What is canon in a universe where a writer can re-write reality?
2019's Control was the first game from Remedy Entertainment to commit to the idea of a shared, connected universe, doing so by making direct references to the events of 2010's Alan Wake. While Remedy did have a game between those two, 2016's Quantum Break, that time-warped narrative officially belongs to Microsoft, much as Remedy's first giant hit, Max Payne, has been owned by Rockstar Games (even making a third game without Remedy's involvement). Alan Wake and Control are the two franchises that are fully owned by Remedy (I can't recall if they got the rights to Max Payne back prior to starting work on the remakes or if that's a licensing thing).
The point is, at this point, Control and Alan Wake have each had significant crossover with other another, with the FBC playing a key role in the main story of Alan Wake II.
This year, we are eagerly anticipating the release of Control Resonant, previously presented as Control 2.
The way in which Remedy makes its games and tells its stories invites you to scrutinize every detail you're presented with, and I think right of the bat that the fact that Control's sequel is not simply numbered - something previous Remedy games have done (Max Payne 2 does have the sub-title The Fall of Max Payne) - is cause for curiosity.
Resonance is, of course, pretty key to the world of Control. Both the villainous Hiss and the helpful Hadron and Polaris, are resonances, less physical beings than a kind of frequency or pattern.
While the idea of anything of any real substance merely being a resonance might seem absurd on the surface, things like String Theory suggest that this might actually be the underlying nature of matter itself: Einstein came up with his theory of special relativity that linked matter and energy (the famous E=mc^2) and String Theory suggests that the base particles of matter are actually coiled strings of energy that vibrate in a certain way.
One of the big critiques of String Theory is "so what?" - a question as to how this model actually changes our approach to what these particles do. But in the speculative fiction realms that these games take place within, one could imagine that vibrations and resonance might make reality itself a little more vulnerable to manipulation and transformation.
One of the strangest interpretations of quantum physics is the manner in which things can exist in a superposition until they're measured: a particle acts like it has all manner of "spin" simultaneously until it is measured. Some experiments have shown that a particle can interfere with itself because of this, the two versions of reality bumping up against one another until we intervene to determine the truth. And thus, there's an idea that when we do measure the spin of a particle, we're actually creating separate realities, one that is spin up, one where it's spin down.
Apologies to the physicists who could explain this a lot more accurately than I can.
Anyway, this got me thinking:
In Control, we learn that Dylan Faden was being trained to become the next director of the FBC. One of the numerous meanings of the game's title is that Jesse acted as the "Control" in an experiment - two siblings with similar parautilitarian potential, but one was subject to constant intervention and training while the other was left to her devices to mature into adulthood on her own (alternatively, Dylan being kept in captivity and away from the influence of the outside world may have been the control subject).
Of course, things don't work out with Dylan, and he plays the closest thing to an antagonist in the game, acting as the mouthpiece of the Hiss. Even before the Hiss arrive, though, Dylan's shot at directorship is over, because he's evidently killed one of the scientists working with him.
But what if he didn't?
Through the many drafts and edits that Alan Wake makes to the story that shapes his reality, we get numerous versions of events. Indeed, the scene in which Jesse spies on Alan meeting with Tom Zane in Control's AWE expansion plays out very differently when we see the same scene in Alan Wake II. But it's definitely the same scene, playing out in a different way.
Tonally, and genre-wise, Remedy has taken multiple approaches to the same idea: a multiverse. Quantum Break is not canon, again, because it's owned by Microsoft, but some of its ideas and even characters seem to have been slyly brought into the Remedy Connected Universe. Warlin Door is clearly Martin Hatch - he was even initially meant to be played by Lance Reddick, only for Reddick's death to prevent that. Door exists simultaneously in all realities, and while that can mean the truly distinct kinds of realities like the Dark Place, the Astral Plane, etc., it also might mean that he exists across alternate universes where peoples' fates are different.
In Control Resonant, we aren't playing as Jesse, but are instead playing as Dylan.
