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.
Well, it ain't coming out before my birthday (which is on Monday, and it's a Big One) but we have a release date and we got a new trailer for Control Resonant.
The date: September 24th. The trailer, well, here:
Big takeaways:
First off, it looks like they're not going to be coy about us finding Jesse. The Faden siblings seem to team up at some point, and if we're getting it in a trailer, I assume it's at most halfway through the game's story. Honestly, after the hell that Jesse went through in the first game only to get the weird Hiss-corrupted Dylan and then Dylan in a coma, getting to see the two of them seemingly with their right minds together is nice.
Dylan's role at the FBC is, of course, going to be an interesting one: we see someone (is it Arish?) who seems none too happy about working with Dylan, claiming he's not even human, and it looks like Dylan's been fitted with some kind of control device (maybe even an explosive to kill him if he turns on them?)
But surely the most welcome and wonderful thing the trailer gives us is more Dr. Darling videos, which were truly such a highlight of the first game.
We're nearly four months out, but you can be sure I'm going to be going hard into this game the moment it's available.
Well, it's coming out this year, but we don't know when this year.
Our first trailer dedicated to just gameplay, we're given a glimpse of what Dylan's journey across a warped and weird Manhattan will look like.
A few takeaways:
I get the sense that Resonant might be a little more action-focused - Dylan seems to have to fight off a number of monsters en route to his mission objective, and while that certainly happened with Jesse, the first Control game was, I felt, more about exploration interrupted by bursts of action.
We see what appears to be Hiss (or maybe Hiss/Dark Presence hybrids, as the monsters seem to be more inhuman like Emil Hartman was) as well as some Mold Infected along his route.
Dylan is seen shifting weapon-types rapidly throughout combat. While I'm sure this is a developer with intimate knowledge of the systems trying to show it all off, I'm curious to see how fluidly we can play.
It's said to be an "early" mission in the game, and Dylan already has a lot of abilities, including what seems to be the ability to hover (a pretty late-game thing for Jesse).
The Shift ability that they showcase allows Dylan to hop to surfaces that aren't parallel to his own ground and change gravity - we see him hop onto a wall, making that "down" for him, and when he fights a foe, it seems he has the ability to shift them off of that plane of gravity to send them falling sideways.
Enemy design looks like it's getting a lot more diverse, which is awesome (though I suppose we'll see as the game goes on).
"Resonants" appear to be the game's major bosses. In the announcement trailer we saw some posters for what looks to be some kind of dance show called "Parting," and that seems to then be the focal point for this actually rather human-looking boss.
We see signs for a Casino, a Hotel, and a Theater in similar neon lights. Casinos aren't a think in New York, but it does make me think of the Oceanview Motel and Casino, the Place of Power from the first game, and of course its Oceanview Hotel seen in the Dark Place (which... maybe is the same place? Honestly, if not for the familiar name, the Hotel in Alan Wake II might have seemed no more notable than Caldera Street Station or Poet's Cinema).
We seem to have a friendly woman on the radio named Zoe. Is she an FBC agent? I don't remember any Zoes in previous games.
The game's UI seems to retain a lot of its look from the first game - I'm eager to see all the environmental storytelling and document-hunting that I enjoyed so much in the first game.
Symmetries seem to be a major motif - the road leading to the dancer Resonant is mirrored, with smears of blood creating symmetrical patterns that look almost like an intentional design.
Anyway, I'm really excited to have more morsels of this game, one that I've been really looking forward to since playing the first game three years ago (and I'm a newbie, others have been waiting seven years! Not quite the same wait as we had for Alan Wake II, but still!)
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.
In Control, he's Jesse's goal, and then her heartbreak. Only ten years old during the Ordinary AWE (weirdly making him the same age as a coincidentally large number of my friends) and one year younger than big sis Jesse, Dylan and Jesse were separated when she escaped the FBC's agents who had come to investigate the site.
We only get fragments of what exactly happened in Ordinary, but the plot feels like it lines up almost perfectly with a Stephen King novel. A small town in Maine, a couple of outcast kids, an adult generation that is unable to protect the children, an inhuman monster that is uncannily human-like, and bullies who become monstrous, deadly threats.
Jesse, Dylan, and their friend Neil seem likely to have been the only ones helping each other out, other than Polaris, the supernatural being that bound itself to Jesse and I think Dylan as well. Neil doesn't make it out of this horror story, or at least he doesn't make it out of it as a human. They say that he's transformed into some kind of dog-like creature, still loyal and protective, but not the kid he once was (and I think it's implied that he died, because the FBC does find dog-like remains).
The entire drama comes to a conclusion before the FBC even gets there - it all starts with the Slide Projector, whose images form portals into other worlds. Initially seeming innocuous, the horror begins when beings in those worlds, like the Not-Mother (we never get a physical description) begin to spread their influence.
As a note: the Not-Mother, which seems to be the primary monster of the Ordinary AWE, is found in a slide they call Temple that bears a striking resemblance to the flooded bunker overlap Saga enters in Alan Wake II, and one is invited to wonder if Cynthia Weaver's Taken form might be somehow linked to that. Saga doesn't have the context to make that connection, and as far as I know, Jesse hasn't yet learned of the 2023 Bright Falls AWE due to the lockdown in the Oldest House, so it's only for us players to recognize the parallels, similar to how Alan's story in Alan Wake II has parallels with the in-universe Lynchian TV show Address Unknown in Max Payne, even though officially Max Payne isn't within the same canon (though I honestly think that we can presume that Alan's Alex Casey books are the same story as Max Payne except where explicitly stated otherwise).
The FBC excursion to Ordinary included Trench and Darling, the real top brass of the entire bureau (though given that it was 17 years before the events of Control, I don't know if we can be certain that they were already Director and Head of Research, respectively. I think Northmoor "retires" in the 90s, so Trench at least would have been in charge by then). And it is they who take in Dylan, making him part of the Prime Candidate Program, designating him as P6. In absentia, Jesse was P7, and of course did ultimately wind up succeeding Trench as director.
While Jesse's life was clearly a tough one, it certainly seems that Dylan's was worse. Confined to the Oldest House, socially isolated, and worst of all, lied to that his sister knew where he was and was permitted to visit him if she wished, and thus leading him to believe that she had stopped caring about him (when in fact she spent her entire life looking for him), Dylan grew bitter. He was known to be a powerful parautilitarian, and I think we can probably assume that both Faden siblings are of comparable levels of potential power.
It's not obvious if this is because of some genetic inheritance (something that would very easily be shared between siblings) or if it's their connection to Polaris.
But the deeply inhumane manner in which the FBC attempted to condition and train Dylan led him toward bitter resentment, which ultimately wound up getting a researcher killed when Dylan lashed out and evidently telekinetically beat them to death.
All of this would be profoundly horrific for Jesse to discover - that Dylan had not only become this violent person capable of such brutality, that he had been so denied anything resembling a normal childhood after surviving the horrors of the Ordinary AWE, that these lies had soured his most important relationship, one with a sister with whom he had clearly had a very strong and loving bond - but it all got worse when she found him infected by the Hiss.
And unlike any other Hiss-afflicted individual, Dylan had seemed to welcome it. So thorough had his resentment toward the FBC, toward the people in charge become, that he welcomed this strange, nigh-demonic force into himself.
That said...
We don't really know what Dylan did under the influence of the Hiss. Indeed, after Jesse scours the building for him, she finds that he's merely turned himself in and submitted himself to be questioned, monitored, and communicated with. Jesse's deeply disturbed by Dylan's manner, his dream-like, sing-songy voice and his advocacy for this infectious hive mind being able to take over the world.
Jesse didn't go to the Oldest House to become the FBC's director. She went there to finally find and rescue her brother. But by the end of the game, he's in a coma, left unclear whether he'll ever wake up or if he's even really still in there.
But we're about to undergo a perspective shift.
In Control Resonant, Dylan becomes the player character. It's Jesse who is now missing, her motivations enigmatic.
In articles about Control Resonant, we're told that in addition to adventuring across a twisted Manhattan, Dylan is going to journey into other planes of existence, and even into his own mind to confront elements of his past.
That past, as I see it, has a few obvious phases: after a presumably normal or at least mundane childhood growing up with his older sister (we never hear anything about their parents, which is interesting) he experiences the Ordinary AWE, then he has the next 17 years under FBC custody, and then he has his Hiss affiliation.
