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.
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