Ok, how to do this without spoilers...
When we played the first Control, we knew that Jesse ultimately tracked down the FBC and entered the Oldest House to rescue her brother, after 17 long years of separation. That was her whole motivation to begin with, not to become the FBC's new director and spend seven years locked inside of the Oldest House battling Hiss.
In the first game, we did slowly start to piece together the siblings' backstory and the events of the AWE that took place in Ordinary, Maine in 2002, but it was all detailed purely in documents and logs that only gave us fragments. I wondered if we would ever be able to see the events themselves.
Well... let's get into spoiler territory:
Your only real main mission when arriving in the "Unknown" zone way above the Oldest House and floating over Manhattan, is to sever links with the Hedron causing the Patterning to open the way for you to fight it.
Jesse's fate remains in question - we get disturbingly Patterned audio glimpses of her, and I'm still worried we're going to ultimately have to fight her. But the bond between these siblings is the very heart of the game.
When the links become severed, something very strange happens: our screen seems to glitch out, and we ultimately wind up on a screen full of letters. The words "Hello World" appear, and then we find the letter D, which we then guide around to create Dylan's name. Doing so, we are transported to an SNES-style JRPG-like game very much in the aesthetic of Earthbound.
And here, we play as Dylan (in a party with Jesse) in 16-bit sprites as we go through the events of the Ordinary AWE. The Fadens live in a fucking nightmare of a childhood, where their mentally ill mother has become so depressed that she won't even talk to her children (there's a note that the TV in the kids' room has a bullet hole where their mom almost shot them). Their father is an alcoholic who has just been fired from his job as a security guard, and it's very clear that the family is falling apart.
Also, another really weird note is that their grandmother has sent back a letter in which she seems confused that they're referring to "both" their kids - what the fuck happened here? Dylan dismisses it as grandma going senile, but this isn't the first time that someone has suggested that Jesse and Dylan were originally a single person (in fact, Dylan is the one who first presents this possibility in the first game after saying he had a dream in which he was a girl named Jesse Dylan Faden).
Anyway, the events play out to a large extent the way that we had already known, though a bit more explicit: the bullies, and later basically all the other kids in town, started feeding off of the Not-Mother and turning into "Dung Monkeys," (whom we fight in turn-based RPG fashion). The Dung-Monkeys straight-up killed Dylan's teacher Mrs. Chester (not sure if we should read into some connection with Chester Bless, but I'm fairly convinced we're going to get nothing more concrete about the Blessed Organization this game, which is a shame - though I do think that the "Secret Organization" hideouts must be theirs).
Even in the 16-bit game, his experiences in Ordinary are almost like flashbacks, where he's trying to piece together his memories and identity. We also get flashes to his time in the Prime Candidate Program, and watch as Trench starts to show his first signs of Hiss infection after the trip into The Hand Slidescape. (Darling does wonder how he and Jesse could talk there when it's 100% silent.)
Darling also earns himself no favors when we see that his reaction to Dylan's killing of Roberts as a sign of potential - they had been frustrated that Dylan wasn't showing any paranatural aptitude, but by cracking the abusive guard in half, he showed that he truly had great power.
I do wonder if we'll ever see Darling again in the Dark Place or beyond, and if he will have come to any understanding of the fucking evil he did or if he'll remain callously detached from the harm he's done.
Anyway, it's cool to see a depiction of places like Temple or Meadow. Also, Neil seemed to fuse with the neighbor's dog Bogus, but in a way that he gets to kind of shift back and forth between (though also seems to be a kind of weird hybrid). Neil is at large, too, which is cool.
Another interesting element I don't think was in the first game is that one of the bullies, Hugo, is very mysterious - Dylan isn't aware of him having parents, and even the FBC files on the Ordinary AWE seem to be unable to confirm he was a kid in the town.
