worth of damage.

So, if we're level 15, let's talk about a few assumptions: first, we've probably capped our Intelligence at this point, having had general feats at levels 4, 8, and 12 by now (even if we take half feats at each of these, we can start with a 17 in Intelligence and thus cap it by 12). So, we have a +5 to Intelligence and we have a +5 Proficiency bonus. Our level 9 subclass features is adding +1 to attack and damage rolls with any built-in weapon.

If we take a +2 weapon (which we can get as early as level 10) we're going to be looking at a Force Demolisher that has a +13 to hit (+5 from Int, +5 from PB, +2 from magic, +1 from Improved Armorer) and deals 2d6+8 damage, or 15 on average, twice per turn.

If we take a Flame Tongue, and assume it's active when combat starts, we'll have a +11 to hit, and we'll be doing 2d6+2d6+6 damage, or 20 damage on average (13 Force and 7 Fire), twice per turn.

In the DMG, a 15th-level character accounts for 3,300 xp in a low difficulty combat encounter, 5,400 in a moderate encounter, and 7,800 in a high difficulty encounter. Generally, I think most encounters are probably going to be low-difficulty, unless your DM prefers big, climactic fights (I'm admittedly in the middle of an adventure with my party that is explicitly individual fights with special objectives each day, so these are all tuned high).

I like Vampire Nightbringers as monsters (I enjoy vampires in general as monsters,) which are CR 7, and thus worth 3,900 xp. For a low-difficulty encounter, you'd want the players to slightly outnumber them at level 15. The important thing is that these guys have an AC of 16, which is actually pretty average for monsters of this CR.

My guess is that the +X weapon will actually do better against higher AC monsters, where the bonus to hit counts for more, but let's do some quick math here:

+2 Weapon:

Hitting on a mere 3 or higher, we've got an 90% chance to hit. Our hits do 15 damage, and our crits add 7. So, 15x90% is 13.5 and 7x5% is .35, so we're doing 13.85 damage per attack, or 27.7 damage per turn (you know, before letting our homunculus use our spell-storing item to blast with a lightning bolt, but that'll be the same with both weapon types).

Flame Tongue:

Now, we're only hitting on a 5 or higher (still pretty good) so we've got an 80% to hit. Our hits are doing 20 damage, while our crits are adding a pretty chunky 14 damage.

20x80% is 16, and 14x5% is .7, so that's 16.7 damage per attack, and thus 33.4 damage per turn.

So, yeah, the Flame Tongue is clearly performing better. Note, of course, that there are a lot of monsters that are immune to Fire. If you have both plans, you might consider swapping Flame Tongue out for +2 weapons if you're, say, going to the Elemental Plane of Fire or the Nine Hells, fighting Red Dragons, or anything like that (fiends that aren't devils are also often resistant to fire).

But what about a fight against something with a tougher AC? In the past I've generally set boss-level AC at tier 3 at 20. An Ancient White Dragon would not be an unreasonable fight for a 15th level party, and they have an AC of 20. So, how does the math work out there?

+2 Weapon:

Now we only hit on a 7 or higher (70%). 15x70% is 10.5, with the same crit bonus of .35, so we're looking at 10.85 damage per attack (assuming we can get within range to hit it - honestly a dragon might be a good time to go Infiltrator mode anyway) for 21.7 damage per turn.

Flame Tongue:

And here, we're hitting on a 9 or higher, so 60%. 20x60% is 12, and then we have that crit bonus of .7, so 12.7 per attack. We're thus hitting for 25.4 damage per turn.

Yeah, Flame Tongue sure is proving itself, though the gap here is a little smaller - 5.7 better against a 16 AC versus 3.7 against an AC of 20.

The question, then, is whether there's an AC a monster can get that is high enough to make the +2 weapon better.

The highest innate AC of a monster in 5E is 25, found on the Tarrasque (and, unless I'm mistaken, its fellow CR 30 creatures, Tiamat's fiendish form from Tyranny of Dragons, as well as the Aspects of Bahamut and Tiamat, though they might not actually have the same AC). Sul Khatesh, from Eberron: Rising from the Last War has a native AC of 22, but can cast Shield at will to push that to 27, but I'm also hesitant to use her as an example because she can likely shut down all our magic weapons anyway (though the fact that we deal Force or other non-kinetic damage types with our built in weapons could help as a workaround, if the DM doesn't rule that antimagic fully shuts down our whole armor suit).

The problem with the Tarrasque is that it's immune to Fire damage, making the Flame Tongue clearly not useful.

The Colossus might be our best bet here - it doesn't have any immunities we care about, and has an AC of 23 (it's also the highest CR monster in the new Monster Manual other than the Tarrasque, at 25. I don't think there are any creatures in all of 5E with a 26, 27, or 29 CR).

Now, facing a Colossus at level 15 would be a really scary prospect (especially with its ability to disintegrate people with its Divine Beam). We could just assume we're higher level, which would only shift things by 1 given the boost to our proficiency bonus, but I'm going to just say that this is a very dire scenario instead.

So, with an AC of 23, we're looking at the following:

+2 Weapon:

We now hit on a 10 or higher (still more often than not, but only just barely at 55%).

So, 15x55% is 8.25, and then the usual .35 crit bonus, giving us 8.6 damage per attack, for 17.2 damage per turn.

Flame Tongue:

We're going to be whiffing a lot now - we have a 45% hit chance.

20x45% is 9, and then we've got our crit bonus of .7 as before, so yeah, 9.7 damage per attack and thus 19.4 damage per turn.

So yes, it really turns out that that extra 2d6 damage is basically always going to be better for us than the higher attack bonus. Monsters ACs just don't scale up high enough to make that little +2 bonus over the Flame Tongue worth it.

Again, though, there are a lot of monsters that are immune to fire, so it's truly campaign dependent. If you could get a Vicious Weapon variant (which adds 2d6 of the weapon's normal damage type, which would be fantastic on a Force Demolisher) that would be preferable, but it's not an option.

So, unless your campaign is very fiery, I'd really suggest you consider getting the Flame Tongue for your weapon enchant, assuming you can even do that.

Dylan Faden and Control Resonant

 Who is Dylan Faden?

In Control, he's Jesse's goal, and then her heartbreak. Only ten years old during the Ordinary AWE (weirdly making him the same age as a coincidentally large number of my friends) and one year younger than big sis Jesse, Dylan and Jesse were separated when she escaped the FBC's agents who had come to investigate the site.

We only get fragments of what exactly happened in Ordinary, but the plot feels like it lines up almost perfectly with a Stephen King novel. A small town in Maine, a couple of outcast kids, an adult generation that is unable to protect the children, an inhuman monster that is uncannily human-like, and bullies who become monstrous, deadly threats.

Jesse, Dylan, and their friend Neil seem likely to have been the only ones helping each other out, other than Polaris, the supernatural being that bound itself to Jesse and I think Dylan as well. Neil doesn't make it out of this horror story, or at least he doesn't make it out of it as a human. They say that he's transformed into some kind of dog-like creature, still loyal and protective, but not the kid he once was (and I think it's implied that he died, because the FBC does find dog-like remains).

The entire drama comes to a conclusion before the FBC even gets there - it all starts with the Slide Projector, whose images form portals into other worlds. Initially seeming innocuous, the horror begins when beings in those worlds, like the Not-Mother (we never get a physical description) begin to spread their influence.

As a note: the Not-Mother, which seems to be the primary monster of the Ordinary AWE, is found in a slide they call Temple that bears a striking resemblance to the flooded bunker overlap Saga enters in Alan Wake II, and one is invited to wonder if Cynthia Weaver's Taken form might be somehow linked to that. Saga doesn't have the context to make that connection, and as far as I know, Jesse hasn't yet learned of the 2023 Bright Falls AWE due to the lockdown in the Oldest House, so it's only for us players to recognize the parallels, similar to how Alan's story in Alan Wake II has parallels with the in-universe Lynchian TV show Address Unknown in Max Payne, even though officially Max Payne isn't within the same canon (though I honestly think that we can presume that Alan's Alex Casey books are the same story as Max Payne except where explicitly stated otherwise).

The FBC excursion to Ordinary included Trench and Darling, the real top brass of the entire bureau (though given that it was 17 years before the events of Control, I don't know if we can be certain that they were already Director and Head of Research, respectively. I think Northmoor "retires" in the 90s, so Trench at least would have been in charge by then). And it is they who take in Dylan, making him part of the Prime Candidate Program, designating him as P6. In absentia, Jesse was P7, and of course did ultimately wind up succeeding Trench as director.

