Control released on August 27, 2019. Control: Resonant launches September 24, 2026. That’s a seven-year gap, not the vague “few years” framing that gets thrown around in pre-launch chatter – and a lot happened in those seven years that Resonant is built to assume you remember.
Remedy has been clear that Resonant doesn’t require you to have finished the first game. The sequel centers on a new protagonist, Dylan Faden, and is deliberately structured to welcome newcomers [2]. But playing (or re-reading) the original story still “enriches your experience, especially narratively” [2] – because Resonant treats the base game’s ending, and both of its story expansions, as settled history. This is the recap that covers all of it: the 2019 base campaign, the Foundation DLC, the AWE DLC, and exactly what changes when the story hands the wheel to Dylan.
Who Should Read What
Not everyone needs the same depth of refresher. Use this table to find your starting point.
| If you… | Do this |
|---|---|
| Finished Control at launch in 2019 | Skim the base-game section for names, then read closely from “Why It’s Called Resonant” onward – that’s the part a 2019 memory won’t cover |
| Played the base game but skipped the DLCs | Read the Foundation and AWE sections in full; Resonant treats AWE’s closing scene as canon setup, not an optional side story |
| Never played Control at all | Read start to finish – nothing here assumes prior knowledge of the series |
The Basics: What the FBC Actually Is
The Federal Bureau of Control (FBC) is a clandestine U.S. government agency that contains, studies, and controls “paranatural” phenomena – objects, people, and events that break the physical laws of reality [12]. Its headquarters, the Oldest House, is a Brutalist skyscraper in New York City that exists partly outside ordinary space; hallways rearrange themselves, and elevators sometimes go to floors that shouldn’t exist [12].
Two more terms carry the entire plot. Objects of Power are ordinary items – the Slide Projector that lets the Hiss into the building is one – reshaped by the collective unconscious during an Altered World Event, then recovered by the FBC. Certain gifted people, called parautilitarians, can “bind” to an Object of Power through an Astral Plane ritual and use its ability directly [14]. And the Board is the power behind the FBC’s throne: a group of entities that lives in the Astral Plane, communicates through an inverted black pyramid, and personally selects who becomes Director by granting them the Service Weapon, itself an Object of Power [13][12].
Ordinary, Jesse, and Dylan
Jesse and Dylan Faden grew up in the small town of Ordinary, Maine. As kids, they found a slide projector capable of opening passages to other dimensions – the same type of Object of Power that Trench later weaponizes to let the Hiss into the Oldest House, though the game never confirms it’s the same physical unit. Using it triggered the “Ordinary AWE,” an Altered World Event that made the town’s entire adult population vanish [15]. When the FBC arrived to secure the fallout, they took Dylan into custody as a test subject and quietly began grooming him as a future Director candidate [15][8]. Jesse got away, and spent much of her adult life afterward searching for her brother, guided by a presence in her head she came to call Polaris [15] – the same Polaris who leads her to the Oldest House in 2019.
That backstory is the reason Resonant can hand the story to Dylan without it feeling like a stretch: he was inside the FBC’s orbit, and inside an Object of Power’s blast radius, before Jesse ever set foot in the Oldest House. Resonant just switches which sibling the camera follows.
The Base Game: How Jesse Becomes Director
The 2019 campaign opens with Director Zachariah Trench dead by his own hand, having shot himself with the Service Weapon. Jesse arrives searching for Dylan and picks the weapon up off the floor – and the Board immediately recognizes her as the new Director [7][8].
The Oldest House, meanwhile, has been overrun. Trench, it turns out, was the first FBC agent infected by an entity called the Hiss, contracted during an expedition into an unknown dimension; he secretly kept one of the burned slides connecting to that dimension and deliberately loaded it into the Bureau’s Slide Projector, letting the Hiss pour into the building [8][9]. Jesse spends the campaign clearing Control Points sector by sector, aided by Polaris – a resonance-based guiding presence she’s heard in her head since childhood – and FBC researcher Emily Pope.
Polaris turns out to be bound to an Object of Power called the Hedron, which the FBC had captured and was quietly studying. The Hiss destroys the Hedron during the campaign’s climax, and in the process infects Jesse directly. She survives only because Polaris was already living partly inside her, giving her something the Hiss can’t override [8][9]. In the final confrontation, Jesse finds Dylan – who has been Hiss-possessed the entire time – and purges the Hiss from him rather than losing him, closing off the Hiss’s attempt to open a direct gateway to the Board. She accepts the Director’s chair for good, and the FBC moves into a long cleanup phase [7][9].
The Foundation: What’s Actually Under the Oldest House
Released March 26, 2020, The Foundation is Jesse’s first assignment as Director. The Board summons her – through a Hotline call – to a cavernous, crystalline region below the Oldest House that the FBC first discovered more than 40 years earlier [5]. Down there she meets Ahti, the House’s self-described “janitor,” who is quietly one of the most powerful beings in the building: he’s telepathic, he’s one of only two people (besides Jesse) able to resist Hiss possession without a Hedron-Resonance Amplifier, and he owns a cassette player capable of navigating the Ashtray Maze – previously thought to require an entirely different Object of Power [6].
Ahti calls the Foundation his “vacation spot,” which is as close as the game gets to confirming he has some standing connection to the Astral Plane or the Board itself [6]. Once Jesse stabilizes the Foundation with a new ability called Shape, Ahti disappears back down into it and isn’t seen again in the base game [5].