The Hiss clearly have an impact on him, physically, as he loses all of his hair during the Hiss invasion. After Jesse cleanses him and he's left in a coma, we even see within Control that his hair begins to grow back.
It also does appear that he's out of his coma by 2023, when Kieran Estevez meets him within the Oldest House after traveling there via the Oceanview Motel & Casino. We can surmise from what he says there that he is has already reconciled with Jesse, and has evidently tried to keep his paranatural abilities under control (or whatever "I really tried" means,) but that whatever he was trying to do, he's unable to control it.
There is, of course, as to whether Estevez' visit to the Oldest House is actually the same time period she's in during the whole Lakehouse episode (I believe that her DLC chapter is happening around the same time as Saga's Local Girl chapter in Watery).
Still, it's suggested that Dylan is up and awake, no longer aligned with the Hiss, by 2023.
This is curious, because I think the initial interpretation I had in the Control Resonant trailer is that Jesse drives The Aberrant into him while he's still in a coma, the editing suggesting that this is her Hail Mary plan after containment within the Oldest House is breached. But assuming what I'm calling the New York AWE takes place the year the game comes out, 2026, perhaps Dylan wasn't in a coma.
It really is a fascinating reversal of perspectives, because Dylan serves as, if not the main antagonist of Control, then its mouthpiece. Saving him is the final act Jesse completes to end the game's main story (though his salvation is a tragically qualified one, given the coma and the fact that the Hiss aren't fully driven away).
Unlike Saga, whose controversial introduction as Alan Wake II's other player character (though given the themes of collaboration, I think her presence there works brilliantly,) Dylan is a well-established figure in the dramatis personae of Control - but he's going from a sinister source of exposition and insight to becoming the questing hero himself.
Yep, still obsessing. I even re-installed Control to just putter around the Oldest House and fight Hiss. I want to talk about the Expedition 33 DLC, but at least as far as I can tell, there aren't any giant lore reveals, just some very tough bosses (one is a little frustrating, as I've gotten to the end of the fight several times now, but botched the mandatory gradient counter at the end each time - hard to practice when it takes like ten minutes to get through their HP, and making me consider using a cheese strategy).
The Board is a pretty central figure in Control, though even then, we know very little about it. We aren't even sure if it's one entity or many (the name implies the latter) and while it's often associated with the inverted black pyramid that we see in the Astral Plane, when it first contacts us, the Board claims to be broadcasting to us from "The Other," which I interpret to be what that black pyramid is called - and that that means that the Other and the Board are not one and the same thing.
I'm inclined to believe that the Board is its own inhuman, cosmic entity, though I have heard some theories that it might be the collected wills or consciousnesses of the previous FBC Directors.
I'm not persuaded by that theory - largely because the Board doesn't really start playing a role in the FBC until the discovery of the Service Weapon in 1964 or thereabouts. There are several previous directors, including Theodore Ash Sr., who were appointed by the federal government (presumably the President). But two things happened when the FBC entered the Oldest House: first, the subsequent director, Broderick Northmoor, made contact with the Board and underwent the ritual to bind with the Service Weapon. Second, when the FBC moved into the Oldest House as their primary office, the country more or less forgot they existed, the same shrouding effect that keeps the Oldest House hidden from the general public working to divert attention away from the Bureau itself.
This is probably why the government hasn't really done anything about what is essentially a rogue agency that doesn't answer to anyone.
The Oldest House and the Board are linked, but that link is likely fairly recent. In the Foundation, we find cave paintings that would seem to imply that humans who discovered this place had been in contact with the Board for millennia, but carbon dating of those paintings suggest that they appeared after the 1964 discovery of the caverns. A popular interpretation of this fact is that the Board had these paintings made to imply that it had been connected to the Oldest House longer than it truly had.
Our goal in the Foundation DLC is to repair the Nail, a strange monolith that seems to create a connection between the Oldest House and the Astral Plane, and whose destruction has caused some kind of bleeding between the planes of existence that could be catastrophic if not treated.
And yet...
The Board presents the Nail as some kind of integral part of the Oldest House, but it is notably similar in material and geometry to what I believe to be The Other (the inverted pyramid). It even looks like the Nail could fit onto the tip of the Other (though it's flat, with a triangular notch in the top, and not a concave reverse-pyramid - but that might have just been a design decision to make that detail clear, as a true pyramid-socket would just look like a square from below).
Marshall blows up the Nail, instigating the entire DLC chapter, to prevent it from being infected by the Hiss, but the Board punishes her for it, causing her HRA to detach (I think just causing a strap to snap) and dooming her to Hiss infection. It seems that the destruction of the Nail isn't acceptable to the Board, even as a preventative measure against the spread of the Hiss.
One of the bizarre parts of Foundation (and one that, honestly, I don't know really works as anything other than a gameplay/plot contrivance) is that the Board allows Jesse to gain one of the two powers, to either destroy the various crystals down there or to cause them to grow. She's unable to complete her task without both powers - she literally needs both to fix the Nail's spherical anchors. But the Board refuses to give them both, and thus she has to receive the other from former adversary the... er, Former.
The game hints strongly that The Former is a part of the Board that broke away. Assuming what we are seeing is actually the Former's true form, it's a genuinely alien being. Are the other members of the Board like it?
The climax of the main story in Control sees Dylan leading the Hiss in an invasion of the Astral Plane, and specifically going to the Other. There's a fear that they'll corrupt the Board, and we even see the Board starting to spew some of the weird Hiss chant. However, once this is fixed, all seems... well, I guess.
I'm inclined to think that the Board was not permanently infected. They're not human, after all, and the Hiss might have a different effect on them. But furthermore, I don't think that the Hiss were necessarily going for the Board. I think they were going for the Other. The Other is used by the Board to broadcast to the FBC Director, and presumably other people. I suspect that the Other is some profoundly advanced piece of communication technology (such that things on the Astral Plane can be called "technology,") and that the Hiss sought to use it to propagate itself across the cosmos.
If the Oldest House is effectively the modern equivalent of the World Tree, that would make it a very desirable asset for any being that is trying to spread its influence wide (there are parallels with Mr. Door, who has sought and maybe accomplished being present in every world simultaneously).
It's a not-so-subtle theme in Control that these powerful people and entities are trying to assert and maintain control over things. Trench compartmentalizes the Bureau to keep everything running through him, and so there's no real apparatus to detect his status as Hiss patient zero until it's too late.
And the Board is weirdly jealous and miserly with its withholding of power, furious with Jesse for interacting with the Former. One gets a strong sense that while Jesse was very much working within the Board's agenda in the base game, that the events of Foundation created a rift in their relationship, which could be a deadly danger for the good director.
While it's an enemy of the FBC, responsible for the death of at least one agent, there's some hinting that the Blessed Organization might actually be linked to the Board as well. Chester Bless' self-help lecture series involving a surfboard altered item is called "The Power of the Board," and I read this very much as an intentional taunting of the FBC. But is it only that?
After all, Blessed is a far better-informed group than your standard paracriminals (see the Cult of the Tree for contrast). They know things that the general population shouldn't, like knowing that America Overnight is actually an FBC project (likewise the revival series of Night Springs, which we know Saga Andersen and her family like to watch).
It seems, thus, that the Blessed Organization likely has some ties to the FBC, maybe even ongoing moles within it. (My reading on the Tennyson Report is that it's fairly benign, but I'm not going to rule out Langston completely as a Blessed mole - clearly there are some well-intentioned members, like Barry Wheeler, who might not be privy to quite how extreme the organization goes.)
But there's a very curious coincidence regarding the Blessed Organization and the FBC's transition from Executive Branch to Board oversight - the FBC moves into the Oldest House in 1968, the same year that a PO Box is opened that will, decades later (I believe both times in 2016, probably in quick succession) be used to send and receive dangerous altered items linked to the Blessed Organization (including the one that killed an FBC agent).
1968 is the year that the FBC transforms into its current, or at least pre-Faden form, and 1968, if I had to guess, is when the Blessed Organization is founded. And I just have to imagine that the latter is a response to the former (not the Former, though... who knows?)
Now, that being said, I think this points toward the Blessed Organization being opposed to the Board - if it was created, perhaps by former FBC agents, to oppose the Board's takeover of the agency. That would of course put them into conflict with the FBC under Northmoor and Trench, and maybe under Jesse as well.