While Jesse's life was clearly a tough one, it certainly seems that Dylan's was worse. Confined to the Oldest House, socially isolated, and worst of all, lied to that his sister knew where he was and was permitted to visit him if she wished, and thus leading him to believe that she had stopped caring about him (when in fact she spent her entire life looking for him), Dylan grew bitter. He was known to be a powerful parautilitarian, and I think we can probably assume that both Faden siblings are of comparable levels of potential power.

It's not obvious if this is because of some genetic inheritance (something that would very easily be shared between siblings) or if it's their connection to Polaris.

But the deeply inhumane manner in which the FBC attempted to condition and train Dylan led him toward bitter resentment, which ultimately wound up getting a researcher killed when Dylan lashed out and evidently telekinetically beat them to death.

All of this would be profoundly horrific for Jesse to discover - that Dylan had not only become this violent person capable of such brutality, that he had been so denied anything resembling a normal childhood after surviving the horrors of the Ordinary AWE, that these lies had soured his most important relationship, one with a sister with whom he had clearly had a very strong and loving bond - but it all got worse when she found him infected by the Hiss.

And unlike any other Hiss-afflicted individual, Dylan had seemed to welcome it. So thorough had his resentment toward the FBC, toward the people in charge become, that he welcomed this strange, nigh-demonic force into himself.

That said...

We don't really know what Dylan did under the influence of the Hiss. Indeed, after Jesse scours the building for him, she finds that he's merely turned himself in and submitted himself to be questioned, monitored, and communicated with. Jesse's deeply disturbed by Dylan's manner, his dream-like, sing-songy voice and his advocacy for this infectious hive mind being able to take over the world.

Jesse didn't go to the Oldest House to become the FBC's director. She went there to finally find and rescue her brother. But by the end of the game, he's in a coma, left unclear whether he'll ever wake up or if he's even really still in there.

But we're about to undergo a perspective shift.

In Control Resonant, Dylan becomes the player character. It's Jesse who is now missing, her motivations enigmatic.

In articles about Control Resonant, we're told that in addition to adventuring across a twisted Manhattan, Dylan is going to journey into other planes of existence, and even into his own mind to confront elements of his past.

That past, as I see it, has a few obvious phases: after a presumably normal or at least mundane childhood growing up with his older sister (we never hear anything about their parents, which is interesting) he experiences the Ordinary AWE, then he has the next 17 years under FBC custody, and then he has his Hiss affiliation.

The Hiss clearly have an impact on him, physically, as he loses all of his hair during the Hiss invasion. After Jesse cleanses him and he's left in a coma, we even see within Control that his hair begins to grow back.

It also does appear that he's out of his coma by 2023, when Kieran Estevez meets him within the Oldest House after traveling there via the Oceanview Motel & Casino. We can surmise from what he says there that he is has already reconciled with Jesse, and has evidently tried to keep his paranatural abilities under control (or whatever "I really tried" means,) but that whatever he was trying to do, he's unable to control it.

There is, of course, as to whether Estevez' visit to the Oldest House is actually the same time period she's in during the whole Lakehouse episode (I believe that her DLC chapter is happening around the same time as Saga's Local Girl chapter in Watery).

Still, it's suggested that Dylan is up and awake, no longer aligned with the Hiss, by 2023.

This is curious, because I think the initial interpretation I had in the Control Resonant trailer is that Jesse drives The Aberrant into him while he's still in a coma, the editing suggesting that this is her Hail Mary plan after containment within the Oldest House is breached. But assuming what I'm calling the New York AWE takes place the year the game comes out, 2026, perhaps Dylan wasn't in a coma.

It really is a fascinating reversal of perspectives, because Dylan serves as, if not the main antagonist of Control, then its mouthpiece. Saving him is the final act Jesse completes to end the game's main story (though his salvation is a tragically qualified one, given the coma and the fact that the Hiss aren't fully driven away).

Unlike Saga, whose controversial introduction as Alan Wake II's other player character (though given the themes of collaboration, I think her presence there works brilliantly,) Dylan is a well-established figure in the dramatis personae of Control - but he's going from a sinister source of exposition and insight to becoming the questing hero himself.

I'm really eager to learn more.

What Magic Items to Hand to Your Homunculus Before Level 11

 The Forge of the Artificer, er... Artificer revamp didn't strictly introduce the Homunculus servant, but it did make some big changes to how it works which will make it, if you ask me, a must-use spell for any Artificer.

The old version took up one of your infusions and also demanded a bit of your action economy, forcing you to use your bonus action to command it, which kind of made it useless for Artillerists and Battle Smiths, who want to use their bonus actions for key subclass features (Eldritch Cannons and Steel Defenders, respectively).

The new version, though, is now a second level spell that acts a lot like Find Familiar, but with one key difference: the Homunculus can attack. (Oh, and the component in the spell isn't consumed, so once you have it, as long as the DM isn't mean and steals your spell component, you can re-cast the spell easily.)

The thing is, the homunculus' attack, while better than a familiar's because it can be ranged (I suppose a Chain pact Warlock could use a Skeleton familiar's shortbow attack, with the pact boon allowing it to attack, but its attack bonus doesn't scale the way the homunculus' attack does) on top of, you know, it being allowed to attack.

But one trick that isn't really talked about a lot is giving your familiar a magic item that can do something more exciting. I can't recall if using a magic item requires a Magic action or a Utilize action, but neither of these are prohibited by either spell. That said, if you have an Owl, for example, your DM could likely argue that they don't have the proper limbs to use and operate a magic item. But the homunculus has two things in its favor: one is that we have pretty broad leeway to define how its limbs are configured, the art often showing a little mechanical dude hovering around with two humanoid-like arms. The other is that, as artificers, we can very easily cook up some magic items to give to them.

Now, if you're worried about carrying capacity, the Homunculus Servant has a Strength of 4. Most playable characters (who are all Medium or Small unless altered by some spell or class feature) have a carrying capacity of 15 pounds for each point of Strength (meaning that a normal person should be able to carry 150 pounds). Tiny creatures, however, have this value halved. But luckily, even with a mere 4 Strength, that means that you can still carry up to 30 pounds as a tiny creature.

The heaviest kind of arcane focus is a staff, which weighs just 4 pounds. A wand is 1 pound. In fact, the very heaviest mundane weapon in the game is the Heavy Crossbow, at 18 pounds, which our Homunculus could hold (and wield! With a 15 Dexterity, they're qualified to use a Heavy ranged weapon!) The heaviest set of artisan's tools, Tinker's Tools, is 10 pounds.

The point here is that unless something is explicitly very heavy (there are armor sets that will be too heavy for them, though I might argue that if you make a set of armor for the homunculus, it might be lighter given that it's for a tiny creature) they should be able to carry most magic items.

One last bit of preamble:

At level 11, you can make a spell-storing item, and three of the five subclasses (and maybe four if and when the Reanimator subclass comes out - which I hope it does) have very good AoE damage spells at 3rd level that will likely be your go-to option for this. And with ten casts per day (unless you're taking a lot of general feats and not Intelligence-capped yet, but then still probably eight uses) you'll probably just have the Homunculus use this over and over.

But level 11 is a pretty big threshold, crossing into tier 3. As a second level spell, we can start using a Homunculus at the start of tier 2. So, what do we do from levels 5-10 with them?

One option to consider is the Dragon's Breath spell, which allows the Homunculus to use its action to do a 30-foot cone (dex save) for 3d6 of a standard dragon elemental damage type. This is really not a bad use of one bonus action in a combat, but it does take up what is still a pretty precious 2nd level spell slot. Making a magic item for them might be a good alternative. But what options ought we to look at?

5th level:

At 5th level, we're still using just our base Replicate Magic Item feature's options. There are a few wands included in the bespoke list, but none that do any damage. But we can also create any common magic item that isn't a scroll, a potion, or cursed.

And frankly? There's not a lot of great options here. Even enspelled items that cast cantrips are actually Uncommon. I think you're really best off just using Dragon's Breath or, if you want to conserve spell slots, just making use of the Homunculus' own attack.

6th level:

Here, we get our second suite of replicable items, and we start to get some strong options:

Pipes of Haunting doesn't have a ton of charges (though we can use Magic Item Tinker on it when it runs out to turn it into one of the other options here) but it's a pretty powerful effect, inflicting the frightened condition on creatures within 30 feet (of your choice). The Wisdom save DC is a set 15 (standard for a lot of magic items) but that's actually pretty good - at level 6 with a +4 to Int, we're looking at a 15 DC for our spells anyway. A 30-foot emanation, effectively, is going to easily cover, if not the entire battlefield, then a pretty enormous swath of it, and there's no limit on targets. You'll only use this once per fight, as creatures who succeed on the save will be immune to the effect, but it's a hell of an opener.

