The State of Things in the RCU as of Control Resonant

 So much of Control Resonant's plot is shrouded in mystery. According to one of the recent trailers, an aberrant resonance appeared in Manhattan two days before the lockdown of the Oldest House failed. That's curious.

Control ends in a strange place - arguably, Jesse hasn't really accomplished a whole lot. While she was able to shut down the Slide Projector and cleanse Dylan of the Hiss, the actual Hiss "infection" of the house isn't stopped, and Dylan is put in a coma that he doesn't awaken from until far later. As we see in the previews for Control Resonant, the Hiss does make it out of the Oldest House, and is claiming victims in Manhattan. But it doesn't seem to be the primary threat here.

It's interesting because both Alan Wake and Control take place during what the FBC would classify as AWEs, but both are somewhat contained. Alan Wake's metafictional nightmare is somewhat confined to Bright Falls and its environs. Even if the ripples of it go out across the whole world, the actual shadow monsters aren't appearing anywhere but Bright Falls. Likewise, the Hiss Invasion in Control is confined to the Oldest House.

But with Manhattan, the center of America's biggest city and economic capital, warped by all of this stuff, it's hard to imagine that the rest of the world is going to continue on unaware of such paranatural things.

That said, we don't know how the game will end, so perhaps there's going to be some kind of reset of the collective unconscious that makes people forget anything that happened.

I do think it's notable that Barry's emails to Alice Wake, found in the apartment during Alan's parts of AW2, see him saying that his new friend Chester Bless encouraged him to not be in New York because something was going to happen there. When we find the Wakes' apartment all packed up and moved-out-of, the cardboard boxes that Alice's things have been packed into have "Blessed" printed on them.

To this day, I maintain that the "organization" that helped Alice regain her suppressed memories wasn't the FBC, but the Blessed Organization - as far as I can tell, the entire online discourse other than myself seems to have a consensus that she's talking about the FBC. But given Barry's connection, and her use of the word "organization," I really think that this work was separate from her visit to the Oldest House that set off Hartman, and that Blessed would be seeking out someone with a connection to a major AWE like Bright Falls.

Given this foreknowledge about something going down in New York, I think it's very likely that Blessed acted as the catalyst for the events of Control Resonant, though their goals and motives remain pretty obscure.

There are also some interesting timeline questions to consider:

Both in the announcement trailer and when Estevez meets Dylan in the Lake House DLC for AW2, Dylan's hair has grown back but is trimmed short. But when he emerges from the Oldest House in what appears to be the beginning of the game, he's got long, unkempt hair (that he eventually ties back the same way that Jesse now has it). The growth of hair would suggest several months between his acquisition of the Aberrant and the fall of the Oldest House. So what, precisely, happened when Estevez saw him?

The Lake House takes place concurrently with the story of Alan Wake II - it's likely that she goes in there while Saga is dealing with Thornton and Mulligan in Watery - which means that it's happening in the Fall of 2023. I believe that Remedy tends to set their game contemporary to their releases, so presumably Control Resonant takes place in 2026. Now, it's also totally possible that Estevez glimpsed the future, but again, there's the issue of his hair growth.

Is it possible that Dylan actually woke up years before the fall of the Oldest House? Certainly, if his meeting with Estevez didn't involve time travel, he would have been up now for at least two and a half years. But it also looks like Jesse gives him the Aberrant while he's still in a coma.

We'll have to see - the timeline here might even be an intentional mystery to tease out over the course of the game.

Interestingly, Dylan does seem to interact with Jesse, suggesting to me that we might see her earlier in the game than expected. But it also might take place in the Gap, the mental space that Dylan can escape to (and I think serves a similar role to the Writer's Place/Mind Space in AW2), meaning that he might be able to connect with her on some mental level (or even just his own projection of her) but maybe still needs to look for her.

I'm eager to see how Dylan is portrayed. Our only interactions with him in the first game were when he was brainwashed by the Hiss, and the developers have talked about how he's struggling to reckon with the things that he did under their control, and also with the horrible abuse he suffered as "P6." There's talk about how his emergence from the Oldest House is his first time actually seeing the sun since he was 10, and he's immediately called upon to fight a bunch of monsters.