Control Resonant is set seven years after Control. Jesse Faden has disappeared, the Oldest House has been in lockdown, and the Hiss have spilled into Manhattan alongside a new form of resonance and the Mold. You play her brother Dylan Faden, who spent the first game as a Hiss-corrupted antagonist and ended it in a coma. The sibling roles are reversed: Dylan is now the one searching.
Before everything: Ordinary, Maine
Jesse and Dylan grew up in Ordinary, Maine. A paranormal event tied to a mysterious slide projector made people and objects disappear and exposed both siblings to paranatural forces. When the Federal Bureau of Control arrived, it took Dylan and Jesse escaped.
Dylan was classified a Prime Candidate, capable of wielding Objects of Power, and spent most of his childhood inside Bureau containment facilities and testing chambers. Years of isolation and paranatural exposure damaged his mental state badly.
What happened in the first Control
In Control, Jesse enters the Oldest House looking for her brother and ends up Director of the FBC during the Hiss invasion. When she finally finds Dylan he speaks in riddles and references alternate realities.
Dylan falls under the Hiss’s influence but, unlike its other victims, keeps much of his sanity — he treats the Hiss as a friend and a liberator. He becomes a major antagonist in the game’s climax, and after his defeat he collapses into a coma. His brief awakening in Alan Wake 2’s Lake House DLC foreshadowed the sequel.
The seven-year gap
Resonant opens seven years after Jesse’s journey into the Oldest House. Across that gap the House has been in full lockdown and Jesse has mysteriously disappeared — the game does not begin with an explanation for where she went, because finding out is the plot.
Remedy’s official framing is that Dylan confronts "a growing supernatural crisis" in Manhattan, where "a new form of resonance, alongside the Hiss and the Mold, is warping Manhattan as a mysterious cosmic force reshapes reality itself." With Jesse missing, Dylan takes on an unexpected defensive role.
Dylan’s position inside the Bureau
Dylan wakes and leaves the Oldest House, but the FBC does not welcome him back. The remaining staff keep him at arm’s length because of his history as a mass murderer — an unwilling one, under Hiss control, but the bodies were real.
That friction is the engine of the story. Dylan has spent his entire life being controlled: the FBC controlled where he lived, researchers controlled what was done to him, and the Hiss controlled his mind. The arc is about him learning to make his own choices and decide who he wants to become.
The Patterning and the Resonants
The phenomenon distorting Manhattan is called the Patterning — algorithmic distortions that transform parts of the city. Its most powerful embodiments are the Resonants, boss-level entities that each work differently from one another.
Beating a Resonant is also how Dylan unlocks new paranatural combat abilities, so the story beats and the power curve are deliberately tied together rather than running on separate tracks.
Do you need the first game to follow it?
No. Remedy wrote Resonant as an entry point and built a Control recap into the main menu. The official "Previously on Control" trailer covers the same ground in a few minutes: Jesse becoming Director, the Hiss containment breach, the Oldest House, and the truth behind the slide projector in Ordinary.
Playing Control first mostly changes the emotional weight. If you know what Jesse went through to reach Dylan and what the Bureau did to him, the reversal at the heart of Resonant lands considerably harder.
Terms worth knowing before you start
- FBC — the Federal Bureau of Control, the secret agency that studies and contains paranatural phenomena.
- The Hiss — the reality-corrupting, whispering force that invaded the Oldest House in the first game.
- Objects of Power / Altered Items — ordinary things warped into something dangerous and useful.
- The Oldest House — the FBC’s shifting brutalist headquarters, under lockdown as Resonant begins.
What the Resonance actually is
Remedy’s own wording is precise and worth repeating: "a new form of resonance, alongside the Hiss and the Mold, is warping Manhattan as a mysterious cosmic force reshapes reality itself." Three hostile forces are named there, not one, and the Resonance is the new arrival.
That is also where the subtitle comes from. The Hiss carried over from the first game and the Mold from its expansion content, but the Resonance is the phenomenon that defines this story and the entities Dylan has to fight.
How the story is told
Resonant leans on conversation rather than collectible documents. Dialogue plays while you move instead of stopping the game, which is a deliberate change from the original’s heavy reliance on case files, recordings and video you had to stand still to consume.
It is still a Remedy game, so the world-building runs deep, but the main thread is legible without hunting every document. Reviewers consistently rated the story and the cast performances as among the game’s strongest elements even where they criticised the combat.
Manhattan as a character
The original Control took place entirely inside the Oldest House, the FBC’s shifting brutalist headquarters. Resonant moves outside into a Manhattan that folds, inverts and collapses, split into large zones each with its own atmosphere, encounters and lore.
Some reviewers argued that leaving the Oldest House costs the series part of its identity, and that criticism appears repeatedly in the lower-scoring reviews. Others praised the level design as a highlight. It is the single most divisive creative decision in the game.
What we do not know yet
We do not publish the ending, the fate of Jesse Faden, or any late-game twist on this page. Those beats sit behind a 30-hour campaign, and summarising them from pre-launch coverage would mean guessing. What is confirmed is the setup: Jesse is missing at the start, and finding her is Dylan’s motivation.
Where Resonant sits in Remedy’s wider universe
Dylan’s brief awakening in Alan Wake 2’s Lake House DLC set up his return as the playable character here. It is connective tissue for people who follow every Remedy release, not a prerequisite for understanding Resonant.
Nothing in the sequel requires FBC: Firebreak either. Treat the wider shared universe as optional context — the story of Resonant is Dylan and Jesse, and the game gives you what you need about both.