Wand of Magic Missiles is a pretty straightforward option. With 7 charges, you'll probably be able to use this on most turns, and if you just use it up and Magical Tinker it into something else, it only needs to last half the day (though be aware that there's a 5% chance that it crumbles to dust if you use up the last charge, which isn't terrible in the long term, but will prevent you from transforming it into something useful). You can up-cast the spell by using more charges, so if you need a bigger burst of damage, you can do that, but spreading it out over all 7 charges means, effectively, a total of 21d4+21 damage. Or, perhaps more usefully, you can think of this as being a guaranteed (except in very rare cases) 3d4+3 (around 10.5 damage) every turn. To contrast this with the Homunculus' normal attack, that's got an attack bonus equal to your spell attack (we'd probably assume +7 at this level) and does 1d6 plus the spell's level in Force damage, so at this level that's 1d6+2, or 5.5, and if you have a target with an AC of 15, that's 3.75 damage per round. In other words, the wand's going to be doing 2.8 times as much damage.

Wand of Web is another good choice - for one thing, it's your homunculus who will maintain concentration on the spell, rather than you. Web's a strong spell, though the DC on this item is only 13. Still, it's a pretty large region, and the webs are even flammable (which will destroy them, but they do cause extra fire damage when they burn - I'm sad that the new Grease is explicitly non-flammable).

Of these, Wand of Magic Missiles is obviously the best choice for pure damage output. But it's very dependent on the kind of fight you're fighting - if you're getting swarmed by lots of monsters, an AoE fear might make that fight a lot more manageable. If you want to really debilitate a foe or a couple of foes, Web's going to be really great for that. It's a question of what your party really needs from you.

Level 10:

While we're only a level away from Spell-Storing Item, our options here open up massively, because we can now make any uncommon wondrous item. And uncommon is when magic items start to become way more powerful. Now, we can't make any staff, rod, or wand here - which does limit our spellcasting item options. And enspelled items are all staves, armor, and weapons, which aren't included here either. But still, we have a ton of things to look at. I'm not sure I'll be able to cover all the best options here, btu I'll try to find some really solid options.

Coiling Grasp Tattoo might be a bit odd, but it's an endlessly-reusable action that can deal 3d6 damage on a failed strength save and grapple a target. The DC is set by the item, so the Homunculus' low Strength is not a problem here, and the 15-foot range on it can potentially have the Homunculus safely hover above.

The Decanter of Endless Water can do a small amount (only 1d4) damage in a line with its Geyser action, but it can also knock creatures prone. The benefit this has, I think, over something like Wand of Web is that it never runs out (just as the name of the item suggests).

Gems of Brightness can inflict the blinded condition, though note that they don't have the friendly fire protections of the Pipes of Haunting. While the normal version of the item never regains charges and becomes a nonmagical item after its 50 charges are expended, if it's replicated, you can just make a new one when it's used up.

A Pyroconverger (from Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica) is basically a flamethrower that deals 4d6 damage. It doesn't have charges, but there's a growing chance (starting at 50%) that it'll explode, so while hilarious, perhaps not the most practical.

A Wind Fan, similarly to the Gem of Brightness, is largely limited by its chance to break, though Gust of Wind (the spell it casts) is arguably not that great.

Level 14:

By this level, you'll have the Spell-Storing Item, which is probably what you'll have your homunculus using, as it's got a pretty hefty number of charges, uses your own (likely quite high) spell save DC. But we do have some other options.

The Ring of the Ram is probably not worth it unless you want it specifically for breaking objects, especially if you're looking for a sustainable option (the get decent damage out of it, you'll probably want to expend extra charges).

But we also now get Rare wondrous items:

Bag of Beans could be used as a single big AoE burst - if you dump out all of the beans (3d4, so an average of 7.5, we'll round down to 7) then each bean will explode for 5d4 force damage in a 10-foot radius sphere. Your homunculus could thus do something like a bombing run, and if we assume 7 beans, that's basically 35d4 damage (or half on a successful DC 15 Dex save,) which is 87.5 damage - not nothing. (Planting the beans will have much more strange effects, which are randomized). This won't outdamage ten Conjure Barrages, of course, but if you need a really sudden burst, it's an option.

Cube of Force will allow your Homunculus to maintain Wall of Force, among other useful spells, if you need crowd control more than damage.

Cube of Summoning is a very silly option, as you'll be able to have your homunculus cast a random "Summon" spell at 5th level.

Necklace of Fireballs is probably not going to be as good as an Artillerist's spell-storing item, but if you're a Cartographer or Alchemist who doesn't have as good of a 3rd level spell to toss in it, this is a workaround.

    I think that, probably by design, most of the items that can cast lots and lots of spells are either staves or wands, while wondrous items are largely more about constant, passive effects or one-per-day big things that you might not need to hand off to your homunculus.

Honestly, I think that the level 6 options you get pretty early on are going to do a lot to tide you over until level 11. Wand of Magic Missile is probably your most universally useful option, though I'd genuinely consider both the Pipes of Haunting and the Wand of Web.

Now, depending on the item you find in your campaign, or the items you're able to craft if your DM gives you the downtime, materials, and opportunity, there might be some really good options. A lot of these have some attunement requirements that might get in the way, but something like a Wand of Binding (which can cast Hold Person and Hold Monster) could be great to have someone else concentrating on.

The Board's Desire for Control

 Yep, still obsessing. I even re-installed Control to just putter around the Oldest House and fight Hiss. I want to talk about the Expedition 33 DLC, but at least as far as I can tell, there aren't any giant lore reveals, just some very tough bosses (one is a little frustrating, as I've gotten to the end of the fight several times now, but botched the mandatory gradient counter at the end each time - hard to practice when it takes like ten minutes to get through their HP, and making me consider using a cheese strategy).

The Board is a pretty central figure in Control, though even then, we know very little about it. We aren't even sure if it's one entity or many (the name implies the latter) and while it's often associated with the inverted black pyramid that we see in the Astral Plane, when it first contacts us, the Board claims to be broadcasting to us from "The Other," which I interpret to be what that black pyramid is called - and that that means that the Other and the Board are not one and the same thing.

I'm inclined to believe that the Board is its own inhuman, cosmic entity, though I have heard some theories that it might be the collected wills or consciousnesses of the previous FBC Directors.

I'm not persuaded by that theory - largely because the Board doesn't really start playing a role in the FBC until the discovery of the Service Weapon in 1964 or thereabouts. There are several previous directors, including Theodore Ash Sr., who were appointed by the federal government (presumably the President). But two things happened when the FBC entered the Oldest House: first, the subsequent director, Broderick Northmoor, made contact with the Board and underwent the ritual to bind with the Service Weapon. Second, when the FBC moved into the Oldest House as their primary office, the country more or less forgot they existed, the same shrouding effect that keeps the Oldest House hidden from the general public working to divert attention away from the Bureau itself.

This is probably why the government hasn't really done anything about what is essentially a rogue agency that doesn't answer to anyone.

The Oldest House and the Board are linked, but that link is likely fairly recent. In the Foundation, we find cave paintings that would seem to imply that humans who discovered this place had been in contact with the Board for millennia, but carbon dating of those paintings suggest that they appeared after the 1964 discovery of the caverns. A popular interpretation of this fact is that the Board had these paintings made to imply that it had been connected to the Oldest House longer than it truly had.

Our goal in the Foundation DLC is to repair the Nail, a strange monolith that seems to create a connection between the Oldest House and the Astral Plane, and whose destruction has caused some kind of bleeding between the planes of existence that could be catastrophic if not treated.

And yet...

The Board presents the Nail as some kind of integral part of the Oldest House, but it is notably similar in material and geometry to what I believe to be The Other (the inverted pyramid). It even looks like the Nail could fit onto the tip of the Other (though it's flat, with a triangular notch in the top, and not a concave reverse-pyramid - but that might have just been a design decision to make that detail clear, as a true pyramid-socket would just look like a square from below).

Marshall blows up the Nail, instigating the entire DLC chapter, to prevent it from being infected by the Hiss, but the Board punishes her for it, causing her HRA to detach (I think just causing a strap to snap) and dooming her to Hiss infection. It seems that the destruction of the Nail isn't acceptable to the Board, even as a preventative measure against the spread of the Hiss.

