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.
Is it any wonder, then, that we had to be outside? Unlike her brother, Jesse spent her entire life beyond the confines of the FBC (we learn the FBC knew exactly where she was but chose to let her operate as a control [heh] study to Dylan). But Dylan was imprisoned for most of his life.
When he is finally free, the first thing some of the FBC leadership want to do is drag him back to a cell. Many blame Dylan for the events of the first game that led to the deaths of over 500 of their comrades. Dylan, while acknowledging he was possessed by the Hiss, also blames himself for giving into temptation. Throughout Resonant, he is often apologetic, soft-spoken, propitiating the FBC in any way he can.
Dylan is not his sister (though this is debatable). He is the FBC’s prisoner, not its leader. It makes sense that Jesse’s story was told within the confines of the bureaucracy she now manages, but Dylan’s story has already been told on the canvas of the Oldest House. We as players have seen it written there even from the first game.
Just as the interior of the Oldest House was new to Jesse and we got to experience it with her, so too is the outside world new to Dylan. Thus we get to experience this world with him; a world that passed him by through no fault of his own. This echoes, too, the relationship each has with the monstrous bureau. One example of this is Dr. Darling, who has vanished into another dimension by the time Jesse arrives in 2019.
While it’s not exactly a secret that Dr. Darling was in charge of Dylan and his training, the first game showed him, via tapes Jesse finds, as a likeable, bubbly, bright-eyed and brilliant person. It is Darling who develops much of the technology that saves hundreds of lives. He even dedicates a rock song to Jesse from his unknown dimension. Jesse, however, never meets him in person.
But Dylan knows better.
In Resonant, we also find tapes of Darling—but here we see his true face. He’s a bully and manipulator, ignoring a young Dylan’s pleas for freedom, play, and family. Darling dismisses Dylan’s physical abuse at the hands of a guard and abuses Dylan himself in his attempts to measure Dylan’s latent powers. In one video of Darling, he berates a young Dylan, forcing Dylan to run 100 laps for failing to demonstrate his powers to Darling’s satisfaction.
Gone is the likeable, goofy scientist from the first game. We are in Dylan’s shoes, and this is our abuser.
Letting Dylan escape the confines of the Oldest House then aligns with Dylan’s relationship with the Bureau. He no longer wants to be its prisoner, if he is to become a proper person. Jesse, on the other hand, fully embraces the confines of the FBC. In Control, she literally says to herself: “Everything here feels crazy, weird, but it feels right. Like how the world should be. I’m in an infinite building leading to different dimensions and I never want to leave. Even with all the horror, I’m happy. It feels sane. Or just the right kind of insane.”
Dylan, however, tells an agent at the beginning of the game that he never wants to go back. How could he?
Each world in the two Control games let us witness a Faden sibling becoming their own. As Darling himself learned, that was never going to happen for Dylan inside the Oldest House.
While I understand wanting to experience the wonderful weirdness of the bureaucratic halls again, I could never fathom that happening for Dylan given who he is, what the FBC did to him, and what his relationship is with the FBC/Oldest House. He was never going to become a full person within his prison. I’m glad we got to experience the weird world outside its infinite walls and see Dylan move beyond his horrific confinement, able to fully become his own person.
