Control Resonant Story Explained: Dylan, Jesse & Hiss

What is Control Resonant about?

Control Resonant is set seven years after Control, on the day FBC Director Jesse Faden’s lockdown of the Oldest House fails. Her younger brother Dylan wakes from a years-long coma, walks out of the Bureau’s headquarters into a Manhattan being warped by a new form of resonance, and has to contain it while looking for Jesse, who is missing.

Remedy describes the threat as "a new form of resonance, alongside the Hiss and the Mold," warping Manhattan "as a mysterious cosmic force reshapes reality itself." In the game that force is the Patterning, the distortion that folds and inverts whole blocks of the city; the first mission already sends Dylan to "Reach the Source of the Patterning". Its most powerful embodiments are the Resonants, boss-level entities with one in each zone except the Evacuation Zone. Beating them is also how Dylan gains new paranatural powers (the Deserter is one example).

The conflict is personal as much as cosmic. Remedy’s co-creative director Mikael Kasurinen puts Dylan’s motives plainly: "he wants to help, and he wants to find his sister," and the question he keeps running into is "who is he today?"

The opening mission, Orientation, is simply the order to leave the Oldest House. Dylan wakes in a glass containment cell, picks a form for his shapeshifting weapon, the Aberrant, and heads out into the city. An FBC agent named Zoe is his voice on the radio.

Who is Dylan Faden?

Dylan Faden is Jesse’s younger brother and the only playable character in Control Resonant. The FBC took him as a child after the paranatural event in Ordinary, Maine, and raised him as a possible future Director before locking him away. In Control the Hiss took him over, and Jesse’s rescue left him in a coma that lasts until Resonant begins.

Ordinary, Maine. As children, Jesse and Dylan found a slide projector, an Object of Power, in their hometown, and the paranatural event it set off made the town’s adults disappear. The FBC arrived, took Dylan and the projector, and Jesse got away.

Inside the Bureau. Dylan was Prime Candidate 6 — "P6" is printed on his clothes in Resonant’s opening — and the FBC groomed him to succeed Director Trench. Remedy’s summary is that the institution "tried to dictate every aspect of his life" and that "it ended in tragedy: lives were lost, and he was contained for years." In Control’s backstory, those deaths are Bureau agents he killed before the Hiss ever arrived, which is why he was locked in the Containment Sector.

The Hiss. The Hiss then entered the Oldest House through the projector. In Remedy’s words, Dylan "was taken over by it, and what followed became the largest paranatural disaster the FBC had ever known. Hundreds of people died." Jesse stopped him and cleansed him, and he fell into a coma, "trapped inside his own mind for years."

What was him, and what was the Hiss? Remedy’s framing separates the two: the Hiss "took over" Dylan when hundreds died. Control itself is less tidy — when Jesse finds him, he tells her he has embraced the Hiss — and the killings that got him contained came earlier. What is stated outright is that Dylan "has never been in control of his own life", and the Steam description frames his arc as a journey "from former test subject to paranatural superweapon". Whether he is a villain, a victim or both is interpretation, and the game leaves that question to you.

That history shapes who he is in Resonant. PlayStation.Blog’s preview describes him as "shy and hesitant, in part due to spending years both in a coma and incarcerated by the FBC", in contrast to his confident older sister.

What happened to Jesse Faden?

At the end of Control, Jesse was Director of the FBC and the Oldest House was sealed under lockdown with the Hiss still inside. Seven years later, as Control Resonant begins, that lockdown is failing and Jesse is missing. She is not simply gone, though: Remedy says she "remains central and has a presence in the game", and she appears to Dylan in the first minutes.

What you see in the opening. Jesse is in Dylan’s containment cell as the game begins. She drives a long black object into him and he comes to gasping; reviews identify it as the Aberrant. Later in Orientation she appears to him again during a ritual at a Fault, with the objective "Complete the Ritual".

Kasurinen says Remedy has been "deliberately quiet about her new journey", and that "Dylan’s journey is shaped by Jesse’s actions." Where she is and why is what the story is about, so the answer belongs below the spoiler line: Jesse’s fate at the end (spoilers).

When does Control Resonant take place?

Control Resonant takes place seven years after Control, on the day Jesse’s lockdown of the Oldest House finally fails. The gap in the story matches the real one: Control launched in August 2019, and Resonant launched in September 2026.