One of the bizarre parts of Foundation (and one that, honestly, I don't know really works as anything other than a gameplay/plot contrivance) is that the Board allows Jesse to gain one of the two powers, to either destroy the various crystals down there or to cause them to grow. She's unable to complete her task without both powers - she literally needs both to fix the Nail's spherical anchors. But the Board refuses to give them both, and thus she has to receive the other from former adversary the... er, Former.

The game hints strongly that The Former is a part of the Board that broke away. Assuming what we are seeing is actually the Former's true form, it's a genuinely alien being. Are the other members of the Board like it?

The climax of the main story in Control sees Dylan leading the Hiss in an invasion of the Astral Plane, and specifically going to the Other. There's a fear that they'll corrupt the Board, and we even see the Board starting to spew some of the weird Hiss chant. However, once this is fixed, all seems... well, I guess.

I'm inclined to think that the Board was not permanently infected. They're not human, after all, and the Hiss might have a different effect on them. But furthermore, I don't think that the Hiss were necessarily going for the Board. I think they were going for the Other. The Other is used by the Board to broadcast to the FBC Director, and presumably other people. I suspect that the Other is some profoundly advanced piece of communication technology (such that things on the Astral Plane can be called "technology,") and that the Hiss sought to use it to propagate itself across the cosmos.

If the Oldest House is effectively the modern equivalent of the World Tree, that would make it a very desirable asset for any being that is trying to spread its influence wide (there are parallels with Mr. Door, who has sought and maybe accomplished being present in every world simultaneously).

It's a not-so-subtle theme in Control that these powerful people and entities are trying to assert and maintain control over things. Trench compartmentalizes the Bureau to keep everything running through him, and so there's no real apparatus to detect his status as Hiss patient zero until it's too late.

And the Board is weirdly jealous and miserly with its withholding of power, furious with Jesse for interacting with the Former. One gets a strong sense that while Jesse was very much working within the Board's agenda in the base game, that the events of Foundation created a rift in their relationship, which could be a deadly danger for the good director.

While it's an enemy of the FBC, responsible for the death of at least one agent, there's some hinting that the Blessed Organization might actually be linked to the Board as well. Chester Bless' self-help lecture series involving a surfboard altered item is called "The Power of the Board," and I read this very much as an intentional taunting of the FBC. But is it only that?

After all, Blessed is a far better-informed group than your standard paracriminals (see the Cult of the Tree for contrast). They know things that the general population shouldn't, like knowing that America Overnight is actually an FBC project (likewise the revival series of Night Springs, which we know Saga Andersen and her family like to watch).

It seems, thus, that the Blessed Organization likely has some ties to the FBC, maybe even ongoing moles within it. (My reading on the Tennyson Report is that it's fairly benign, but I'm not going to rule out Langston completely as a Blessed mole - clearly there are some well-intentioned members, like Barry Wheeler, who might not be privy to quite how extreme the organization goes.)

But there's a very curious coincidence regarding the Blessed Organization and the FBC's transition from Executive Branch to Board oversight - the FBC moves into the Oldest House in 1968, the same year that a PO Box is opened that will, decades later (I believe both times in 2016, probably in quick succession) be used to send and receive dangerous altered items linked to the Blessed Organization (including the one that killed an FBC agent).

1968 is the year that the FBC transforms into its current, or at least pre-Faden form, and 1968, if I had to guess, is when the Blessed Organization is founded. And I just have to imagine that the latter is a response to the former (not the Former, though... who knows?)

Now, that being said, I think this points toward the Blessed Organization being opposed to the Board - if it was created, perhaps by former FBC agents, to oppose the Board's takeover of the agency. That would of course put them into conflict with the FBC under Northmoor and Trench, and maybe under Jesse as well.

But if we want to get real tin-foil hat about this, what if it's something stranger? What if the Blessed Organization is actually the Board's contingency plan? I'll admit this feels less likely, but if Chester Bless is truly wielding "the Power of the Board," what if he was given that power in order to wrest the FBC out of the hands of a non-compliant Director? Northmoor was a full-on Board worshipper, and only had to "retire" because he had become overloaded with paranatural energies (we never did find out if he became infected by the Hiss, stuck there in the NSC-2, generating the power for the whole building - also, how old would Northmoor be, if he was the head of a federal agency in the late 1960s?) and Trench was loyal to the Board until the Hiss took over his brain and the Board had him "re-take" the Director's lethal qualification exam.

Now, Blessed was already moving against the FBC long before Jesse's insubordination to the Board began - she entered the Oldest House in 2019, and it was three years earlier that the America Overnight attack occurred.

The thing is: I think it's very likely that the Blessed Organization is what's behind the breach of the Oldest House. Chester Bless tells Barry Wheeler that it's good that he's in Los Angeles rather than New York, because of the coming catastrophe, and the most likely way for someone like him to know about that upcoming event is if he's behind it. I don't know if they'll be our primary antagonists in Control Resonant - it seems more likely that they're instigators who unleash something much bigger than themselves - but it does seem that if the Blessed Organization was merely trying to break the FBC's connection to the Board, this seems like a really extreme thing to do that would get a lot of innocent people killed.

The Board, though, might not be so concerned with the human costs.

Now, there is a possibility here as well: might the Former be the Blessed Organization's hidden patron? I'm not super convinced by this, but only because tonally, it seemed as if the Foundation DLC was there to tell us that the Former might not be as malevolent as we first thought it to be (though we also shouldn't forget that poor guy who got eaten by the fridge that was connected to the Former). Maybe the Board was right to admonish Jesse for consorting with the Former (though they could have just given her the powers she needed).

In the Control Resonant trailer, when Dylan emerges from the subway and we're drawn to look at the twisted Hiss monsters (maybe with a little Dark Presence in them like Hartman?) there's also a golden circle up in the sky, and if you ask me, it does resemble the Former's giant spotlight eye a bit, with even another kind of triangular wave above it that looks a tiny bit like the edge of the top of the Former's head.

The Board has acted in ways that seem to be not quite in sync with our own priorities - both punishing Marshall for destroying the Nail but then standing in the way of Jesse's fixing it. We know that Jesse has "gone rogue/fishing," and that implies that she's no longer aligned with the Board, necessitating Dylan's revival and stepping in to face the unleashed chaos.

And sure, if it's the Board that is giving him his mission, that might all be consistent. But man, there's a deeper story here, and we don't have all the details.

What Role for Alan Wake in Control Resonant?

 Big caveat right at the start: I don't know that our favorite tortured writer is going to be a major part of Control Resonant. While the Alan Wake games and the Control games (I guess technically already plural because of FBC Firebreak) are in the same universe, we've seen very little direct interaction between its characters - just the Hotline messages for Jesse in AWE and the weird intrusion into Alan's scene with Tom Zane by Jesse (we see some earlier draft of that scene from Jesse's perspective in AWE).

Even with the Final Draft NG+ version of Alan Wake II, we're left in a somewhat ambiguous place regarding where Alan, Saga, and Casey actually are. Saga winds up in the Writer's Room via the Dark Place, while Alan gets there physically by entering the door in the Valhalla Nursing Home (there's an interesting question as to whether the nursing home building is just this "draft" of reality's version of Bird Leg Cabin, which would make this writer's room the same as the room in which Alice had intended him to break his writer's block in way back in 2010.

Now, he does enter it while Bright Falls has been transformed by the Clicker. Basically, even if we know that yes, he does survive the bullet of light, and Saga is able to receive a call from Logan, it's not 100% clear to me that Alan can just walk out of the building and be back in the real world. He's also likely inclined to journey back to get Alice out of there once again, only now hopefully with greater ability and control so that he'll be moving through with intention rather than floundering as he did for the previous thirteen years.

Alan is from New York - while his games take place primarily in the Pacific Northwest, he and Alice are New Yorkers through and through - and I wonder how connected he'll feel to the chaos unleashed in Control Resonant. If he truly is now a Master of Many Worlds, he could very well be a powerful asset fixing what has gone wrong.

That being said, while Alan's clearly a powerful parautilitarian, the Faden siblings likely have even greater potential (Alan's able to rewrite reality from the Dark Place, but he's clearly no more physically capable than a normal person - though I think there's an interesting question of what it means to "boost" a flashlight that's already shining. I don't know about you, but my flashlights don't have that function).

Basically, I think Dylan probably is the right guy for the job (at least, while Jesse can't do it for whatever reason).

