I've made it to (and probably done a fair chunk of) the first zone that isn't presented in your initial vista from the Watchtower, a region called The Underpass. But if you were expecting it to be something like the Lincoln Tunnel, it's... very much not that.
What it is is a departure from the "messed up Manhattan" zones we've had previously, and is instead a descent into a realm that recalls far more the Labyrinth from acknowledged major influence on Control, House of Leaves.
I guess that's the big spoiler, but I'll do a cut to talk about what is going on there:
The attempt to use the Pattern to fight the Hiss in the Evacuation zone does not go well - it turns out that when you employ a more powerful dangerous resonance to defeat a different resonance, things can... well, go wrong.
We show up and have a chat with Arish by the Sinkhole (our first delve into which was part of the game's previews - I had thought it was a sidequest, but it's quite important to the overall plot) where he reiterates that he freaking hates Dylan (though your dialogue options can suggest that he maybe just needs someone to blame for all the trauma he's experienced and errors he's made in the past). The remains of The Artist, the first Resonant we fight in Downtown, are being used as the conduit for the Pattern resonance, which does make Dylan feel a bit... uncomfortable.
But as the Hiss mass for an assault before the CFD (can't remember what it stands for, but it's the Hiss-obliterating weapon they're trying to make) can be completed, Arish orders it fired early, to catastrophic results. Dylan is forced to race through a twisting gauntlet to reach the thing and shut it off. The end result is that the weapon is destroyed, and the Hiss is still around, though at least the Evac building (again, I think it's supposed to be the UN) remains warped but no longer glows with evil red. (The image, I think, could have been inspired by this art from Cool World.)
Anyway, Dylan wakes up later after things have been kind of cleaned up, and we find that Arish has stepped down, leaving Emily Pope as sole acting director.
In the aftermath, the Sinkhole has expanded, and we are sent after a team of scientists sent there by Pope. We also finally recover Langston's cat Alfred. Good news: he's alive! Bad news: Maria, the neighbor who took care of him, has become a Hiss Distorted. Good and also Scary News: Alfred is for sure not just a cat, but some sort of paranatural monster who can kill the shit out of the Hiss and has been known to take down full on coyotes. Figures that Langston would have a terrifying monster that looks like a housecat as a pet (he does lament that as the head of the Panopticon, he really should have suspected something).
Anyway, that technically side mission aside, we go further down and the Sinkhole stops looking like weird patterned apartments and instead looks like...
Well, the labyrinth from House of Leaves.
Granted, this doesn't remain true for long - we open out into a vast expanse, where massive concrete structures float. It looks, in fact, much more like the Bleeds from the first game's Foundation DLC, only rather than the blank white of the Astral Plane, there's just darkness off in the distance (though notably there's white up above, and we are said to be under the Oldest House, so I wouldn't be shocked if that area up above is maybe reaching up toward the Foundation. The area seems to be the "boss lair" of the zone's Resonant, though, so I'm waiting to go there).
Platforming is a major challenge here, and while there are some Hiss and a bit of Mold as well, traversal's really the name of the game. In particular, there are some areas where you need to use Shift, but while we've generally used that in fairly low-stakes indoor environments or just on streets, it's much easier to fall off into the void here. Fittingly, rescuing Alfred gives us the recipe for an artifact that reduces damage from falling into the void, which I probably should have made before going farther into this area.
Anyway, we find another Fault here, and get the most emotional moment of the game so far: Dylan follows sort of anti-silhouettes of himself and Jesse as they were kids (anti-silhouette in that they're made of light on a mostly dark background). There's a bit of a puzzle where you have to guide the light-siblings back to one another by following close to bright walls on which they can shine.
We get a bit more about their family life, and it's very sad: they remember having a happy childhood until things abruptly changed. Their mother withdrew from them while their father became violent. The Faden siblings grew to rely more on each other, staying out late to play outside of their toxic home. One night, they came home to their paranoid mother holding their father's rifle at them, thinking that they're intruders, and she doesn't lower the gun even when she sees who it is.
It's not 100% clear what happens as their dad comes to wrest the gun away from her, but we do hear that their mother spent a long time in the hospital following the incident. I don't think that the parents truly vanished until the AWE, but there's a causal line of the two Faden kids playing where they shouldn't be and stumbling across the Slide Projector.
This powerful bond between the siblings, then, lends further tragedy to what Jesse reveals: she used the Slide Projector to leave, going to another plane of existence, and in order to close the faults that threaten to tear the universe apart, she'll need to seal them from the other side, sacrificing herself, or at least her ability to come home, to save the world.
Dylan's reaction to this is up to you, but I felt that acceptance would not be in-character - both siblings have been desperately trying to reunite for 24 years.
Fuel for the weird fan theory that Dylan's dream about the two of them being a single person named Jesse Dylan Faden is that as Dylan recounts his childhood, he initially describes the happy period before his parents started having their issues as one in which the world was great with the "three of us." But it also seems that something about where Jesse is and her planar distance is warping memories. Dylan struggles even to recall her name at one point.
As someone who is very close with my own older sister, this relationship hits home quite a bit - thankfully I didn't spend 17 years separated from her, but I do feel like Dylan's in this weird place where he is an adult with immense power, but has all of these complexities to his experience that would benefit from a slightly older, more world-wise sympathetic ear who can forgive him for everything that weighs upon him.
I'm hoping that this dire conclusion is something we can heroically work around, but I'm studiously avoiding spoilers as best as I can.
Anyway, setting those more emotional stakes aside, we then have a truly mind-bending puzzle to solve. The Pattern is patterning time itself, and so when we find Pope's researchers, not only do we find four versions of their base camp within the Underpass, but we also find multiple versions of the team, some of which are super dead and some of which are still alive. The time dilation has meant that some of the teams have experienced far more time down here than others, with one group I think being there for two years.
Dylan himself is replicated across these timelines, and communicating with Zoe over the radio is a nightmare because there are multiple versions of each of them all on the same channel.
After resolving issues at each of the camps, you get a call from a different Dylan to go fight the Hiss and clear the way for the findings of all four teams to be transmitted to Pope, which has the fun extra detail of three other Dylans blinking into existence and fighting Hiss alongside you, with some monsters vanishing as they pop back into their timeline (or you back into yours?)
As an aside, a couple years back, I was running my D&D game set in the world of Ravnica (originally from Magic the Gathering,) and I had the party venture through Duskmantle, the headquarters of the extremely secretive House Dimir, one of the world's ten world-governing Guilds. I based the look and feel of Duskmantle on The Oldest House. At one point, the players found themselves in a room somewhat like MC Escher's Relativity, and while they were limited to just one odd structure, they could see off into a dark void other similar structures, with alternate-timeline versions of the party (I asked them what other character concepts they had considered when first creating characters for the campaign).
Remarkably, the sequel to Control did almost precisely this, even with the bizarre Escher-esque subjective gravity.
The Underpass is a welcome change of scenery from the urban streets we've spent most of the game in, but I also suspect that there are fewer activities to do here, which is probably for the best, as the rough concrete in a black void doesn't allow for the visual variation that the urban areas do. I did find that freaking dog again, but this time I didn't see her toy anywhere obvious, so I decided to come back to her. Not sure if there's also a taxi here as well. I'll probably get exploring now that I've done a fair amount of plot-advancement.
It does seem, though, that most foes I'm fighting have grey level numbers, so I'm probably overpowered for where I am in the game.
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