Into the Unknown

 I realize that the title of this post sounds very much like the kind of title for a post about the end of my current gaming fixation, Control Resonant, but I'm not there yet. No, instead I've made it to what I'm pretty certain is the last major area of the game, which is the most disorientingly Escher-esque region so far.

We're in the endgame, but given that we've also just unlocked a new zone, that means that we've got tons of side quests and other optional objectives to sort through, meaning that it's not exactly a race to the finale.

We did get what feels like it might be Control Resonant's big musical moment, though I can't say that it's necessarily the match of, say, the Ashtray Maze or the Dark Ocean Summoning. For one thing, the song isn't by the Old Gods of Asgard, but it's also more or less Dylan's entrance into this final area and while we arrive in the middle of a giant insane battle, it doesn't really conclude with any serious punctuation.

To be fair, the "Take Control" segment in the first game, as beloved and memorable as it is, was also kind of transitionary, acting more as the lead-in to final revelations about Hedron and the false game over. And hell, Dark Ocean Summoning kind of only works in the worst possible way, as triumphant as it feels.

I will say that after Alan Wake II, which had Sam Lake's fingerprints all over it, the relatively small role he played in this game (I'm actually not sure the degree to which he actively worked on it at all, other than being the Creative Lead for Remedy) has left Resonant with... I don't want to say less of a signature style, but I guess one that I'm not quite as attuned to picking up on.

Once again, I want to reiterate that the game's great - it's just that Remedy leapt to among my favorite game studios when I got into them three years ago, and so I'm holding this game to the tightest standards.

Anyway, I'm going to go into a spoiler cut - not that I've advanced the plot much since my last post, or I think two posts ago - but just because I want to get into things that have been revealed so far.

After facing off against the Hedron entity in the Oldest House, the Hiss manifests within Dylan, but he fights it and gets it under control. The conclusion is that Dylan never actually got the Hiss purged from him - Jesse/Polaris/Hedron instead constructed a containment field around what part of it remained inside of him. The upshot is that he's basically inoculated - if you're already infected by the Hiss, it can't... infect you again. Seemingly, it's only when in proximity with the Hedron that the Hiss within Dylan fights emerge from its containment and revert him to the monster he was.

The implications of this are pretty far-reaching, but I also think we've got some interesting thematic ideas to consider:

In the first game, I think we're meant to suspect Darling might have been patient zero for the Hiss, as he talks about this resonant entity he discovered and how Trench had become convinced that his old friend was becoming a threat. But the reveal that it was Trench who was actually patient zero near the end of the game seems to absolve Darling, and by extension, establish Hedron as this benevolent entity.

But...

In Resonant, Hedron is presented instead as just as much of a threat, if not more, than the Hiss. Just like Darling, or even more so, given that Darling was already known to be complicit in some shady shit, but we just hadn't seen the degree to which he was directly awful toward Dylan, Hedron's benevolence is essentially revoked by this game's story.

But then we have to consider the following:

First, Darling was transformed or transported by Hedron (evidently his Hedron was the same entity that the Fadens called Polaris). Why did this not make him a Resonant like the various bosses that we've seen? If his fate were still a total mystery, I could imagine that being a reveal, but we've seen Darling in the Dark Place following his departure from this reality (or at least I assume that the Final Draft videos we find where he meets Tom Zane are from after the events of Control).

More worrying, though, is Jesse, who has carried Polaris within her since she was a child. Now, Pope suggests that Polaris was weak and dying, which might be why it wasn't capable of much other than empowering some kids to help in its mission to destroy the Hiss (and probably deal with the Not-Mother situation).

But again, the words of the Board from the start of the game bode ill - that Jesse might have become some kind of Resonant and that Dylan will have to fight her as the final boss. Even if that is the case, I could see there being some sort of redemption in the end.

(Craziest theory yet: that the game ends with Jesse and Dylan merging into a single being, never to be parted again. Just putting that up on the board in case I'm right.)

Of course, I do wonder if perhaps the story as presented here - with Hedron recharacterized as a villainous (or at least cosmically dangerous) thing might actually be our false understanding of what's going on. But would that twist on top of this existing twist actually be satisfying?

In a sense, perhaps Jesse's possession of Polaris and Dylan's possession of the Hiss might be a way for the two to mutually annihilate the resonant entities within themselves, freeing both from these cosmic forces.

Anyway:

While Hedron (and this must be a separate Hedron entity from Polaris, as they died... even if some remnant of them lived on in Jesse) was cast out of the Oldest House, it created its own warped mirror of Manhattan up above, the Oldest House stretching to impossible height and a weird, warped city-scape now floating above.

Unknown, this new zone, is extremely shifty, with many fights and puzzles requiring you to flip gravity. In practice, it's also a bit of a greatest hits of areas from earlier in the game, with I assume at least one sort of "island" based on each above-ground zone before. (There's a version of the Factory with the Deserter Resonant, as well as a warped UN building where it seems our zone Resonant will be - which is either going to be Arish or we're going to find Arish there and rescue him from it. I think I saw the theater from the Western Incursion Zone and some area of the Park).

Getting to Unknown requires us to take advantage of Dylan's total immunity to fall damage. We climb to the top of the Oldest House (thankfully the elevator now allows roof access, extra helpful now that the building is like, miles tall). Then, we have to get to a platform where we can shift to stand on top of it (it's a Patterned Taxi) and then, shocking Pope and Zoe, we leap off and fall the, like, insane distance into the twisted cityscape (I wonder if I jumped the gun and missed some dialogue by doing this too early).

Anyway, Zoe blasts in "Fight for Control," and given that this has the word Control in it, I assume this is meant to be our big climactic musical moment, but it's... it's fine. The spectacle of falling toward the cityscape, with the massive ring of light beyond that looks like the eye of god is amazing. But it's kind of just another street fight when we get there. Also, as someone who was in high school in the early 2000s, let me just go on the record as a millennial and say I fucking hate nu-metal. I've been asked why I have the music tastes of someone ten years older than I am, and the answer is because rock in my teen years generally fucking sucked.

But whatever. It's fine. A lot of people have nostalgia for it. I don't understand them, but to each their own.

Anyway, while I suspect that, like the first game, we'll be able to keep doing side missions and such in the post-game (though it would be nice to see some firmer resolution to the crisis,) but I still feel inclined to do a big circuit and clear out my quest log before I finish things off. I realize that I've probably got a couple stages of main quest stuff to get through before going to the grand finale, but better safe than sorry.

I did find the last taxi for... er... The Last Taxi. While the side quest is pretty basic - you just find taxis in each zone and solve a pretty simple series of puzzles in the Taxi Dimension - I enjoyed it for much of the reason why I loved going to the Oceanview Motel and Casino in the first game (sadly absent, at least so far,) which is that the place has amazing atmosphere. The first time I arrived, I genuinely thought I was in The Dark Place (as I mentioned in an earlier post, each time Dylan arrives there, he answers a call on a payphone with shots that are framed almost exactly the way that Alan is when he finds the one in the Dark Place).

I haven't gotten the final upgrade for any of the weapon forms yet, but I'm getting close. I know they have a New Game Plus mode, and while I think the initial plan for that was to just have a single NG+ that wouldn't go on to any further playthrough, they apparently either want to add or maybe did already add an indefinite NG+ system. Mainly I just wanted to have more than one save file so I could play through the first game again without losing my finished save with all the tough challenges overcome, but I believe this one already has that. So, you know, great. In a year or two if I want to revisit this, I'll be able to, and that's great.