Remedy has been explicit about creating an interconnected universe for their games. So far, that's only explicitly meant crossovers between the Alan Wake and Control games (which I'm, again, counting FBC Firebreak as part of the latter,) though there have been a lot of winking nods to Quantum Break, skirting around the fact that Microsoft owns the rights to it in the same way that they've done by having Alex Casey stand in for Max Payne because of Rockstar's ownership of that brand. Warlin Door is, basically, implied to just straight-up be Martin Hatch, and Tim Breaker could be an alternate-timeline version of Jack Joyce.

All this being said, one of the themes the games have toyed with is the existence of multiple universes. Not only are there different "planes" like the Dark Place, the Astral Plane, etc., but also different versions of our familiar reality. Some are different drafts of reality as Alan has tried to write them, seemingly overwriting one another like a palimpsest (like how Saga has deja vu when she goes through the cycle again on The Final Draft) but we also get word from Dylan himself, who describes different realities in which they each play different roles - one where Jesse works for him at the FBC, not unlike her weird inner dream while the Hiss is trying to take her over near the end of the game, and even one in which he and Jesse are a single person - Jesse Dylan Faden.

Alan has a ton of experience dealing with multiple, overlapping realities. In the Dark Place, these realities flood together in immense density - the Shades we fight across the Dark Place are likely other versions of him, other aspects of his own mind. He has dark confrontations with his other parts, whom he mistakes for Scratch. If we are to take that he has ascended the spiral and emerged, truly, as the Master of Many Worlds, he might be the perfect guide for Dylan in his navigation of this chaos.

See, we really don't know what the ultimate implications of the New York AWE will be. It looks truly apocalyptic, but what boundaries does the event have? And are those boundaries purely spatial in nature?

See, there's an interesting question that we'll need to consider: is this warped New York actually being experienced by the people of the city?

A lot of comparisons have been drawn to both Inception and Doctor Strange. The visuals we initially get of the New York AWE are particularly similar to the ones seen in that film, but the sequences in that movie that show New York shifting like that are actually in the "Mirror Dimension," a kind of "just next to reality" plane. Do we know that Dylan is in the true New York? Or some reflection of it?

I mean, I don't necessarily know that I want the stakes cut off at the knees to say "well, this doesn't really count," but I also think that Remedy isn't going to treat this in any really straightforward way.

I've seen some people speculating that the Jesse that we see stabbing Dylan with the Aberrant might not be our Jesse. I'm inclined to think that this isn't meant as a violent act to kill him, but might be necessary to get him attuned to the weapon. If we're to take the shot of the dead bodies outside the Oldest House's doors as being the state of things when we see Jesse, I think we're looking at a frustrated, desperate Director who is resorting to some desperate measures.

One thing to consider, as well:

The Hiss we've seen in the trailer are twisted far beyond their typical human shapes. We did see the Hiss do this on its own with monsters like the Hiss Distorted, so take this with a grain of salt, but don't some of those seem... I don't know, a little like The Thing That Had Been Hartman? Emile Hartman is probably the most twisted and horrifying creature that we've seen in Remedy's games, and that transformation is credited to the kind of exacerbating resonance between the Hiss and the Dark Presence - as Alan describes it, a darkness made louder, a sound made darker.

It's clear that we're still going to be fighting the Hiss, but I strongly suspect that they're just going to be one of many kinds of monsters we face - that freaky half-face statue boss we see toward the end of the trailer is utterly mysterious to me, and by far the most intriguing creature. But it also doesn't look at all like the Hiss or the Dark Presence, or the Mold.

While I'd be excited to hear a little from our good Mr. Wake, I suspect that he's going to be a bit of a missing presence in this one.

The person I really want to see, though, is Caspar Darling. Darling was, to me, so instrumental in the setting of Control's tone, Matthew Poretta's friendly but definitely mad scientist giving a real face to the FBC. Now, we know he's in the Dark Place, working with/getting manipulated by Tom Zane, but I'd also be eager to see that crazy parasite bastard as well. If that happens, we'll get the two real-world halves of Alan, at least.

What is the Blessed Organization's Role in Control Resonant?

 I don't even know if anyone even mentions the Blessed Organization out loud across all of Control or in Alan Wake II.

Sam Lake talked about the trick they discovered (or learned, at least) when building the lore of Control: that you can get players to read a whole lot of text if the text itself is a reward for exploration. If you play a game like World of Warcraft, a lot of players don't really bother to read the quest text, because it's just so much to get through before you're on your way, completing objectives. Control obviously took some inspiration from FromSoft's Souls-like games (control points being like bonfires, Source being like Souls) and I think part of that inspiration was the idea of hiding a lot of the game's story and lore in dense text.

I can't tell you exactly why I find the various FBC memos more compelling to read than the item descriptions in Elden Ring, but somehow, it works.

But like in FromSoft games, entire subplots can be hidden in these documents.

And the subplot that feels most consequential is that of the Blessed Organization.

I've written about this before, and there's nothing direct to link with the new trailer for Control Resonant, but I think it's worth reminding myself and others about it.

The FBC monitors and has a mandate to stop "paracriminal" organizations, a designation that basically means a criminal organization that takes advantage of paranatural phenomena, often trafficking and/or using altered items or OOPs.

While we'd later see the Cult of the Tree designated as one of these (and discover that their aims were far more benign than they first appeared - though still messing with an OOP) the only other one I think that is named is The Blessed Organization.

I don't recall exactly, but I think that Blessed gets mentioned only in the DLCs, primarily in the AWE expansion for Control (which tied into Alan Wake as a story). The memos don't always make the connection explicit, but we find out about various paranatural crimes that involve various companies that are called "Blessed" XYZ, such as Blessed Pictures or Blessed Repair and Service. The companies in some way provided or were linked to an altered item that caused some havoc, sometimes causing injuries.

Later, when an altered item kills an FBC employee, the PO box from which the item was mailed is the same associated with the altered movie camera affiliated with Blessed Pictures.

The only individual known to be associated with the Blessed Organization is one Chester Bless, who in 1994 ran a self-help course using a surfboard that could impart a sense of confidence and self-esteem upon those who touched it. The FBC took notice and attempted to raid Bless' home, but found it empty, the surfboard left behind. Notably, Bless' self-help course was called "The Power of the Board," which should raise some eyebrows for anyone aware of the cosmic entity behind the FBC.

In Alan Wake II, when Alan is able to visit some kind of Overlap/Threshold within his own apartment (his accidental "haunting" of Alice) we see that she is in correspondence with Barry Wheeler, Alan's best friend and agent, who has been in Los Angeles managing the film rights for Alan's books in an effort to maintain a revenue stream for Alice. Barry jokes that he's joined a cult, referring to what he believes is a Hollywood social club, but the name rings alarm bells for us players: The Blessed Wellness Center. Barry claims it's led by someone named Chester, who gave him an ominous warning that something bad was going to happen in New York.

One detail that I feel like every YouTuber I've watched seems to have missed is that when Alice leaves New York to plunge herself into the Dark Place, the empty apartment we find is filled with moving boxes labeled "Blessed." Now, this could be because Barry, having lost both Alan and Alice, was left to manage what was left of their shared estate, and he might have sent movers from the organization to pack things up. However, I'm also the only one online that I've seen who thinks that Alice is also linked to the organization now - when she talks about how an "organization" helped her regain the memories she had repressed from the events of the first game, seemingly everyone else says that this is the FBC she's talking about, but I think that that choice of word is deliberate: the FBC is a bureau or agency, and the word organization is what we use to refer to Blessed.

But that might not even matter that much: the important thing, though, is that Blessed knows that something bad is going to go down in New York.

And as we see from the Control Resonant trailer, things have gone real bad in New York.

Now, I'm disinclined to think that Blessed are good guys. Their actions have clearly put a lot of innocent people in danger, and especially the killing of the FBC employee at their America Overnight studio points to violent, hostile intent.

It's possible that there's some sympathetic motivation under all of it - the FBC of course, has a pretty awful ethical track record. If their goal is to strike out against a corrupt and tyrannical government agency, I might quibble with their tactics, but I could understand the motivation.

But if Chester Bless knows that an apocalyptic event is coming in New York, he's got a moral and ethical obligation to warn someone who can do something about it.

Maybe Blessed is behind it.

First off, we're making a certain assumption here: that Chester Bless and the other members of the organization are human. Certainly, all mentions of them seem to point toward a group of human paracriminals. But are we sure of that?