But if we want to get real tin-foil hat about this, what if it's something stranger? What if the Blessed Organization is actually the Board's contingency plan? I'll admit this feels less likely, but if Chester Bless is truly wielding "the Power of the Board," what if he was given that power in order to wrest the FBC out of the hands of a non-compliant Director? Northmoor was a full-on Board worshipper, and only had to "retire" because he had become overloaded with paranatural energies (we never did find out if he became infected by the Hiss, stuck there in the NSC-2, generating the power for the whole building - also, how old would Northmoor be, if he was the head of a federal agency in the late 1960s?) and Trench was loyal to the Board until the Hiss took over his brain and the Board had him "re-take" the Director's lethal qualification exam.
Now, Blessed was already moving against the FBC long before Jesse's insubordination to the Board began - she entered the Oldest House in 2019, and it was three years earlier that the America Overnight attack occurred.
The thing is: I think it's very likely that the Blessed Organization is what's behind the breach of the Oldest House. Chester Bless tells Barry Wheeler that it's good that he's in Los Angeles rather than New York, because of the coming catastrophe, and the most likely way for someone like him to know about that upcoming event is if he's behind it. I don't know if they'll be our primary antagonists in Control Resonant - it seems more likely that they're instigators who unleash something much bigger than themselves - but it does seem that if the Blessed Organization was merely trying to break the FBC's connection to the Board, this seems like a really extreme thing to do that would get a lot of innocent people killed.
The Board, though, might not be so concerned with the human costs.
Now, there is a possibility here as well: might the Former be the Blessed Organization's hidden patron? I'm not super convinced by this, but only because tonally, it seemed as if the Foundation DLC was there to tell us that the Former might not be as malevolent as we first thought it to be (though we also shouldn't forget that poor guy who got eaten by the fridge that was connected to the Former). Maybe the Board was right to admonish Jesse for consorting with the Former (though they could have just given her the powers she needed).
In the Control Resonant trailer, when Dylan emerges from the subway and we're drawn to look at the twisted Hiss monsters (maybe with a little Dark Presence in them like Hartman?) there's also a golden circle up in the sky, and if you ask me, it does resemble the Former's giant spotlight eye a bit, with even another kind of triangular wave above it that looks a tiny bit like the edge of the top of the Former's head.
The Board has acted in ways that seem to be not quite in sync with our own priorities - both punishing Marshall for destroying the Nail but then standing in the way of Jesse's fixing it. We know that Jesse has "gone rogue/fishing," and that implies that she's no longer aligned with the Board, necessitating Dylan's revival and stepping in to face the unleashed chaos.
And sure, if it's the Board that is giving him his mission, that might all be consistent. But man, there's a deeper story here, and we don't have all the details.
Big caveat right at the start: I don't know that our favorite tortured writer is going to be a major part of Control Resonant. While the Alan Wake games and the Control games (I guess technically already plural because of FBC Firebreak) are in the same universe, we've seen very little direct interaction between its characters - just the Hotline messages for Jesse in AWE and the weird intrusion into Alan's scene with Tom Zane by Jesse (we see some earlier draft of that scene from Jesse's perspective in AWE).
Even with the Final Draft NG+ version of Alan Wake II, we're left in a somewhat ambiguous place regarding where Alan, Saga, and Casey actually are. Saga winds up in the Writer's Room via the Dark Place, while Alan gets there physically by entering the door in the Valhalla Nursing Home (there's an interesting question as to whether the nursing home building is just this "draft" of reality's version of Bird Leg Cabin, which would make this writer's room the same as the room in which Alice had intended him to break his writer's block in way back in 2010.
Now, he does enter it while Bright Falls has been transformed by the Clicker. Basically, even if we know that yes, he does survive the bullet of light, and Saga is able to receive a call from Logan, it's not 100% clear to me that Alan can just walk out of the building and be back in the real world. He's also likely inclined to journey back to get Alice out of there once again, only now hopefully with greater ability and control so that he'll be moving through with intention rather than floundering as he did for the previous thirteen years.
Alan is from New York - while his games take place primarily in the Pacific Northwest, he and Alice are New Yorkers through and through - and I wonder how connected he'll feel to the chaos unleashed in Control Resonant. If he truly is now a Master of Many Worlds, he could very well be a powerful asset fixing what has gone wrong.
That being said, while Alan's clearly a powerful parautilitarian, the Faden siblings likely have even greater potential (Alan's able to rewrite reality from the Dark Place, but he's clearly no more physically capable than a normal person - though I think there's an interesting question of what it means to "boost" a flashlight that's already shining. I don't know about you, but my flashlights don't have that function).
Basically, I think Dylan probably is the right guy for the job (at least, while Jesse can't do it for whatever reason).
Remedy has been explicit about creating an interconnected universe for their games. So far, that's only explicitly meant crossovers between the Alan Wake and Control games (which I'm, again, counting FBC Firebreak as part of the latter,) though there have been a lot of winking nods to Quantum Break, skirting around the fact that Microsoft owns the rights to it in the same way that they've done by having Alex Casey stand in for Max Payne because of Rockstar's ownership of that brand. Warlin Door is, basically, implied to just straight-up be Martin Hatch, and Tim Breaker could be an alternate-timeline version of Jack Joyce.
All this being said, one of the themes the games have toyed with is the existence of multiple universes. Not only are there different "planes" like the Dark Place, the Astral Plane, etc., but also different versions of our familiar reality. Some are different drafts of reality as Alan has tried to write them, seemingly overwriting one another like a palimpsest (like how Saga has deja vu when she goes through the cycle again on The Final Draft) but we also get word from Dylan himself, who describes different realities in which they each play different roles - one where Jesse works for him at the FBC, not unlike her weird inner dream while the Hiss is trying to take her over near the end of the game, and even one in which he and Jesse are a single person - Jesse Dylan Faden.
Alan has a ton of experience dealing with multiple, overlapping realities. In the Dark Place, these realities flood together in immense density - the Shades we fight across the Dark Place are likely other versions of him, other aspects of his own mind. He has dark confrontations with his other parts, whom he mistakes for Scratch. If we are to take that he has ascended the spiral and emerged, truly, as the Master of Many Worlds, he might be the perfect guide for Dylan in his navigation of this chaos.
See, we really don't know what the ultimate implications of the New York AWE will be. It looks truly apocalyptic, but what boundaries does the event have? And are those boundaries purely spatial in nature?
See, there's an interesting question that we'll need to consider: is this warped New York actually being experienced by the people of the city?
A lot of comparisons have been drawn to both Inception and Doctor Strange. The visuals we initially get of the New York AWE are particularly similar to the ones seen in that film, but the sequences in that movie that show New York shifting like that are actually in the "Mirror Dimension," a kind of "just next to reality" plane. Do we know that Dylan is in the true New York? Or some reflection of it?
I mean, I don't necessarily know that I want the stakes cut off at the knees to say "well, this doesn't really count," but I also think that Remedy isn't going to treat this in any really straightforward way.
I've seen some people speculating that the Jesse that we see stabbing Dylan with the Aberrant might not be our Jesse. I'm inclined to think that this isn't meant as a violent act to kill him, but might be necessary to get him attuned to the weapon. If we're to take the shot of the dead bodies outside the Oldest House's doors as being the state of things when we see Jesse, I think we're looking at a frustrated, desperate Director who is resorting to some desperate measures.
One thing to consider, as well:
The Hiss we've seen in the trailer are twisted far beyond their typical human shapes. We did see the Hiss do this on its own with monsters like the Hiss Distorted, so take this with a grain of salt, but don't some of those seem... I don't know, a little like The Thing That Had Been Hartman? Emile Hartman is probably the most twisted and horrifying creature that we've seen in Remedy's games, and that transformation is credited to the kind of exacerbating resonance between the Hiss and the Dark Presence - as Alan describes it, a darkness made louder, a sound made darker.
It's clear that we're still going to be fighting the Hiss, but I strongly suspect that they're just going to be one of many kinds of monsters we face - that freaky half-face statue boss we see toward the end of the trailer is utterly mysterious to me, and by far the most intriguing creature. But it also doesn't look at all like the Hiss or the Dark Presence, or the Mold.
While I'd be excited to hear a little from our good Mr. Wake, I suspect that he's going to be a bit of a missing presence in this one.
The person I really want to see, though, is Caspar Darling. Darling was, to me, so instrumental in the setting of Control's tone, Matthew Poretta's friendly but definitely mad scientist giving a real face to the FBC. Now, we know he's in the Dark Place, working with/getting manipulated by Tom Zane, but I'd also be eager to see that crazy parasite bastard as well. If that happens, we'll get the two real-world halves of Alan, at least.