When	What happens	Where it is told
Childhood, 17 years before Control	The Ordinary AWE: the slide projector empties the town of adults; the FBC takes Dylan, Jesse escapes	Control backstory, retold in Resonant
Control	Jesse enters the Oldest House and becomes Director; the Hiss outbreak; she cleanses Dylan, who falls into a coma; the House stays under lockdown	Control (2019)
After Control	Jesse settles into her role as Director	The Foundation and AWE expansions (2020)
Seven years after Control	The lockdown fails, Dylan wakes and Jesse is missing	Control Resonant (2026)

In Alan Wake 2’s The Lake House expansion (October 2024), FBC agent Kiran Estevez comes across Dylan, awake and held in a glass cell, and he gives her cryptic answers; the scene ends with a tease of this game. The Lake House does not say where that scene falls on Control’s timeline, so we leave it off the table above.

How does it connect to Control and Alan Wake?

You need a handful of Control concepts, not the game itself: the FBC, the Oldest House, the Hiss, Objects of Power and the slide projector from Ordinary. Remedy covers them in a Control recap in the main menu and in its official "Previously on CONTROL" video. The link to Alan Wake is optional background.

FBC — the Federal Bureau of Control, the secret agency that studies and contains paranatural phenomena.
The Oldest House — the FBC’s shifting brutalist headquarters in New York, where Resonant begins.
The Hiss — the reality-corrupting force that invaded the Oldest House in Control and took over Dylan.
Objects of Power — ordinary items warped into something dangerous and useful.
The slide projector — the Object of Power from Ordinary. It explains the siblings’ past, and it matters again at the end.
The Board — the entity that speaks in bracketed text. It addresses Dylan within the first minutes of Resonant.

Optional background: Control’s AWE expansion, the crossover that tied the Bureau to Alan Wake; Alan Wake 2’s The Lake House, with its Dylan scene; and the co-op spin-off FBC: Firebreak. None of them is needed to follow Resonant, and this game-by-game table separates what is required from what is optional background. For a fuller answer on whether to play the original first, see Should I Play Control Before Control Resonant?

How the story is told

The main thread runs through cutscenes, radio conversations and Dylan’s visions of Jesse at the Faults. The backstory sits in collectibles such as "Notes On The Ordinary AWE Case File", which you can pick up in the opening hour, and in a main quest called Rebuild that retells the siblings’ childhood as a 2D pixel-art sequence. Sportskeeda points out that the cutscenes alone do not tell the whole story, and that notes and recordings fill in much of the detail. Budget for it: the main story alone runs about 30 hours (see How Long Is Control Resonant?).

Plot explained (spoilers)

Major spoilers from here to the end of the page, including the ending and what happens to Jesse. Each step says what it rests on: gameplay footage we checked (with timestamps under Sources) or a written source we could not yet match to footage.

The plot in brief: Dylan works for the Bureau, on a kill-switch leash, to clear the Patterning out of Manhattan, while Jesse reaches him through the Faults. Both trace the Patterning to a single entity, the Hedron. Dylan finally kills it inside his own mind, which should kill him too, until Jesse takes his place.

Wake Up. The main story opens with Jesse waking Dylan in his cell. The Board speaks to him, and Orientation sends him out of the Oldest House into Manhattan (IGN footage).
The Bureau’s terms. Back at the Oldest House, Emily Pope lets Dylan stay free on condition that he wears a Mobile Containment Device (MCD) that can incapacitate or kill him, and Zoe is given control of it. Pope hopes the Patterning, which works against the Hiss, can be turned into a weapon; a rushed test of her Cancellation Field Device backfires and speeds the Patterning up. This comes from Wikipedia’s uncited plot summary; Sportskeeda also describes the MCD as a kill switch.
The Faults. Dylan is repeatedly pulled into Faults, where he and Jesse perform a ritual together; the first comes during Orientation (footage). Sportskeeda reports that in these scenes Jesse remembers their childhood and regrets not saving him from the Bureau, and that the Faults grant Dylan his movement abilities.
The Resonants and the Hedron. As Dylan clears the Resonants, he and Jesse trace the Patterning to one source, the Hedron. The final main-story chapter is named Defeat the Hedron, as the quest log in the ending footage shows.
Jesse is lost. According to Sportskeeda, the resonance makes the Hiss inside Dylan try to take him again. Jesse pulls him back but is lost in the process, and later turns out to be alive, Patterned inside the Hedron and holding it back to buy him time. Wikipedia’s plot summary tells this stretch differently: Jesse is travelling between dimensions sealing the Faults, and she and Dylan fail to close the last one, inside the Oldest House. We have not matched either version to footage.
The Oldest House. The Hedron reaches Manhattan and starts Patterning the Oldest House itself. Dylan fights his way up to it; the objective reads "Fight to the Core — Fight the Hedron" (ending footage, from the start).

The name is not new. In Control, "Hedron" is what Director Trench and Dr. Darling called the hexagonal entity they found through the slide projector, which Jesse recognised as Polaris. Wikipedia’s plot summary says the game presents its Hedron as a different one from Polaris, an entity of the same kind still in its prime. We have not confirmed that in the game ourselves, so we do not treat them as the same being.