My expectation remains that we're probably going to be playing in the same canonical timeline/universe as the first game, and that Dylan, freed from the Hiss, will likely be motivated by finding his sister, perhaps without the assistance of the FBC (and even maybe its opposition). Jesse is the FBC's Director, but she has also clearly developed some friction with The Board.
However, let's also consider what seems to be happening in the game: New York, at least Manhattan, is getting twisted by weird energies and flooded with monsters previously contained by the Oldest House - things like the Hiss and the Mold (boy, the Firebreak team does not seem like it was very successful).
Unless the RCU is going to be one in which New York is either supremely fucked up or at least the Manhattan AWE becomes an enormous historical event, something has to bring the chaos there to an end. And I wonder if that means that we're going to be looking at an alternate universe.
Sequels invite twin imagery - Alan Wake II gave us two protagonists, two worlds, two "books," even the Koskela twins. Jesse and Dylan have always been foils for one another, and it's interesting that this game appears to be flipping the script, with Dylan trying to find his lost sister, rather than Jesse looking for her lost brother.
What does it mean for it to be Resonant?
Does it take place within a different universe?
In Alan Wake II's Lake House DLC, we play as Kieran Estevez, and near the end of the adventure, we have an opportunity to go to the Oceanview Motel & Casino via a lightswitch cord - something FBC agents are not only aware of but even encouraged to do when they find a cord. Estevez shows up not in the familiar lobby we see when Jesse visits it in Control, but in some other hallway that leads to a door marked with a symbol that we've historically associated with Control 2. This seems to lead into the Oldest House, and Estevez passes through a hallway that honestly looks more like the Executive Sector (with portraits of the director that show Jesse and someone else, maybe Trench, overlapping in concentric circles) but must be in Containment because there's a sign taking us into the Panopticon. There, Estevez encounters a no-longer-in-a-coma Dylan, his hair grown back, but still locked up and evidently distressed, trying to convey a message to his sister that he's "sorry" and that he "really tried."
The visions Estevez gets before she arrives back at the Lake House are clearly linked to the events of Control Resonant, with the Hiss and Mold breaking out into an Manhattan that has twisted in on itself in kaleidoscopic ways.
But there are some oddities:
In the Control Resonant trailer, we see what appears to be Jesse at Dylan's bedside, taking up the object we'll know as the Aberrant and jamming it into his chest - evidently the ritual required for him to bond with it, as she is bonded with the Service Weapon.
Now, to be fair, Dylan could just be sleeping in his cell when this happens. Given the editing, I think we're meant to believe that the containment failure, the outbreak of the Hiss and other dangerous things from the Oldest House, has already happened, and that this is an act of desperation on Jesse's part.
But if Dylan is still in a coma when this happens, a big question about the timeline opens up - Estevez's adventure takes place during Saga's - probably during the "Local Girl" chapter, as that's the one that starts right after Alan comes out of the lake and sets of the FBC monitoring station and ends with Estevez showing up to take over the investigation after he experiences in the Lake House.
There are some assumptions being made here, of course, like the idea that Estevez' visit to the Oldest House is happening at the same time - it wouldn't seem that impossible for her to have unwittingly gone to the near future. We know that time shenanigans are afoot in all of this - Saga and Alan having their distorted meetings at the Overlaps when Alan's half of the conversation is likely happening years earlier and not in the same order.
But it does feel very possible that we're looking at different realities, or at least, that the Dylans we're seeing need not all be the same one as the one we're playing.
Another note of interest: Alan has been having an influence on New York with his visitations of Alice. While we're likely meant to think of his visits to Parliament Tower initially as just Alan's projection of his home, we discover later that his visitations have been real enough to alert Alice, and affect her behavior. Even stuck in the Dark Place, he has had an influence on the real world.
Is it coincidence that Alan is from New York? Might we actually go to the real Parliament Tower as Dylan?
Anyway, we still haven't gotten any further news about Control Resonant, but the release date is some time this year. You can be sure I'll be dissecting everything we get.
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