I don't even know if anyone even mentions the Blessed Organization out loud across all of Control or in Alan Wake II.
Sam Lake talked about the trick they discovered (or learned, at least) when building the lore of Control: that you can get players to read a whole lot of text if the text itself is a reward for exploration. If you play a game like World of Warcraft, a lot of players don't really bother to read the quest text, because it's just so much to get through before you're on your way, completing objectives. Control obviously took some inspiration from FromSoft's Souls-like games (control points being like bonfires, Source being like Souls) and I think part of that inspiration was the idea of hiding a lot of the game's story and lore in dense text.
I can't tell you exactly why I find the various FBC memos more compelling to read than the item descriptions in Elden Ring, but somehow, it works.
But like in FromSoft games, entire subplots can be hidden in these documents.
And the subplot that feels most consequential is that of the Blessed Organization.
I've written about this before, and there's nothing direct to link with the new trailer for Control Resonant, but I think it's worth reminding myself and others about it.
The FBC monitors and has a mandate to stop "paracriminal" organizations, a designation that basically means a criminal organization that takes advantage of paranatural phenomena, often trafficking and/or using altered items or OOPs.
While we'd later see the Cult of the Tree designated as one of these (and discover that their aims were far more benign than they first appeared - though still messing with an OOP) the only other one I think that is named is The Blessed Organization.
I don't recall exactly, but I think that Blessed gets mentioned only in the DLCs, primarily in the AWE expansion for Control (which tied into Alan Wake as a story). The memos don't always make the connection explicit, but we find out about various paranatural crimes that involve various companies that are called "Blessed" XYZ, such as Blessed Pictures or Blessed Repair and Service. The companies in some way provided or were linked to an altered item that caused some havoc, sometimes causing injuries.
Later, when an altered item kills an FBC employee, the PO box from which the item was mailed is the same associated with the altered movie camera affiliated with Blessed Pictures.
The only individual known to be associated with the Blessed Organization is one Chester Bless, who in 1994 ran a self-help course using a surfboard that could impart a sense of confidence and self-esteem upon those who touched it. The FBC took notice and attempted to raid Bless' home, but found it empty, the surfboard left behind. Notably, Bless' self-help course was called "The Power of the Board," which should raise some eyebrows for anyone aware of the cosmic entity behind the FBC.
In Alan Wake II, when Alan is able to visit some kind of Overlap/Threshold within his own apartment (his accidental "haunting" of Alice) we see that she is in correspondence with Barry Wheeler, Alan's best friend and agent, who has been in Los Angeles managing the film rights for Alan's books in an effort to maintain a revenue stream for Alice. Barry jokes that he's joined a cult, referring to what he believes is a Hollywood social club, but the name rings alarm bells for us players: The Blessed Wellness Center. Barry claims it's led by someone named Chester, who gave him an ominous warning that something bad was going to happen in New York.
One detail that I feel like every YouTuber I've watched seems to have missed is that when Alice leaves New York to plunge herself into the Dark Place, the empty apartment we find is filled with moving boxes labeled "Blessed." Now, this could be because Barry, having lost both Alan and Alice, was left to manage what was left of their shared estate, and he might have sent movers from the organization to pack things up. However, I'm also the only one online that I've seen who thinks that Alice is also linked to the organization now - when she talks about how an "organization" helped her regain the memories she had repressed from the events of the first game, seemingly everyone else says that this is the FBC she's talking about, but I think that that choice of word is deliberate: the FBC is a bureau or agency, and the word organization is what we use to refer to Blessed.
But that might not even matter that much: the important thing, though, is that Blessed knows that something bad is going to go down in New York.
And as we see from the Control Resonant trailer, things have gone real bad in New York.
Now, I'm disinclined to think that Blessed are good guys. Their actions have clearly put a lot of innocent people in danger, and especially the killing of the FBC employee at their America Overnight studio points to violent, hostile intent.
It's possible that there's some sympathetic motivation under all of it - the FBC of course, has a pretty awful ethical track record. If their goal is to strike out against a corrupt and tyrannical government agency, I might quibble with their tactics, but I could understand the motivation.
But if Chester Bless knows that an apocalyptic event is coming in New York, he's got a moral and ethical obligation to warn someone who can do something about it.
Maybe Blessed is behind it.
First off, we're making a certain assumption here: that Chester Bless and the other members of the organization are human. Certainly, all mentions of them seem to point toward a group of human paracriminals. But are we sure of that?
There are a number of somewhat angelic/heavenly visuals in the Control Resonant trailer. In the first shot, where the camera tilts up from Dylan's containment cell, the circular resonance pattern is surrounded by gold-limned clouds. I had also noted that the twisting pattern of pigeons soon after that recalls some descriptions of angels - I remember the cover of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door left a big impression on me when my sister was reading it when we were kids, and I think it depicts an angel. And when we see Dylan step out of the Thomas Street Subway to battle some very mutated Hiss, above in the sky there's a golden ring that looks like a god's eye.
One of the central questions in Control is whether we can really confront all of these strange phenomena and retain the kind of rational detachment to still call it science fiction. The Tennyson report (almost certainly written by Langston) argues that the insistence on all of this quasi-scientific terminology is just a way to deny the clear fact that all of this is magic, and that we're just denying the existence of magic, gods, and such because we've convinced ourselves that our less rational forebears must have been mistaken about their worldview.
Is this a paracriminal organization, then, or the cult to some kind of dangerous god?
There's also the interesting question of what connection the Blessed have with the FBC. Are they targeting it simply on ideological grounds? I think that the cheeky pun about The Power of the Board suggests some deeper knowledge of the FBC's inner secrets than a regular gang of criminals would have.
The earliest date associated with Blessed is 1968, when the PO box related to Blessed Pictures and the deadly fondue fountain delivered to the studios of America Overnight was opened, evidently never used prior to 2016, when both the ActionMaxx Camera and Fondue Pot altered items passed through it. This was four years after Broderick Northmoor became FBC Director in 1964. Northmoor was the first Director to be appointed by the Board, rather than by the government (presumably it had previously been a presidential appointment, but given the FBC's supposed role as more or less handling logistics for transporting materials for other government agencies, I imagine that this was usually one where the president just signed an appointment and moved on to other tasks). (EDIT: the FBC moved into the Oldest House as their headquarters on November 13th, 1968. I don't think this is a coincidence).
If we were to guess that the Blessed Organization first started to take form around the time that that PO Box was purchased, maybe after a year or two of planning involving the acquisition of disposable assets like a burner PO Box, might it have happened as a response to this change, with the Board essentially taking over the bureau?
Is it the Bureau that is their target? Or is it the Board? Or, alternatively, might it be some kind of contingency? The Board has shown itself to be quite shady and willing to sabotage its own people (like Marshall) if they step out of line. Could it be maintaining Blessed as some kind of contingency?
Right now, of course, the details in the trailer are really mostly just to lay out the premise and hint at broad ideas, and this kind of detail is either not going to be in that first trailer or we lack the context to really understand what hints we're receiving.
I think the key detail is Chester Bless' foreknowledge of chaos in New York. (Also crazy to me that he's still going by that name - unless he's taunting the FBC in some way).
It looks to me like Dylan is not particularly interested in representing the FBC's agenda (given how the bureau's initials are painted over on his poncho,) so I wonder if the Blessed Organization might wind up being a faction we interact with in the game.
Control Resonant has been described by Remedy as something of an open-world action RPG, leaning more heavily into the RPG elements that the first game hinted at. What if we're able to do "quests" for them, if we aren't just going to be fighting them.
So yeah, if you were hoping for definitive answers here, I have none to give. But I'm just trying to squeeze every last drop of info out of what we've got so far.
In my most conservative imaginings about what Control 2 might be, I thought it was possible we'd still be in the Oldest House, just different parts of it, dealing with another crisis. The Oldest House is an incredible setting, and you could do a ton of things there.
But I'm also rather relieved that that doesn't seem to be the case. While it doesn't seem likely we're leaving New York City (though that doesn't count going through various alternate dimensions - arguably we might go very far) it seems that Control Resonant will see the weirdness contained within the Oldest House break out into the rest of the world, needing someone to do something to prevent it from destroying the whole world.
