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.