AWE: The Alan Wake Crossover
The second expansion, AWE, launched August 27, 2020 – exactly one year after Control itself. It’s built entirely around a single idea: the small town of Bright Falls, setting of Remedy’s earlier game Alan Wake, is itself an Altered World Event, and the FBC has an entire sector dedicated to studying it [10].
Inside, Jesse encounters Dr. Hartman, the psychiatrist who ran the Cauldron Lake Lodge in Alan Wake, and learns his sector was overrun after an entity called Shade Hartman broke containment and spread darkness through the facility [10]. AWE also plants a more unsettling idea through a set of in-game “Night Springs” spec scripts: that the events of Control might have been written by Alan Wake himself, using Jesse and the Hiss as material for his own escape from the Dark Place [10]. Alan Wake 2 later pays that off directly – an FBC technician is shown servicing a relay near Cauldron Lake early in the game, the Bureau eventually deploys in force to contain the Dark Presence, and Jesse Faden is glimpsed on a television screen inside the Dark Place itself [11]. If you’re catching up on the other half of that crossover, our Alan Wake 2 PC settings guide covers getting the RTX-heavy sequel running at its best. AWE’s own ending seals the loop: it closes on the FBC receiving a new AWE report from Bright Falls – dated years in the future [11].
Why It’s Called Resonant
This is the detail almost no recap connects, and it’s sitting in plain sight in Control’s own lore: the Hiss is defined, in the FBC’s own case files, as “a self-propagating force of interdimensional resonance” [4]. The Board – the entity pulling every string in the series – is separately theorized to be “a resonance-based intelligence” as well, the same category Polaris belongs to [13]. Remedy didn’t pick “Resonant” as a stylish sequel title; it’s the same word the games have used for their two most powerful forces since 2019. That’s a strong signal the sequel’s new threats aren’t a clean break from the Hiss – they’re the same underlying phenomenon wearing a different name.
What Resonant Actually Picks Up
Confirmed details put Manhattan under pressure from three separate paranatural threats: the Hiss, which broke containment from the Oldest House and is now loose in the city; the Mold, an invasive, extradimensional organism spreading unchecked through it; and the Patterning, an entirely new cosmic anomaly the FBC internally calls “the Pattern,” which reshapes city blocks into strange algorithmic structures [1][3]. Its boss-tier manifestations, called Resonants, are described by Remedy’s own art director as “former persons of power” who’ve become fused with their surroundings rather than simple monsters [3].
Dylan Faden takes the lead this time, released from FBC custody to help contain the crisis while Jesse is missing [1][2]. That’s not a random casting choice: Dylan is one of only two named characters in the entire series – alongside Trench – confirmed to retain some personal agency while under Hiss influence [4]. The base game treats that as a horror detail. Resonant is positioned to treat it as the reason he’s still standing when the story needs him.
FAQ
Do I actually need to have played Control before Resonant?
No, and Remedy built the sequel around that answer – Dylan is a new lead, and the studio has said the story is meant to work as an entry point [2]. But treat “don’t need to” as a floor, not a recommendation: Resonant’s version of Dylan only makes sense in light of his childhood at Ordinary and his time under Hiss possession in the base game, and neither of those beats get re-explained from scratch mid-sequel.
Is the AWE DLC actually required reading, or just a nice-to-have?
Required, in practical terms. AWE is the piece that sets up the Remedy Connected Universe as an ongoing thread rather than a one-off Easter egg, and Resonant was itself first teased inside Alan Wake 2’s own DLC [2] – the crossover machinery you’d be catching up on runs through AWE specifically, not through the base game.
Are the Hiss, the Mold, and the Patterning the same threat with three names, or three separate problems?
Confirmed information treats them as three distinct things sharing one city: the Hiss is the returning, known enemy; the Mold is described as an invasive growth problem rather than a sentient force; and the Patterning is the new, still-mysterious element built specifically around Resonant’s own boss fights [1][3]. Whether they turn out to be connected at a deeper level – given how directly “resonance” ties back to both the Hiss and the Board – is exactly the kind of question a sequel titled Resonant seems built to answer.
Key Takeaway
Everything Resonant needs you to know traces back to three things: Jesse ended the base game as Director by purging the Hiss from her brother rather than losing him to it; the Foundation revealed the Oldest House sits on something far older than the FBC itself; and AWE confirmed Control was never a standalone story – it was always half of a conversation with Alan Wake. Dylan steps into Resonant carrying all three of those threads at once, in a city where the thing that nearly killed him once has apparently learned two new names.
For a complete step-by-step walkthrough, see the full Control: Resonant hub — everything confirmed for September 24.
Sources
1. Control Resonant Launches Worldwide on September 24 – Remedy Games
2. Control Resonant – Wikipedia
3. Control Resonant’s Bosses Are Nothing Alike, as Remedy Teases The Patterning – GamingBolt
4. The Hiss – Control Wiki
5. The Foundation – Control Wiki
6. Ahti – Control Wiki
7. Control’s Full Story Summary and Recap – GameRant
8. Control: Everything You Need To Know About The Story – TheGamer
9. The Ending of Control Explained – SVG
10. What Control’s AWE DLC Tells Us About Alan Wake’s Story – GameSpot
11. How Alan Wake 2 Connects to Control – GameRant
12. Federal Bureau of Control – Control Wiki
13. The Board – Control Wiki
14. Object of Power – Control Wiki
I've been playing video games for over 20 years, spanning everything from early PC titles to modern open-world games. I started Switchblade Gaming to publish the kind of accurate, well-researched guides I always wanted to find — built on primary sources, tested in-game, and kept up to date after patches. I currently focus on Minecraft and Pokémon GO.