It looks, honestly, like a pretty tall order.
Jesse Faden, of course, was the hero and player character of the first game, and I think most of us were fairly confident that we'd be gunning around with Jesse and her suite of powers, blasting away with the Service Weapon in the sequel.
But the Director of the FBC appears to be taking on a different role in the second game.
In Control, Dylan was Jesse's initial objective - she hunted down the FBC in order to find her long-lost brother. For seventeen years, the two had been separated after they survived an AWE in their hometown of Ordinary, Maine. Jesse and Dylan had been the unwitting instigators of the event, discovering an OOP in the form of a Slide Projector that opened doorways into other worlds. By the time the FBC arrived several days later (September of 2002, while the AWE had happened in August) the town's adults had all vanished, and there were only 17 kids remaining (some having evidently been transformed into strange monsters, or the case of the Fadens' friend, a dog - genuinely, the events in Ordinary seem like something out of Stephen King, particularly the childhood segments of IT). Jesse and Dylan were going to be taken in by Trench and Darling (who were both on-site for this investigation) but Jesse managed to run away.
And as a result, the two kids had very different lives. Jesse bounced between foster homes and wound up kind of a drifter while Dylan was put into a strange program to groom him as an appropriate successor to Trench as Director of the FBC.
Dylan's conditioning under the Prime Candidate Program was... not great. He apparently killed one of the researchers and developed a great deal of resentment toward Dr. Darling and more or less everyone else, even Jesse, because he had been told that she could visit him whenever she wanted, and of course she didn't. They didn't tell him that she was actually looking for him all this time.
In other words, the FBC is, like, not great. Even figures like Darling, whom I think we're meant to like, have done some incredibly unethical and shady things. Jesse's ascension to Director is a sudden and bizarre twist in things - she literally walks into the building moments before her predecessor blows his brains out (I'm assuming he's forced to do this by the Board, who probably sensed his infection by the Hiss by that point but needed to have a proper successor lined up).
Jesse comes in quite heroically, excited to enter this new world of strangeness, but also eager to find her brother and resolve the whole crisis.
But Control's ending was... well, it wasn't a true resolution to the crisis. The Hiss are still there, and as we see in the new trailer, the Hiss are still there, and now spilling out into the outside world. As Dylan's narration suggests, trying to keep it all contained has still allowed it to "worm" its way out (as in "you are a worm through time," a phrase that I think is more like someone being able to view time as a spatial dimension, a bit like how we see the pigeon at the start of the trailer).
In the Foundation DLC, we get our clearest evidence that the Board is also not so great - they arbitrarily limit Jesse's power in such a way that would prevent her from getting her mission done, forcing her to receive the other power from The Former, and then the Board has the chutzpah to get pissed off at her for doing this. It's clear that they really liked Northmoor because he was the first director that they could really control, and that Trench was fine up until he got ruined by the Hiss. But Jesse remains independent, skeptical of the FBC's mission and practices. In an ideal world, she's a reformer.
But can the FBC be reformed? I suspect that Jesse might feel, after what will be seven years as Director, trapped in the same damned building, that it's not looking like it can be reformed.
Jesse is described as "gone rogue/fishing." Gone rogue has a pretty clear meaning - she's not taking the Board's orders anymore. Gone fishing is kind of a funny term - it can mean just sort of slacking off (which could mean a less aggressive version of going rogue,) but fishing is also a kind of hunt. Going fishing for clues or evidence or a lead could imply that she's on a mission to discover some new truth that her normal day-to-day practices might not allow her to find.
The point, though, is that as the remaining Faden sibling, Dylan is now being asked to step up. "You're up," the message says.
What is Dylan's mindset? We saw him when he was infected with the Hiss, a sort of mad, sinister monotone. Dylan said he liked being part of the Hiss, presumably because it was an escape from being the FBC's captive. When Estevez finds him in the Lake House (or rather, via the Oceanview from the Lake House) he seems to be trying but failing to do something that Jesse wanted him to do. Just what is that?
I re-watched the trailer with my resolution turned up to the max (Youtube set it to a default 480p, which clouded some of the text). One thing I noticed is that the kind of battle-poncho he's wearing has the letters FBC on the back, but smeared over with black paint, as if he's cutting ties with the Bureau, which would make sense.
I think even if Dylan is now willing to fight against the Hiss rather than trying to spread its influence, there's no love lost for the FBC - his antipathy toward them pre-dates the Hiss. This is a man who has experienced terrible abuse at the hands of the Bureau.
Jesse hasn't suffered as much under the Bureau's influence, but especially when being in charge of it doesn't seem to give her the power to fix its deeper problems, it stands to reason she might be working against its (read: the Board's) agenda.
We, of course, saw Alan Wake II give us two primary player characters (and all different characters to play in the DLCs). I think it's very possible that we'll be playing as both Faden siblings in Resonant, but I also think that we might just play as Dylan. The game's been described as a "sibling" to the first game, and while in the first, Jesse sought her brother, in this, one of our main goals is to seek after her.
Alan Wake II had a big motif of doubling and mirrors, and I think we might also see that here - like how we see the same side of a street mirrored in the opening sequence of the trailer.
Dylan has spent a lot of the intervening years since the first game in a coma. What has Jesse become in the meantime?
A few more notes:
I don't know what, if any, significance the fact that the cafe in the beginning of the trailer has: The awning says 665 Coffee Drinks - I assume it's meant to be 665 Thomas Street, which is both the street the FBC is on and also the number is Remedy's recurring in-joke, "the neighbor of the beast." Tom Zane occupies room 665 at the Oceanview Hotel (though again, in a weird way because the actual room is just a kind of empty square, and the apartment where we actually see him is created with a projector).
Also, the memos on the desk outside of Dylan's containment unit put the FBC's address as 43 Thomas Street, whereas I believe it was earlier established to be 34. Another case of mirroring? Or could the FBC have changed offices? We don't know how long containment has been breached, and who within the Oldest House is still alive.
There are a number of visual shifts, including the font that we get The Board's messages subtitled with. This could be merely a stylistic update, but I find it worth looking at. The folks over at Gaming University argue that the word choice doesn't seem to match the Board, and they speculate on whether this is actually Jesse sending messages (one theory on who the Board is is that it's all the former Directors of the FBC, though count me as a skeptic toward that one).
This is not a drill. The sequel to 2019's Control, a game I didn't play until 2023, has an official announcement trailer.
And boy, does it look like things are going to be a bit different.
Broad strokes (before I re-watch the trailer and start and stop it to gather every freaking detail I can):
First, most shockingly, it looks like we're playing as Dylan Faden, Jesse's brother, whom she was tracking and looking for in the first game. Dylan became the sort of voice for the Hiss as he allowed it into himself after an entire childhood and early adulthood under the FBC's attempts to mold and shape him and his parautilitarian powers to serve as the appropriate successor to Zachariah Trench.
In Control, Jesse finds herself chosen as the FBC's new Director by the mysterious and inhuman Board, and is forced to fight across the enormous and labyrinthine and "bigger on the inside" Oldest House, the paranatural brutalist office building hidden in plain sight in New York City. Jesse fights against the Hiss, an infective resonance from another universe that takes over people like an infection, and ultimately cuts them off from their home dimension, but things are still pretty dire by the end of it: the Hiss is still in the Oldest House and able to keep replicating, and that means that the building must remain on total lockdown. In Alan Wake II, it was confirmed that the FBC hasn't heard from HQ since 2019 (four years by the point of that game). People don't even know that Jesse has become Director outside the building, and Dylan, the only person to survive being cleansed by Jesse, has been in a coma.
We did get a glimpse of Dylan in Alan Wake II's Lake House DLC, but what it seems to indicate is that Dylan, no longer wanting to be part of the Hiss, is nonetheless still somehow affected by it, and seems to be working as hard as he can to keep it contained, but he's failing.
And now, it looks like containment has been breached.
All right: let's get into the trailer. If you haven't watched it already, please do. Then, you can follow along as I re-watch it and make note of everything I notice.
After a brief shot of Dylan in his containment unit, we see some kind of circular pattern in the sky - something reminiscent of Polaris, the entity in Jesse's head that has guided and protected her, but clearly different. Also, very celestial and even angelic or god-like (take note of this, as it's a motif).
We then see a NYC street cafe, and watch as a coffee cup (of course coffee, it's Remedy) duplicate itself, and then a pigeon do likewise, forming, notably, a kind of swirling vortex of feathers that looks very much like a "biblically accurate angel." The feathers recede, and we see a Manhattan folded in on itself like something from Inception or Doctor Strange.
