// KOTAKU — GAMING
Why Control Resonant Had to Take Our New Hero Outside
There seems to be some sentiment from players of Control Resonant that taking the action beyond the confines of the brutalist interior halls of the first game, Control (2019), is less than ideal. But understanding the relationship each game’s protagonist has with the building itself explains why this was the right choice. With each game having a different setting, we also have a clearer articulation of each protagonist.
Please note: This piece discusses narrative revelations that occur in the second half of Control Resonant.
Both third-person action games center on one of two siblings, Jesse and Dylan Faden, and each one’s relationship with a mysterious government agency called the Federal Bureau of Control (FBC), tasked with handling supernatural events. As children, after one such catastrophic event, the siblings encountered the FBC, which considered the Fadens valuable research subjects rather than innocent civilians, and managed to capture Dylan while Jesse fled.
Dylan would be imprisoned, experimented on, and tortured for almost two decades.
It is in Control that Jesse, now in her twenties, finally finds the FBC and Dylan. The bureau operates within a mysterious, windowless monolith of a building in Manhattan, called the Oldest House. The building is itself an otherworldly entity, housing seemingly infinite halls and rooms and adhering to its own mysterious internal laws of nature. It’s a weird, ridiculous space. So ridiculous that the Oldest House is perhaps my favorite video game environment and world.
Jesse, instead of becoming a prisoner of the Oldest House and FBC like her brother, ends up becoming the agency’s head, its Director. Throughout Control, her own supernatural powers grow, and she proves her worth as a fighter of evil entities in the Oldest House, garnering the respect of FBC staff. Thus, it wasn’t merely that she stumbled into an executive role like a nepo-baby, but that she lived up to the title.
Dylan, meanwhile, has been imprisoned, trapped and experimented on within the Oldest House for 17 years. In that time, after encountering a hostile parasitical entity called the Hiss, Dylan willingly let it take over his body as a means to escape his confinement. Instead, however, the Hiss merely uses him and his powers to spread, leading to the events of Control (2019), including the deaths of hundreds of FBC employees.
He thus serves as the face of the enemy in Control, but Jesse is nonetheless unflinching in freeing him: from both the FBC but also, now, the Hiss.
By the end of Control, Jesse has cleansed Dylan and most of the Oldest House of the parasitical entity, but Dylan enters a coma for the next seven years, bringing us to the beginning of Resonant.
After waking up in 2026, Dylan finds that the Hiss have escaped. He follows a trail of destruction that leads him outside. For the first time in 24 years, Dylan leaves the Oldest House and steps outside. Let’s be clear: He arrived at 10 and leaves at 34. His entire life stolen, chewed up, spat out, stomped on by the FBC and its researchers, especially its head of research, Casper Darling.