There are a number of somewhat angelic/heavenly visuals in the Control Resonant trailer. In the first shot, where the camera tilts up from Dylan's containment cell, the circular resonance pattern is surrounded by gold-limned clouds. I had also noted that the twisting pattern of pigeons soon after that recalls some descriptions of angels - I remember the cover of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door left a big impression on me when my sister was reading it when we were kids, and I think it depicts an angel. And when we see Dylan step out of the Thomas Street Subway to battle some very mutated Hiss, above in the sky there's a golden ring that looks like a god's eye.

One of the central questions in Control is whether we can really confront all of these strange phenomena and retain the kind of rational detachment to still call it science fiction. The Tennyson report (almost certainly written by Langston) argues that the insistence on all of this quasi-scientific terminology is just a way to deny the clear fact that all of this is magic, and that we're just denying the existence of magic, gods, and such because we've convinced ourselves that our less rational forebears must have been mistaken about their worldview.

Is this a paracriminal organization, then, or the cult to some kind of dangerous god?

There's also the interesting question of what connection the Blessed have with the FBC. Are they targeting it simply on ideological grounds? I think that the cheeky pun about The Power of the Board suggests some deeper knowledge of the FBC's inner secrets than a regular gang of criminals would have.

The earliest date associated with Blessed is 1968, when the PO box related to Blessed Pictures and the deadly fondue fountain delivered to the studios of America Overnight was opened, evidently never used prior to 2016, when both the ActionMaxx Camera and Fondue Pot altered items passed through it. This was four years after Broderick Northmoor became FBC Director in 1964. Northmoor was the first Director to be appointed by the Board, rather than by the government (presumably it had previously been a presidential appointment, but given the FBC's supposed role as more or less handling logistics for transporting materials for other government agencies, I imagine that this was usually one where the president just signed an appointment and moved on to other tasks). (EDIT: the FBC moved into the Oldest House as their headquarters on November 13th, 1968. I don't think this is a coincidence).

If we were to guess that the Blessed Organization first started to take form around the time that that PO Box was purchased, maybe after a year or two of planning involving the acquisition of disposable assets like a burner PO Box, might it have happened as a response to this change, with the Board essentially taking over the bureau?

Is it the Bureau that is their target? Or is it the Board? Or, alternatively, might it be some kind of contingency? The Board has shown itself to be quite shady and willing to sabotage its own people (like Marshall) if they step out of line. Could it be maintaining Blessed as some kind of contingency?

Right now, of course, the details in the trailer are really mostly just to lay out the premise and hint at broad ideas, and this kind of detail is either not going to be in that first trailer or we lack the context to really understand what hints we're receiving.

I think the key detail is Chester Bless' foreknowledge of chaos in New York. (Also crazy to me that he's still going by that name - unless he's taunting the FBC in some way).

It looks to me like Dylan is not particularly interested in representing the FBC's agenda (given how the bureau's initials are painted over on his poncho,) so I wonder if the Blessed Organization might wind up being a faction we interact with in the game.

Control Resonant has been described by Remedy as something of an open-world action RPG, leaning more heavily into the RPG elements that the first game hinted at. What if we're able to do "quests" for them, if we aren't just going to be fighting them.

So yeah, if you were hoping for definitive answers here, I have none to give. But I'm just trying to squeeze every last drop of info out of what we've got so far.

What Role for Jesse In Control Resonant?

 In my most conservative imaginings about what Control 2 might be, I thought it was possible we'd still be in the Oldest House, just different parts of it, dealing with another crisis. The Oldest House is an incredible setting, and you could do a ton of things there.

But I'm also rather relieved that that doesn't seem to be the case. While it doesn't seem likely we're leaving New York City (though that doesn't count going through various alternate dimensions - arguably we might go very far) it seems that Control Resonant will see the weirdness contained within the Oldest House break out into the rest of the world, needing someone to do something to prevent it from destroying the whole world.

It looks, honestly, like a pretty tall order.

Jesse Faden, of course, was the hero and player character of the first game, and I think most of us were fairly confident that we'd be gunning around with Jesse and her suite of powers, blasting away with the Service Weapon in the sequel.

But the Director of the FBC appears to be taking on a different role in the second game.

In Control, Dylan was Jesse's initial objective - she hunted down the FBC in order to find her long-lost brother. For seventeen years, the two had been separated after they survived an AWE in their hometown of Ordinary, Maine. Jesse and Dylan had been the unwitting instigators of the event, discovering an OOP in the form of a Slide Projector that opened doorways into other worlds. By the time the FBC arrived several days later (September of 2002, while the AWE had happened in August) the town's adults had all vanished, and there were only 17 kids remaining (some having evidently been transformed into strange monsters, or the case of the Fadens' friend, a dog - genuinely, the events in Ordinary seem like something out of Stephen King, particularly the childhood segments of IT). Jesse and Dylan were going to be taken in by Trench and Darling (who were both on-site for this investigation) but Jesse managed to run away.

And as a result, the two kids had very different lives. Jesse bounced between foster homes and wound up kind of a drifter while Dylan was put into a strange program to groom him as an appropriate successor to Trench as Director of the FBC.

Dylan's conditioning under the Prime Candidate Program was... not great. He apparently killed one of the researchers and developed a great deal of resentment toward Dr. Darling and more or less everyone else, even Jesse, because he had been told that she could visit him whenever she wanted, and of course she didn't. They didn't tell him that she was actually looking for him all this time.

In other words, the FBC is, like, not great. Even figures like Darling, whom I think we're meant to like, have done some incredibly unethical and shady things. Jesse's ascension to Director is a sudden and bizarre twist in things - she literally walks into the building moments before her predecessor blows his brains out (I'm assuming he's forced to do this by the Board, who probably sensed his infection by the Hiss by that point but needed to have a proper successor lined up).

Jesse comes in quite heroically, excited to enter this new world of strangeness, but also eager to find her brother and resolve the whole crisis.

But Control's ending was... well, it wasn't a true resolution to the crisis. The Hiss are still there, and as we see in the new trailer, the Hiss are still there, and now spilling out into the outside world. As Dylan's narration suggests, trying to keep it all contained has still allowed it to "worm" its way out (as in "you are a worm through time," a phrase that I think is more like someone being able to view time as a spatial dimension, a bit like how we see the pigeon at the start of the trailer).

In the Foundation DLC, we get our clearest evidence that the Board is also not so great - they arbitrarily limit Jesse's power in such a way that would prevent her from getting her mission done, forcing her to receive the other power from The Former, and then the Board has the chutzpah to get pissed off at her for doing this. It's clear that they really liked Northmoor because he was the first director that they could really control, and that Trench was fine up until he got ruined by the Hiss. But Jesse remains independent, skeptical of the FBC's mission and practices. In an ideal world, she's a reformer.

But can the FBC be reformed? I suspect that Jesse might feel, after what will be seven years as Director, trapped in the same damned building, that it's not looking like it can be reformed.

Jesse is described as "gone rogue/fishing." Gone rogue has a pretty clear meaning - she's not taking the Board's orders anymore. Gone fishing is kind of a funny term - it can mean just sort of slacking off (which could mean a less aggressive version of going rogue,) but fishing is also a kind of hunt. Going fishing for clues or evidence or a lead could imply that she's on a mission to discover some new truth that her normal day-to-day practices might not allow her to find.

The point, though, is that as the remaining Faden sibling, Dylan is now being asked to step up. "You're up," the message says.

What is Dylan's mindset? We saw him when he was infected with the Hiss, a sort of mad, sinister monotone. Dylan said he liked being part of the Hiss, presumably because it was an escape from being the FBC's captive. When Estevez finds him in the Lake House (or rather, via the Oceanview from the Lake House) he seems to be trying but failing to do something that Jesse wanted him to do. Just what is that?

I re-watched the trailer with my resolution turned up to the max (Youtube set it to a default 480p, which clouded some of the text). One thing I noticed is that the kind of battle-poncho he's wearing has the letters FBC on the back, but smeared over with black paint, as if he's cutting ties with the Bureau, which would make sense.

I think even if Dylan is now willing to fight against the Hiss rather than trying to spread its influence, there's no love lost for the FBC - his antipathy toward them pre-dates the Hiss. This is a man who has experienced terrible abuse at the hands of the Bureau.

Jesse hasn't suffered as much under the Bureau's influence, but especially when being in charge of it doesn't seem to give her the power to fix its deeper problems, it stands to reason she might be working against its (read: the Board's) agenda.

We, of course, saw Alan Wake II give us two primary player characters (and all different characters to play in the DLCs). I think it's very possible that we'll be playing as both Faden siblings in Resonant, but I also think that we might just play as Dylan. The game's been described as a "sibling" to the first game, and while in the first, Jesse sought her brother, in this, one of our main goals is to seek after her.