Our next shot shows another city street, but infected with a familiar hazard: the Mold. A big sign like the kind you'd see warning of construction on a freeway reads "Do Not Ingest" alternating with "Resist The Urge," while guards or, more likely, mold zombies, wander.
Next, we see another street filled with red light and Hiss Agents floating in the air. (Might be coincidence, but it's Remedy, so I'll mention it: this alley looks like the one where Alan first encounters Dark Place Casey in Alan Wake II.)
Then, most tellingly, we see the front entrance to the Oldest House in bright daylight. The front doors have been smashed open, with bodies and trails of blood down its front steps.
Then, indoors, we see Dylan's containment chamber, and what looks possibly like Jesse sitting on a couch, observing him. She gets up, grabs something off of a desk - it's a long rod of some sort, seemingly made of blackrock. A childhood photo of the Fadens is underneath it, along with a scratched pen-drawing of some kind of concentric circles and eye-like shapes, a file on the Slide Projector OOP, and some other FBC redacted memos I can't quite make out.
Jesse takes the rod over to Dylan and seems to stab him in the heart with it.
A burst of energy, Dylan's eyes open wide. He awakens and walks out of the containment unit into a surreal landscape where a strange structure awaits him. An entity - likely the Board, but it doesn't sound like it used to, greets Dylan (with different hair than the previous scene - maybe the trailer is edited to disorient us and these aren't in sequence with one another?) says "RISE AND SHINE," and then "THE SIBLING HAS GONE ROGUE/FISHING." Dylan looks down, and then he's in a subway station (I think it reads "Home Street Station," though the "home" in it is obscured on both sides somewhat). Dylan seems to shake off whatever sheathe is on the rod he now carries, and it reforms in his hand as some kind of melee weapon. The Board (we think) says "YOU'RE UP." Dylan walks up to find a street full of vaguely humanoid monsters, and the rod in his hand transforms into a massive war-hammer, which he brings to bear against the creatures as the city is twisted into a kaleidoscopic vision behind him.
We then see some action-shots (presumably of gameplay) of Dylan fighting across a surreal and twisted New York, with what looks like a pretty enormous variety of new enemies and bosses.
We get a warning from Jesse to close out the trailer: "Pace yourself. It's gonna get weirder."
The game sees the FBC release and deploy Dylan to deal with the chaos that has broken out into Manhattan. Our villain is only known as a "mysterious cosmic entity," and Dylan journeys out both to save the city (and world) while also trying to find his sister.
His weapon is not the Service Weapon, but something new (though similar) called The Aberrant. It looks like we'll be able to shift it between different forms depending on our needs as the situation demands. In an article on the Playstation website, folks from Remedy described the game as something of an open-world action RPG. I'm curious to see what they mean, exactly, by that. In some ways, despite being confined to one building, Control was also built in this open-world RPG structure, even if its gameplay was that of a 3rd-person shooter (though one that I think was interested a bit less in the shooting specifically than the broader action.
Dylan looks like he'll be playing very differently - at the very least, he's far more of a melee fighter. I wonder how much, if any, of Jesse's arsenal from the first game will make it into Dylan's catalogue of capabilities.
I'm honestly a little surprised that we won't be playing as Jesse - there's a pretty profound perspective shift, but if there's anything I have faith in Remedy doing more than anything, it's telling a compelling story.
I think we can probably gather that Jesse and the Board are not getting along so well after the events of Foundation. But was it Jesse who broke containment in the Oldest House, or was it Dylan when we encountered him during The Lake House DLC as Estevez?
While it sure seems The Hiss are going to be part of this game, I also kind of get the impression that they're only one of many problems in the city (we saw the Mold, but also possibly some new, other things). Does this have anything to do with the Blessed Organization? It was such a compelling hinted-at antagonist in the first game (and again in Alan Wake II).
The most exciting thing is that the game is due to come out in 2026 - about two years earlier than I had even hoped it would come. Unless it somehow comes out in the first half of the year, I'll still have to wait until my 40s to play it, but only just barely! There's other big new out of the Game Awards as well, but this was the biggest one on my list.
EDIT:
Just tossing in more specific details - not sure how relevant these all are.
Ok, some more scrutiny: the first shot of the twisted city we get after our pigeon/angel thing shows us a partially-mirrored street, which is evidently Thomas St. The name Thomas in Remedy is a pretty important one, as Thomas Zane, or whatever being claims that identity, has shown up in Remedy games as early as in Death Rally. Obviously, his role become a lot more bizarre and mysterious in Alan Wake II, where Tom Zane, the Finnish auteur filmmaker appeared as a decidedly less benevolent force than the poet we knew as Thomas Zane in the first Alan Wake game had been.
Another closer look at the papers on the desk when Jesse picks up The Aberrant to stab Dylan/bestow it upon him seems to be a report on the Ordinary AWE.
The strange twisted-steel structure that Dylan approaches early on seems to be similar in pattern on the weapon Dylan holds, though I don't think it's quite the same.
The Board (assuming it is the Board) sounds different. This could be just an updated sound design compared with the first game in 2019, but we also don't see the inverted black pyramid. In the first game, The Board claims to be broadcasting from "The Other," and I actually think that pyramid might have been The Other - an intermediary or even just a device the Board uses. Perhaps it sounds different because it's speaking to Dylan in a different way.
Dylan's hair is inconsistent. While comatose, it's long, but when we see him step out and meet with the giant metallic structure (that is maybe what the Board is using to communicate with him) he's got shorter hair, closer to what we saw in The Lake House. Obviously, it's all had to grow back since the events of Control, when all of his hair fell out, but six years seems plenty of time for that to happen.
There's what feels like a jump-cut from Dylan observing his weapon to his appearance in the subway. There are posters in the subway for something called Parting (broken up into PA, RT, and ING, if that's relevant). Underneath, the poster says "One night only," and then "Sunset." Now, I actually briefly thought that this might imply that this subway is actually in Los Angeles (we have a major street here called Sunset Boulevard - you've probably heard of the movie named after it) but when Dylan exits the station, the format of the subway sign is unmistakably the NYC metro.
Subway stations are, of course, a common location in Remedy games, from Max Payne to Alan Wake II.
As a note, before exiting the station, Dylan seems to shake the bloody blades from the ends of his bifurcated weapon before allowing one half to meld back to the other half.
Once again, my best guess at the name of the station is Home Street Station. So, it's not Caldera St. Station from Alan Wake II or Roscoe Station from Max Payne. There's graffiti on the signs, one depicting a big ring and the other that seems if anything to say "grok," or maybe "brok." Not sure if there's any relevance there.
What's almost certainly more relevant is the giant glowing ring in the sky above what seems to be an army of Hiss. The ring, and the shape surrounding it, actually seems reminiscent of the Former, though in a more blindingly bright, almost angelic form.
If I had to guess, I imagine there's going to be a lot of pseudo-angelic imagery with the monsters in this game. First of all, there's a lot of reason to believe that the otherworldly entities we encounter in Control, such as the Board, would have been thought of (I won't even say mistaken as, because it's more of a matter of perspective than truth) gods or other supernatural entities. Second, and this could look either foolish or completely obvious depending on whether they actually show up, it would tie into the name of the Blessed Organization. We have practically zero sense of what the agenda of the Blessed is, but I would not be shocked if they have some religious framing for their actions.
It does look like we're going to be fighting a lot of Hiss - they might be our meat-and-potatoes bad guys, though it also looks like they're a little more warped and distorted (not, like, those specific enemies form the first game) and some are a bit less humanoid in appearance. But I think we're going to have other things to deal with. The real show-stopper appears to be some kind of boss that looks like a floating face but throws various metal or stone things at us - not appearing to be Hiss at all, given that the color scheme is far more yellows and browns.
It's clear that we're going to be facing down a lot of surreal and weird stuff (surreal is how you hook me - I love the design of the Nevrons in Expedition 33, and Control going in with more diverse enemy design is going to probably be a big win).
The trailer's last shot, post title card, actually might be Jesse, rather than Dylan, floating in toward a strange ring-like pattern that looks very much to me like an eye, its colors violets, reds, and blues. This doesn't look like Polaris, but it also doesn't look like the other things we've been seeing.