There are some weird things going on. Jesse, angry with her parents for their stubborn inability to understand what is going on in the town, wishes her parents were gone, and shortly thereafter, every adult in the town vanishes (Faden parents included). Also, there's an odd detail that a lot of metallic personal items like jewelry and watches were found in the polluted pond by the town dump.
As the Earthbound-like adventure goes on, eventually Dylan pieces together the "ninth slide" that combines to make his modern, adult self. He's able to revisit the moment that Jesse broke away from Trench and Darling while he remained in their custody, and while Jesse can't hear him, maybe because this is a memory, he tells her as best he can that he doesn't blame her, that he could never have asked for a better big sister, and that he'll always love her.
I do think this game has been more emotionally intense than the first - Jesse was reasonably outraged at the FBC for what they did to her brother, and horrified at the state that she found him in, but the dominant emotion was fear, fighting against this monstrous threat.
Resonant puts us in weird positions where things we thought of as benevolent, like Hedron, are now the big threats.
Case in point: the Resonant in Unknown.
Yeah, you knew it had to happen this way: the Resonant is Arish, and his new form, The Co-Director, is a truly dehumanizing one, where he floats with doubled arms and legs and a big circular hole through his head. A ring of dead (or controlled) FBC rangers floats around him, making him look almost like Shiva.
The thing that makes this fight so very hard is that he doesn't actually do a ton of damage, but he does build up a debuff that I assume is Command, and if that debuff fills, you instantly die (a bit like Miquella stealing your heart in the Promised Consort Radahn fight, though ironically that doesn't work the way that most Souls-like debuffs do). As such, I think you need to just maximize damage output and dodge attacks as best as you can (though I could swear that I got some Command build-up when I was nowhere near his attacks). You can stagger him with enough falter damage, and I wonder if maybe that's the better strategy. You can't instant-kill him, but you have a good window to get in some powerful attacks, and I think I got him down to like 25% with some nasty fire-attacks (I might also go for the short blades rather than my typical Glaive primary weapon).
It's sad to see Arish go this way, though the story has been hinting at this for a while (especially after we activate the CFD and he starts talking about his headaches). Arish has a much more antagonistic relationship with Dylan than he had with Jesse (with Jesse he was downright friendly, even if he had a bit of a "cop" attitude). Dylan's final exchange with Arish, though, sees some reconciliation. As Arish begins to understand that he's probably too far-gone, Dylan can assure him that he's got his rangers in good hands (though the ones we bring into the fight against him get killed very easily, so... let's say the Rangers as a whole). Perhaps in his last moments of independent free will, he can empathize with Dylan.
Anyway, I've made three attempts so far, but it's a very tough fight, and if I die again it will officially be the boss that has taken the most attempts.
While there are some weapon upgrades left and certainly plenty of talents left to unlock, I think it's probably possible to get everything on your first playthrough, so I'm wondering if NG+ ups the difficulty or if they just let you absolutely wreck house (also wondering if you start with all of your traversal abilities).
I'm actually usually not very into NG+ modes - I think I downed the Cleric Beast on my original Bloodborne character's second playthrough, but that's about it. Indeed, in Elden Ring, they let you beat the game without going into NG+ and so I've still got all my characters sitting there just in case they ever release a second DLC (which seems unlikely). One game I really ought to try it with is Lies of P, given that that has actual new things unlock in a second playthrough (actually, I played through Armored Core VI three times because you can't get one of the endings until the third time, which is nuts. But that's also a game where you can already replay any mission you want, and the progression system doesn't prevent you from de-powering your build by choosing cheaper parts, so I'd almost argue that the "full game" of ACVI is actually all three playthroughs.)
Anyway, I'm not sure if I'm emotionally prepared to finish this game, but I do think I've really just got the final boss left. I could leave The Co-Director for afterward (I assume like the first game you can keep playing post-game) but it feels like I ought to cross everything off of my lists.
Though I did just unlock a ton of "Tasks" that mean I've actually got a ton of smaller sidequests, so... yeah, no running out of stuff to do here.
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