Alan Wake II had a big motif of doubling and mirrors, and I think we might also see that here - like how we see the same side of a street mirrored in the opening sequence of the trailer.

Dylan has spent a lot of the intervening years since the first game in a coma. What has Jesse become in the meantime?

A few more notes:

I don't know what, if any, significance the fact that the cafe in the beginning of the trailer has: The awning says 665 Coffee Drinks - I assume it's meant to be 665 Thomas Street, which is both the street the FBC is on and also the number is Remedy's recurring in-joke, "the neighbor of the beast." Tom Zane occupies room 665 at the Oceanview Hotel (though again, in a weird way because the actual room is just a kind of empty square, and the apartment where we actually see him is created with a projector).

Also, the memos on the desk outside of Dylan's containment unit put the FBC's address as 43 Thomas Street, whereas I believe it was earlier established to be 34. Another case of mirroring? Or could the FBC have changed offices? We don't know how long containment has been breached, and who within the Oldest House is still alive.

There are a number of visual shifts, including the font that we get The Board's messages subtitled with. This could be merely a stylistic update, but I find it worth looking at. The folks over at Gaming University argue that the word choice doesn't seem to match the Board, and they speculate on whether this is actually Jesse sending messages (one theory on who the Board is is that it's all the former Directors of the FBC, though count me as a skeptic toward that one).

New Expedition 33 DLC Takes Us to Verso's Drafts

There's free COE33 DLC!

I've played through a fair amount of it - apparently being level 99 on every character might be a little overpowered even for a DLC.

The DLC brings with it a number of new enemies - I found a Chromatic Nevron on a floating island that I had either just never happened to see or might have been added.

The main event, though, is a large new area east of Lumiere called Verso's Drafts. It's decidedly more colorful than Renoir's Drafts, even to the extent that it might take you a moment to adjust to the insane color palette of this region.

The exact nature of the place is a bit of a spoiler for those who haven't finished the game, but basically, think of the kind of playground that a little kid would come up with, filled with children's toys and candy.

The area isn't, as far as I can tell, terribly linear, with a lot of challenges and new enemies to fight. Again, though, having just idled around in Renoir's Drafts trying to farm the chroma to buy everything in the game, my entire party is level 99, which is pretty overpowered except for what I assume is the DLC's final boss.

There are new weapons, new Pictos, and lots of new costumes. Hey, were you also kind of sad Monoco never got a Baguette costume? Well, turn that "whoo" into a "whee," because they've got you covered.

I suspect there are a lot of hidden things here - there's a simple game of hopscotch you can find to get a costume piece for Verso, but then in another nearby area there are hopscotch squares hidden around, and I suspect you'll get another piece if you can find them all and hop onto them in order.

I've faced what I assume is the DLC's final boss (if only because there's a lot of buildup to it and it has an elaborate cutscene) twice now, both times getting it to the end of its second phase, at which there's an evidently very precise Gradient Counter you need to pull off, which has insta-wiped me both times.

Expedition 33 released this the same day as the Game Awards (yesterday as of this writing) when it basically swept the awards, winning Game of the Year as well as several other awards. While the highlight for me regarding the announcements was the trailer for Control Resonant, I really love Expedition 33, and I'm happy to have an excuse to jump back into it. It's crazy to think that I only even found out about the game earlier this year - it kind of came out of nowhere to take the gaming world by storm (and has, of course, provoked a bit of a backlash to its popularity).

Anyway, I'm a big fan of free DLCs, even if we can't expect them to be, like, Shadow of the Erdtree-level big and complex. Even if it's considered a "small" game, Expedition 33 feels big and expansive, and like one of those games you will always be able to dig a little deeper into and find a little more. Now there's an invitation to continue that exploration.

CONTROL Resonant Announced

 This is not a drill. The sequel to 2019's Control, a game I didn't play until 2023, has an official announcement trailer.

And boy, does it look like things are going to be a bit different.

Broad strokes (before I re-watch the trailer and start and stop it to gather every freaking detail I can):

First, most shockingly, it looks like we're playing as Dylan Faden, Jesse's brother, whom she was tracking and looking for in the first game. Dylan became the sort of voice for the Hiss as he allowed it into himself after an entire childhood and early adulthood under the FBC's attempts to mold and shape him and his parautilitarian powers to serve as the appropriate successor to Zachariah Trench.

In Control, Jesse finds herself chosen as the FBC's new Director by the mysterious and inhuman Board, and is forced to fight across the enormous and labyrinthine and "bigger on the inside" Oldest House, the paranatural brutalist office building hidden in plain sight in New York City. Jesse fights against the Hiss, an infective resonance from another universe that takes over people like an infection, and ultimately cuts them off from their home dimension, but things are still pretty dire by the end of it: the Hiss is still in the Oldest House and able to keep replicating, and that means that the building must remain on total lockdown. In Alan Wake II, it was confirmed that the FBC hasn't heard from HQ since 2019 (four years by the point of that game). People don't even know that Jesse has become Director outside the building, and Dylan, the only person to survive being cleansed by Jesse, has been in a coma.

We did get a glimpse of Dylan in Alan Wake II's Lake House DLC, but what it seems to indicate is that Dylan, no longer wanting to be part of the Hiss, is nonetheless still somehow affected by it, and seems to be working as hard as he can to keep it contained, but he's failing.

And now, it looks like containment has been breached.

All right: let's get into the trailer. If you haven't watched it already, please do. Then, you can follow along as I re-watch it and make note of everything I notice.

After a brief shot of Dylan in his containment unit, we see some kind of circular pattern in the sky - something reminiscent of Polaris, the entity in Jesse's head that has guided and protected her, but clearly different. Also, very celestial and even angelic or god-like (take note of this, as it's a motif).

We then see a NYC street cafe, and watch as a coffee cup (of course coffee, it's Remedy) duplicate itself, and then a pigeon do likewise, forming, notably, a kind of swirling vortex of feathers that looks very much like a "biblically accurate angel." The feathers recede, and we see a Manhattan folded in on itself like something from Inception or Doctor Strange.

Our next shot shows another city street, but infected with a familiar hazard: the Mold. A big sign like the kind you'd see warning of construction on a freeway reads "Do Not Ingest" alternating with "Resist The Urge," while guards or, more likely, mold zombies, wander.

Next, we see another street filled with red light and Hiss Agents floating in the air. (Might be coincidence, but it's Remedy, so I'll mention it: this alley looks like the one where Alan first encounters Dark Place Casey in Alan Wake II.)

Then, most tellingly, we see the front entrance to the Oldest House in bright daylight. The front doors have been smashed open, with bodies and trails of blood down its front steps.

Then, indoors, we see Dylan's containment chamber, and what looks possibly like Jesse sitting on a couch, observing him. She gets up, grabs something off of a desk - it's a long rod of some sort, seemingly made of blackrock. A childhood photo of the Fadens is underneath it, along with a scratched pen-drawing of some kind of concentric circles and eye-like shapes, a file on the Slide Projector OOP, and some other FBC redacted memos I can't quite make out.

Jesse takes the rod over to Dylan and seems to stab him in the heart with it.

A burst of energy, Dylan's eyes open wide. He awakens and walks out of the containment unit into a surreal landscape where a strange structure awaits him. An entity - likely the Board, but it doesn't sound like it used to, greets Dylan (with different hair than the previous scene - maybe the trailer is edited to disorient us and these aren't in sequence with one another?) says "RISE AND SHINE," and then "THE SIBLING HAS GONE ROGUE/FISHING." Dylan looks down, and then he's in a subway station (I think it reads "Home Street Station," though the "home" in it is obscured on both sides somewhat). Dylan seems to shake off whatever sheathe is on the rod he now carries, and it reforms in his hand as some kind of melee weapon. The Board (we think) says "YOU'RE UP." Dylan walks up to find a street full of vaguely humanoid monsters, and the rod in his hand transforms into a massive war-hammer, which he brings to bear against the creatures as the city is twisted into a kaleidoscopic vision behind him.

We then see some action-shots (presumably of gameplay) of Dylan fighting across a surreal and twisted New York, with what looks like a pretty enormous variety of new enemies and bosses.

We get a warning from Jesse to close out the trailer: "Pace yourself. It's gonna get weirder."

    There's a bit more information on the official website:

The game sees the FBC release and deploy Dylan to deal with the chaos that has broken out into Manhattan. Our villain is only known as a "mysterious cosmic entity," and Dylan journeys out both to save the city (and world) while also trying to find his sister.