I'm really curious to see what role Jesse plays in this game. While it's a very exciting direction to take Dylan in for this game, I'm also very fond of Jesse, and controlling her in the first game felt so damned good.
Alan Wake II gave us two playable protagonists (and then a bunch of others in the DLCs,) and so part of me wonders if we'll be able to play as both Dylan and Jesse, but giving them very different styles of combat. I don't want to pin my hopes to that - as far as the material we have so far implies, the whole game is going to be Dylan's - it has been described as a "sibling" to the first game.
The strange possibilities hinted at in the first game surrounding Jesse and Dylan could very easily be something explored here. Dylan, in his Hissed-out state, seems to experience different realities as dreams, and in one of them, there's only a single Faden, named Jesse Dylan Faden (both siblings have names that could be a girl's or a boy's).
We likely won't get any clear details until the game's in our actual hands, but Remedy is committed to this interconnected universe - and Control and Alan Wake have both already had crossovers. I'm super curious to see if Darling's actions in the Dark Place play into this, if Alan's ascension to a "Master of Many Worlds" does, and even how the Old Gods of Asgard could play into all of this (interesting that Dylan gets to turn his weapon into a massive hammer. I know that the Service Weapon is implied to have been Mjolnir in some past iteration. What is the history of the Aberrant?)
I really have to say that, apart from chaos spilling out into Manhattan, this is very different from what I expected the game to be like. There is, of course, a bit of a knee-jerk of concern that it looks so different from the first game, but different can be very good if they have good ideas behind those differences.
And hell, Control might be one of my favorite games of all time, but it was not without its flaws. The gun was probably too weak compared to the Launch power, and as Monty Zander's critique noted, it was filled with "Goot" (or Garbage Loot). If we get a progression system that's more interesting and granular, it could be really awesome.
I just hope that, amidst all the monster fighting, we get tons of exploration, environmental storytelling, and lore documents to continue building out this incredibly cool world. Believe you me, I'll be following this game closely.
EDIT 2:
Oh, it's definitely not "Home St. Station," it's "Thomas St. Station," which makes sense given that the first intersection we see with the Atlantis Cafe at the start is Thomas Street. This is actually a real street in Manhattan, a pretty short one in Tribeca. Notably, this is the street upon which the AT&T Long Lines building stands, whose towering concrete form with no windows was a major inspiration for the Oldest House. I would not be surprised if in the Remedy universe, this building is The Oldest House, so we might now have a canonical location for the FBC HQ. (Evidently the canonical address of the Oldest House is 34 Thomas Street, which would put it just across the street from this building, which is 33.) But note in the linked Wikipedia article the entrance to the building, which clearly served as the inspiration for the Oldest House's entrance.
It might, thus, be a bit of serendipity that the building happens to be on a street that shares its name with the the RCU's most enigmatic individual.
Also, the address at the Atlantis Cafe? 665, obviously.
It's been almost a year since Alan Wake II's Lakehouse DLC, and nearly two years since the release of the game. While I haven't gone back and played through it again after finishing The Final Draft (new game plus,) it has sat with me all this time as one of my favorite narratives in a video game.
I have to confess: I'm a sucker for a good mystery box, even if they can often lead to disappointing endings. I watched Lost through college and a bit past it, and was very into the Battlestar Galactica remake at the same time, both of which had endings that seemed to kind of veer off in directions I wasn't terribly interested in.
In a bizarre way, though, the mystery boxes coming from Remedy's games seem to promise us that some things won't be answered (this is also true of FromSoft's souls-like games, though in that case, it's like "we ain't explaining anything here. Answers? You don't even know what questions to ask!") and this makes me kind of feel oddly inoculated against being disappointed in endings. I know that the "RCU" is only getting started, and for sure doesn't have an endgame in mind.
But there are hints of what is coming.
Now, while they're never made a significant part of the game's story, anyone who played Control and did any delving into its hidden lore will be well-aware of The Blessed Organization.
This para-criminal group (basically criminals who use altered items and objects of power) has mysterious goals, but we know that they're dangerous - they sent a deadly altered item to a radio station run (secretly) by the FBC, which killed an agent. And they seem to have distributed other altered items that have gotten innocent people hurt.
Two characters closely tied to Alan have connections to The Blessed Organization. Most directly is Barry Wheeler. Barry, Alan's agent and best friend (and lovable sidekick from the first game), traveled to Los Angeles after Alan's apparent death to act as executive producer on the adaptations of the Alex Casey novels, seeking to ensure A: that Alice Wake was taken care of financially and B: to ensure that the movies did justice to Alan's novels.
However, in going to Los Angeles, Barry met with Chester Bless, the likely leader and founder of the organization.
Barry seems to think of it as some kind of Hollywood social club, though he describes it as cult-like even as he downplays the creepiness of that possibility. (I assume that it probably takes a similar form to Scientology, an infamous cult that has a lot of members in the entertainment industry that did, notably, effect the largest ever infiltration of the FBI.)
Now, the connection that Alice might have to the Blessed Organization is a bit more tenuous. When we find the Wakes' apartment the last time in Alan's campaign, we find it totally packed up and emptied. The cardboard boxes into which things have been packed all say "Blessed" on them.
Now, of course, that might not actually relate to Alice directly because Barry might have been the one to see to the apartment being packed up after Alice's apparent (though thankfully not actual) suicide.
In one of her videos, Alice talks about meeting members of an organization that helped her regain her repressed memories from her time in the Dark Place (back in 2010). Every single YouTube content creator I've watched has assumed that this meant the FBC, and that she's describing the time she came into the Oldest House (she lived in New York, after all) and inadvertently sent The Thing That Had Been Hartman into his frenzy that destroyed the Investigations Sector.
I, however, have always held the idea that while Alice clearly did visit the FBC, she may not have gotten the answers that she wanted. And that Barry had arranged for her to meet with others studying the paranatural, i.e. the Blessed Organization, and maybe even Chester Bless himself. I think it's not an accident that Alice refers to the people who helped her as an "organization." Not, like a government agency or bureau. A word we see used repeatedly to describe this para-criminal group.
The Blessed Organization clearly has some understanding of these paranatural principles - they're not the well-meaning chucklefucks that the Cult of the Tree were. And I could imagine that they would find helping someone like Alice advantageous to their goals.
Alice, of course, has a dark edge to her - we've seen her, with the best intentions I'm sure, manipulate Alan multiple times: lying to him about why they were going to Bright Falls, and faking her death and allowing him to believe he had driven her to suicide. We know so little about the ultimate aims of the Blessed Organization.
But we might have a bit of a hint that I had totally missed:
Actually, before we get to that, let's talk about the Lake House DLC. While mostly a side-story that doesn't have enormous implications for Alan's story, largely self-contained, there is a really major hint for Control 2, which is when Estevez travels through the Oceanview Motel and Casino into the Oldest House, briefly, and meets with Dylan Faden.
Dylan refers to some kind of failure to prevent some catastrophe. While he seems free of the Hiss, or at least keeping it under control, there's something deeply wrong. And we get a series of visions that show something very crazy happening to New York City - some kind of containment breach, with things like The Mold and possibly the Hiss (though I really hope that after Firebreak we can move on to other threats - I don't want Control to be "the series where we fight the Hiss" given that it seems open to so many more possibilities) breaking out, but also the city folding in on itself.
It seems very likely from what tiny previews we've gotten that Control 2 will probably take us out into the city.
And that's where this email stands out:
Chester Bless told Barry that it was a good thing that he wasn't in New York anymore, because "something bad" would have happened to him if he had stayed.
Now, ok, sure: that's it. That's the thing that prompted this post.
But I think this really seems to confirm a lot about what is going on in Control 2. Something catastrophic is coming, and given his advanced knowledge about it, it seems highly possible that the Blessed Organization is behind it (I'll allow that it could be that they just know about it coming).
We don't know why Bless is gunning for the FBC. He does seem to have some connection to the Board - he pops up originally on the FBC's radar when he runs self-help talks that use a Surf Board altered item (or possibly an OOP) and cheekily refers to his methods giving people the "power of the board."
We know from Foundation that the Board sure seems shady - possibly more like a parasitic force upon the Oldest House and the FBC. The Former is in conflict with the Board, but even if our first interactions with it are hostile, it's also quite helpful to us later on. The Board does still have a lot of control (heh) over the FBC, but given that Jesse does not seem as pliant as Trench and Ashmore were, I wouldn't be shocked if Bless turned out to be some kind of contingency plan to destroy the FBC if it couldn't be controlled.