How Control Resonant ends (spoilers)

The ending in one line: Dylan kills the Hedron inside his own mind at the cost of his life, Jesse swaps places with him, and he wakes free while she is left unconscious in the Oldest House.

Destroying the Hedron’s physical form is not the end. Dylan is overwhelmed from the inside — the footage shows him splitting into copies of himself in shafts of light — and he tells Zoe to use a device on him: "Do it, Zoe!" (about 17:10). Sportskeeda identifies the device as his MCD, the kill switch Zoe was given control of earlier, and says it only stops Dylan fighting back, so he tears it off.

A memory of Dr. Darling holding a device to him — "This will fix you" (about 19:20) — leads into the last main quest, The End (about 20:10), which plays out inside Dylan’s mind. The Board speaks to him during the fight (about 26:20), and he kills the Hedron there. Sportskeeda explains the stakes: the Hedron had anchored itself to Dylan, so killing it meant dying with it.

The twist, the epilogue quest The Beginning and every thread the finale leaves open are broken down in Control Resonant ending explained.

Jesse’s fate at the end (spoilers)

Does Jesse die? No. She survives the ending, but she saves Dylan by taking his place and is left unconscious in the Oldest House, in a coma according to every written source we checked.

After the fight, Dylan lies collapsed in a dark void. A beam of light opens and Jesse comes through it (about 27:50). She runs to him — "No, no, no… Hey, no!" (about 28:20) — and moments later it is Jesse lying motionless with Dylan kneeling over her (about 28:40–29:10). Sportskeeda says she used the slide projector, the Object of Power from their childhood, to trade places with him and take the cost of the Hedron’s death herself.

Dylan survives. In the epilogue he sits with Zoe on a bench above the city. The Bureau, he says, is "loosening the leash on me", and she asks what he will do "with all your new found independence" (about 29:50–30:50). A new quest, The Beginning, then sends him to visit Jesse in the Oldest House (about 31:55). She lies unconscious on a medical bed in a curtained room, looked after by Pope (about 34:15–36:30): Emily Pope, the Research specialist who helped Jesse in Control. Wikipedia’s summary adds that the FBC removes Dylan’s MCD and that he becomes a Bureau contractor, vowing to wake her.

Two Sportskeeda articles and Wikipedia’s plot summary all describe her state as a coma and say Dylan and the Bureau are looking for a way to wake her; one Sportskeeda article also places her in Dylan’s old cell. The footage shows her unconscious and under care, but it does not by itself confirm the diagnosis or the room.

What the ending means (spoilers)

What the game establishes. The Hedron is dead. Dylan is alive, and the Bureau is giving him more freedom than he has had since childhood. Jesse is alive but unconscious in the Oldest House. The post-ending quest is called The Beginning, and a Final Chapter screen tells you the crisis is not over and that you can keep playing (about 32:35).

Our reading, not Remedy’s. The ending mirrors Control’s. There, Jesse saved Dylan and he was left in a coma; here, she saves him again by taking his place, and he is the one left standing. That fits Kasurinen’s description of the Fadens’ arcs as ones that "revolve around each other" in games that are "about the siblings confronting their destinies." It also frames The Beginning as a setup for a story about waking Jesse, though Remedy has announced nothing of the kind.

What we have not verified

The middle of the story: Jesse being lost while saving Dylan from the Hiss, then held inside the Hedron. This comes from Sportskeeda, and Wikipedia’s uncited summary tells it differently.
That Dylan tears off the MCD. Sportskeeda and Wikipedia’s summary both describe the MCD as a kill switch in Zoe’s hands, but only Sportskeeda describes him tearing it off, and the footage we checked shows only his "Do it, Zoe!".
The slide projector as the means of the swap. Two Sportskeeda articles report it; the footage shows a beam of light and the switch itself, not the object.
The room as Dylan’s old cell. Jesse’s coma is now reported by Sportskeeda and Wikipedia’s summary; the room comes from one Sportskeeda article only.
That Resonant’s Hedron is a different entity from Polaris, Control’s Hedron. Only Wikipedia’s uncited summary says so.
Whether any choice changes the ending. The footage we used is labelled "True Ending", but we found no source describing a different one.

Checked on September 23, 2026 against text from Remedy, PlayStation.Blog and Steam, press coverage, and gameplay footage from IGN, Ben-Gun and Jason’s Video Games Source. The footage was reviewed as sampled frames with on-screen subtitles, so timestamps are approximate to within about ten seconds. Re-checked on September 28, 2026 against Wikipedia’s plot summary (revision of September 27) and a second Sportskeeda article (September 25); where they add to or differ from the footage, the text above says so.