His weapon is not the Service Weapon, but something new (though similar) called The Aberrant. It looks like we'll be able to shift it between different forms depending on our needs as the situation demands. In an article on the Playstation website, folks from Remedy described the game as something of an open-world action RPG. I'm curious to see what they mean, exactly, by that. In some ways, despite being confined to one building, Control was also built in this open-world RPG structure, even if its gameplay was that of a 3rd-person shooter (though one that I think was interested a bit less in the shooting specifically than the broader action.

Dylan looks like he'll be playing very differently - at the very least, he's far more of a melee fighter. I wonder how much, if any, of Jesse's arsenal from the first game will make it into Dylan's catalogue of capabilities.

I'm honestly a little surprised that we won't be playing as Jesse - there's a pretty profound perspective shift, but if there's anything I have faith in Remedy doing more than anything, it's telling a compelling story.

I think we can probably gather that Jesse and the Board are not getting along so well after the events of Foundation. But was it Jesse who broke containment in the Oldest House, or was it Dylan when we encountered him during The Lake House DLC as Estevez?

While it sure seems The Hiss are going to be part of this game, I also kind of get the impression that they're only one of many problems in the city (we saw the Mold, but also possibly some new, other things). Does this have anything to do with the Blessed Organization? It was such a compelling hinted-at antagonist in the first game (and again in Alan Wake II).

The most exciting thing is that the game is due to come out in 2026 - about two years earlier than I had even hoped it would come. Unless it somehow comes out in the first half of the year, I'll still have to wait until my 40s to play it, but only just barely! There's other big new out of the Game Awards as well, but this was the biggest one on my list.

EDIT:

Just tossing in more specific details - not sure how relevant these all are.

Ok, some more scrutiny: the first shot of the twisted city we get after our pigeon/angel thing shows us a partially-mirrored street, which is evidently Thomas St. The name Thomas in Remedy is a pretty important one, as Thomas Zane, or whatever being claims that identity, has shown up in Remedy games as early as in Death Rally. Obviously, his role become a lot more bizarre and mysterious in Alan Wake II, where Tom Zane, the Finnish auteur filmmaker appeared as a decidedly less benevolent force than the poet we knew as Thomas Zane in the first Alan Wake game had been.

Another closer look at the papers on the desk when Jesse picks up The Aberrant to stab Dylan/bestow it upon him seems to be a report on the Ordinary AWE.

The strange twisted-steel structure that Dylan approaches early on seems to be similar in pattern on the weapon Dylan holds, though I don't think it's quite the same.

The Board (assuming it is the Board) sounds different. This could be just an updated sound design compared with the first game in 2019, but we also don't see the inverted black pyramid. In the first game, The Board claims to be broadcasting from "The Other," and I actually think that pyramid might have been The Other - an intermediary or even just a device the Board uses. Perhaps it sounds different because it's speaking to Dylan in a different way.

Dylan's hair is inconsistent. While comatose, it's long, but when we see him step out and meet with the giant metallic structure (that is maybe what the Board is using to communicate with him) he's got shorter hair, closer to what we saw in The Lake House. Obviously, it's all had to grow back since the events of Control, when all of his hair fell out, but six years seems plenty of time for that to happen.

There's what feels like a jump-cut from Dylan observing his weapon to his appearance in the subway. There are posters in the subway for something called Parting (broken up into PA, RT, and ING, if that's relevant). Underneath, the poster says "One night only," and then "Sunset." Now, I actually briefly thought that this might imply that this subway is actually in Los Angeles (we have a major street here called Sunset Boulevard - you've probably heard of the movie named after it) but when Dylan exits the station, the format of the subway sign is unmistakably the NYC metro.

Subway stations are, of course, a common location in Remedy games, from Max Payne to Alan Wake II.

As a note, before exiting the station, Dylan seems to shake the bloody blades from the ends of his bifurcated weapon before allowing one half to meld back to the other half.

Once again, my best guess at the name of the station is Home Street Station. So, it's not Caldera St. Station from Alan Wake II or Roscoe Station from Max Payne. There's graffiti on the signs, one depicting a big ring and the other that seems if anything to say "grok," or maybe "brok." Not sure if there's any relevance there.

What's almost certainly more relevant is the giant glowing ring in the sky above what seems to be an army of Hiss. The ring, and the shape surrounding it, actually seems reminiscent of the Former, though in a more blindingly bright, almost angelic form.

If I had to guess, I imagine there's going to be a lot of pseudo-angelic imagery with the monsters in this game. First of all, there's a lot of reason to believe that the otherworldly entities we encounter in Control, such as the Board, would have been thought of (I won't even say mistaken as, because it's more of a matter of perspective than truth) gods or other supernatural entities. Second, and this could look either foolish or completely obvious depending on whether they actually show up, it would tie into the name of the Blessed Organization. We have practically zero sense of what the agenda of the Blessed is, but I would not be shocked if they have some religious framing for their actions.

It does look like we're going to be fighting a lot of Hiss - they might be our meat-and-potatoes bad guys, though it also looks like they're a little more warped and distorted (not, like, those specific enemies form the first game) and some are a bit less humanoid in appearance. But I think we're going to have other things to deal with. The real show-stopper appears to be some kind of boss that looks like a floating face but throws various metal or stone things at us - not appearing to be Hiss at all, given that the color scheme is far more yellows and browns.

It's clear that we're going to be facing down a lot of surreal and weird stuff (surreal is how you hook me - I love the design of the Nevrons in Expedition 33, and Control going in with more diverse enemy design is going to probably be a big win).

The trailer's last shot, post title card, actually might be Jesse, rather than Dylan, floating in toward a strange ring-like pattern that looks very much to me like an eye, its colors violets, reds, and blues. This doesn't look like Polaris, but it also doesn't look like the other things we've been seeing.

I'm really curious to see what role Jesse plays in this game. While it's a very exciting direction to take Dylan in for this game, I'm also very fond of Jesse, and controlling her in the first game felt so damned good.

Alan Wake II gave us two playable protagonists (and then a bunch of others in the DLCs,) and so part of me wonders if we'll be able to play as both Dylan and Jesse, but giving them very different styles of combat. I don't want to pin my hopes to that - as far as the material we have so far implies, the whole game is going to be Dylan's - it has been described as a "sibling" to the first game.

The strange possibilities hinted at in the first game surrounding Jesse and Dylan could very easily be something explored here. Dylan, in his Hissed-out state, seems to experience different realities as dreams, and in one of them, there's only a single Faden, named Jesse Dylan Faden (both siblings have names that could be a girl's or a boy's).

We likely won't get any clear details until the game's in our actual hands, but Remedy is committed to this interconnected universe - and Control and Alan Wake have both already had crossovers. I'm super curious to see if Darling's actions in the Dark Place play into this, if Alan's ascension to a "Master of Many Worlds" does, and even how the Old Gods of Asgard could play into all of this (interesting that Dylan gets to turn his weapon into a massive hammer. I know that the Service Weapon is implied to have been Mjolnir in some past iteration. What is the history of the Aberrant?)

I really have to say that, apart from chaos spilling out into Manhattan, this is very different from what I expected the game to be like. There is, of course, a bit of a knee-jerk of concern that it looks so different from the first game, but different can be very good if they have good ideas behind those differences.

And hell, Control might be one of my favorite games of all time, but it was not without its flaws. The gun was probably too weak compared to the Launch power, and as Monty Zander's critique noted, it was filled with "Goot" (or Garbage Loot). If we get a progression system that's more interesting and granular, it could be really awesome.

I just hope that, amidst all the monster fighting, we get tons of exploration, environmental storytelling, and lore documents to continue building out this incredibly cool world. Believe you me, I'll be following this game closely.

EDIT 2:

Oh, it's definitely not "Home St. Station," it's "Thomas St. Station," which makes sense given that the first intersection we see with the Atlantis Cafe at the start is Thomas Street. This is actually a real street in Manhattan, a pretty short one in Tribeca. Notably, this is the street upon which the AT&T Long Lines building stands, whose towering concrete form with no windows was a major inspiration for the Oldest House. I would not be surprised if in the Remedy universe, this building is The Oldest House, so we might now have a canonical location for the FBC HQ. (Evidently the canonical address of the Oldest House is 34 Thomas Street, which would put it just across the street from this building, which is 33.) But note in the linked Wikipedia article the entrance to the building, which clearly served as the inspiration for the Oldest House's entrance.

It might, thus, be a bit of serendipity that the building happens to be on a street that shares its name with the the RCU's most enigmatic individual.

Also, the address at the Atlantis Cafe? 665, obviously.