We do also know that the FBC has a deeply troubled and mixed history, often protecting people but also with several examples of abuse and overreach (you know, like most government agencies. Ever hear of J. Edgar Hoover?) I'm partially inclined to lend some benefit of the doubt to someone who would dedicate themselves to working against this agency (especially given what we saw in the Lakehouse - admittedly, the Marmonts were taking advantage of the Oldest House going silent for several years, but even someone as likable as Casper Darling did, you know, kidnap a child to put him through a dehumanizing training program). That said, I don't think we're going to get some reveal that the Blessed Organization are the good guys, actually, because we know that they've done things that have hurt civilians in very reckless ways.
And, you know, if they wind up causing some huge deadly catastrophe across the country's largest city, that's not, you know, the sort of thing that heroes do.
Anyway, this little snippet of an email doesn't really inspire a new theory, but it does feel like, especially with the context of Dylan's Lakehouse vision, near-confirmation that the Blessed Organization is going to play a big role in what happens in Control 2.
This year, two games are coming out that I have very mixed feelings about.
One, coming quite imminently, is Elden Ring: Nightreign. The other is FBC FIrebreak.
Both are quasi-sequels to single-player games that I've utterly adored, namely Elden Ring and Control, respectively (yes, Elden Ring, like other Soulslikes, has always had multiplayer elements, but you can easily ignore them).
Both games are made by studios that I have enormous respect for.
And so, I find myself in this weird place:
Personally, I have never liked competitive multiplayer in games. And neither of these are. In fact, even while Nightreign is still a 3rd-person action-RPG and Firebreak is a first-person-shooter, both have similar structures, sending you on shorter endeavors in a team of three players.
I'll be honest, though, I haven't actually been following either game as closely as I would be if these were more straightforward follow-ups. Remedy has already announced Control 2, which will likely take a similar form to the original game, and FromSoft has assured their fans/audience/customers that the studio is still committed to making single-player offerings.
So what I am then left wondering is whether I should play these games or not?
See, despite the fact that my family has always gotten Apple computers (back in the mid 90s, this was a bolder stance than it is now) I'm sort of philosophically against the idea of brand loyalty. Star Wars was a big deal to me as a kid, but I find that there's a certain "fandom" culture online that tolerates no criticism, claiming you can't be a fan of something unless you like every last thing released under its banner (to be clear, there's also a ton of toxicity on the negative side of things that is arguably more prevalent). The older I get, the more I become aware of how branding and marketing tries to shift our brains to grow a kind of dependency on the familiar.
And it's tricky, because on one side, I think that these studios in particular are places where art is created - and I don't think there's anything wrong with having favorite artists. But there's also a powerful economic incentive to take advantage of those familiar stories, or in corporate jargon, those "IPs," (standing for "intellectual properties") in order to get people to buy into something that they might not be as inclined to try if it weren't for the familiarity with that brand.
I guess in both these cases, I really don't have a sense of whether the creative people in these studios had a brilliant idea for a multiplayer game, or if some corporate suit who couldn't care less about how fun a game is just read some data that suggests that this kind of ongoing live-service multiplayer game brings in big bucks, and that they need to get on that bandwagon.
Now, of course, it's funny, because in 1999, I played Super Smash Bros. for the first time, and it, along with particularly its two-year-later, much-higher-budget (I assume) sequel of Smash Bros. Melee, became one of my favorite games, despite the fact that there's no real like, story-progression. I'd play against bots far more than against my friends. So, maybe I'll find a lot of fun in the gameplay loop of these games as well.
I guess this all just boils down to my hemming and hawing about whether I'm going to play these games or not. And the answer is... Maybe?
I had a dog named Becky when I was nine years old. Barely a year after we got her, she ran out of the house and into the street and was hit by a car. She got out through the basement door, which my dad had left open because he was doing some work down there. He hadn't expected her to be able to get into the basement, because the interior door to the stairs down there, in the kitchen, was typically closed. It was no one's fault.
Looking back, I wish we had done a better job disciplining her. She was still pretty young, not yet two years old. Losing her, especially given that I'd lost my first cat Choco, also to a car, when I was three, actually left us too traumatized to get any other pets when I was growing up. Only after I moved in with my current roommates did I live with another pet, a cat, and since then we adopted two stray kittens who were born outside of our building (both of whom are quite big adults now).
Anyway, when we had Becky, we were usually very careful with her and had a system to prevent exactly the sort of thing that ultimately happened to her. In my childhood home, where my Dad still lives after my Mom died, both the front and back doors have what we call "mud rooms," with an inner door leading into the house and and outer door that goes outside. If we weren't taking Becky with us (such as when my sister and I were going off to school) we'd make sure that we sealed the "airlock" by getting into the mud room and closing the inner door, ensuring that Becky was still inside, before we'd open the outer door.
But this is about Control 2.
Spoilers for Control, as well as Alan Wake II (mostly the Lake House expansion)
I just beat the second and final DLC for Alan Wake II (sadly I found I needed to downgrade to the lowest difficulty on the final boss - I don't mind scrounging for resources between fights, but I'm terrible at doing it during a fight). The Lake House takes place within the eponymous FBC facility that was built to monitor Cauldron Lake after the 2010 AWE in Bright Falls (aka the events of the first Alan Wake game).
Naturally, given the presence of the FBC, there are some big ties into Control, and some things that portend what we might be dealing with in the next Control game (not counting FBC Firebreak).
Let's talk about all of that past the spoiler cut:
Today, Remedy hit us with not only a second trailer for The Lake House DLC for Alan Wake II (a "launch trailer" despite the fact that it comes out on Tuesday) as well as the trailer for their squad-based cooperative first-person shooter, FBC Firebreak.
I... I don't know if I'll actually be playing it, because I don't have a ton of patience for multiplayer games (yes, I realize this blog started off as a World of Warcraft-exclusive one, but that's kind of the exception that proves the rule).
However, what we have gathered from the trailer has some interesting implications.
The game seems to put you in the shoes of a new FBC unit called Firebreak, which appears to be tasked with clearing out the Hiss from the Oldest House.
Control, notably, doesn't end with the Hiss fully stamped out. While the original source of the crisis is cut off now that the Slide Projector has been turned off, the Hiss is insidious and infectious - all the passive Hiss agents floating above most areas in the game are still amplifying the signal, potentially infecting anyone not wearing an HRA, or who aren't Jesse.
This, of course, allows the game to live on past all the actual missions to let you max out your skills and tie up any side quests. It's how I was able to continually just wander around looking for Hiss to fight and experience the supremely satisfying action the game has (though I'd have preferred a NG+, or even just a second save file so I could play the thing from the start again without losing my existing file. Seriously, this is 2024 and consoles have big hard drives. We shouldn't have to worry about limited save files in this day and age).
However, the very premise of Firebreak, I think, tells us something pretty concrete about Control 2: We're going to get out of the Oldest House and we're going to be fighting something other than the Hiss.
Jesse is a superhero at this point, but given the Hiss capacity to infect new hosts (and possibly even resurrect itself) it's clear that she just can't be in enough places at once to actually sterilize the Oldest House on her own.
But, if we're getting a whole game dedicated to that task, I think that leaves Control 2 in a position to move past it.
And I think that's really fitting: Alan Wake's two games are both primarily focused on taking down the Taken, because they're both dealing with the insidious Dark Presence. Indeed, half of Alan Wake II has us facing the Fadeouts/Shadows, which are related but separate.
But the whole idea of Control is that the Hiss might be one of the most dangerous phenomena the FBC has had to deal with, but it's far from the only one. Even in the original game, we get The Mold - a fully separate infection bleeding into the Oldest House through a different Threshold.
The sites we see in the Firebreak trailer are familiar - the region in Executive where the Post-It Note altered item seems to have started actually killing people, or the Black Rock Quarry. Certainly, this saves Remedy some time and effort on conceptualizing parts of the Oldest House, but I wonder if this is also a way for us to get one last good luck at the setting before Jesse goes elsewhere to investigate what is happening beyond.
Sure, the concept art we've seen appears to be just outside of the Oldest House, but honestly, I'd be pretty happy simply for the opportunity to step outdoors (though I'd love to go to Ordinary).
The Hiss worked very well as the primary antagonists for the first game, but I think Control promises way more, and I hope Firebreak gives us the chance to move past them.
