Before You Play Control Resonant – Control Story Recap

Planning to play Control Resonant? You need Control (2019)'s recap because most people got the story wrong. Even those who finished the game and survived the flying furniture were seen hanging out on Reddit asking for help with Control's story. Yes, it is that complicated, which only made it more fun. Before you play Control Resonant, here is a full recap of the original Control's story so you aren't clueless while slaying monsters in Control Resonant.

Where Control Resonant Begins

Control Resonant hands the lead to a new protagonist: Dylan Faden. He's released from FBC captivity to fight paranatural threats spreading across Manhattan and is armed with a shapeshifting weapon called the Aberrant. He's looking for his sister, Jesse Faden, Director of the Federal Bureau of Control. Let's begin with a complete story recap of Control.

Plot - Bureau, the House, and AWEs

Before we begin the Control story recap, let's understand the basics. It is October 19. The Federal Bureau of Control (FBC) is a secret US government agency that studies and contains the paranatural. Its job revolves around three things:

The Bureau operates out of the Oldest House, a brutalist tower in Manhattan that you can only find if you need to find it. Inside, it's much bigger than outside; corridors rearrange themselves, and whole sectors shift.

Above it all sits the Board, an extradimensional entity that appears as an inverted black pyramid in the Astral Plane. It speaks in broken, self-correcting language, and it chooses the Bureau's Director.

Who Is Jesse Faden?

Years before Control's story begins, in the small town of Ordinary, Wisconsin, Jesse and her younger brother Dylan found a slide projector in a dump. It was an object of power. Its slides were doorways, and using it tore open a threshold between dimensions.

A benevolent entity came through and bonded with Jesse. She calls it Polaris, a presence in her head that hums, nudges, and occasionally speaks. The AWE devastated the town, and only seventeen people survived the aftermath. The FBC arrived, seized the projector and the slide that mattered most, Slide 36. They also took Dylan away to raise him as a future FBC Director candidate.

Jesse spent the next seventeen years on the move, keeping Polaris a secret and looking for her brother. Control begins the day she walks into the Oldest House to get him back.

The Oldest House Secrets

Set in the same universe as Alan Wake, Control begins with Jesse Faden entering the Oldest House, a place of power and home to the Federal Bureau of Control (FBC). She finds an empty lobby, giving the entire place an eerie vibe.

Jesse meets Ahti, the Bureau's janitor, a friendly guy who speaks in proverbs and seems to be expecting her. He says she is here to be hired as his assistant and guides her way to the Director's Office for the interview.

She hears a gunshot sound on her way. Upon entering the office, she finds that the Director of the FBC, Zachariah Trench, is dead after he committed suicide in his office. Prompted by Polaris, she picks up his gun, called the Service Weapon, which becomes her primary weapon. It is a paranatural pistol that can transform into different weapons and reload itself out of thin air.

As Jesse picks up the weapon, she finds herself in the Astral Plane, where she meets The Board, an extradimensional being shown as a black pyramid. The Board makes all the decisions made in the FBC and appoints Jesse as the new Director. The building is now in lockdown, overrun by something called The Hiss, and Jesse is now in charge of the agency she broke into.

What Is The Hiss

The Hiss is an invasive entity from another dimension that spreads as sound. It infects people through a chanting incantation that rewrites them from the inside. Victims float in the air, mutter the chant on loop, and attack anything that isn't them.

People infected by the Hiss are basically dead, so cleansing someone possessed by the Hiss kills their body. Jesse figures this out and is protected by Polaris, which protects her and keeps her immune.

Jesse's Allies And The Device That Protects Them

During her journey, Jesse meets Emily Pope, a researcher at the FBC who becomes a loyal ally. She is one of the few people who hasn't been affected by the Hiss and is protected by a wearable device, the HRA (Hedron Resonance Amplifier).

She promises to help Emily cleanse The Hiss in exchange for information on her brother, Dylan. Jesse realises she needs to defeat the Hiss to find her brother and save everyone in the Oldest House; otherwise, she and her brother might die with everyone else.

It is built by Head of Research Dr. Casper Darling, who is now missing. During Jesse's journey, she finds Darling's video logs, which provide the backstory to the game events. Alongside Emily, there are other people are protected by the HRA, such as security chief Simon Arish, Head of Operations Helen Marshall, and Panopticon warden Frederick Langston.

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Finding Dylan

Jesse's search pulls her deeper into the Bureau: Maintenance, Research, and finally the Panopticon. The Panopticon is the prison sector in Containment where the FBC keeps its most dangerous Altered Items, including her brother Dylan.

He was Prime Candidate 6, trained to become the Director of the FBC, while Jesse was in the outside world as Prime Candidate 7 as part of a "control group". Dylan was subjected to several experiments as part of this training. As Dylan's powers grew, so did his temper, resulting in the death of several FBC staff.

This led to Dylan being locked inside a cell and being corrupted by the Hiss. He now finds comfort in the Hiss while becoming repulsive towards Jesse's Polaris. When Jesse finally reaches him, he isn't the little boy she remembers.

He's articulate, bitter, and already working with the Hiss because he believes the Hiss is the only thing that will ever let him make his own choices. Jesse also crosses paths with the Former, an ancient entity in the Astral Plane. It speaks in riddles, clearly dislikes the Board, and matters later.

The Plot Twist And Final Reveal

Jesse's search into Dylan's past leads her into the Dimensional Research sector where she learns about what the Bureau was up to. The slides in the projector during her childhood showed horrifying and terrible things; Slide 36 had a kind entity called Polaris. But a hostile entity known as the Not Mother corrupted several children and caused everyone in Ordinary to disappear.

Since Jesse couldn't turn off the projector, she burned all slides, leaving only Slide 36. With the help of Polaris, Dylan and Jesse managed to shut down the projector, but it was too late. Only 17 people remained, and the FBC took Dylan with them, along with the Projector and Slide 36.

Slide 36 also contained Hedron, and Darling brought him into the Oldest House. Hedron and Polaris are essentially the same force, and a part of it lived in Oldest House while another part was living with Jesse in Ordinary.

Control's Ending And DLCs

A fragment of the Hiss returns inside Director Trench and slowly works on him. He believed that Darling was planning a takeover of the FBC with Hedron. With a warning from Hedron, Darling created the HRA off its frequency and managed to save some people.

This led Director Trench to load a slide onto the projector and open the door to the Hiss. Later, the Hiss made him commit suicide. Once Jesse finds out about this, she goes to the Maintenance Sector where Ahti gives her the cassette player that lets her access the Dimensional Research. This is also a sign that Ahti could be another extradimensional figure and more powerful than he seems.

Guided by Darling, who is no longer just a human, she makes her way to the Ashtray Maze, a shifting corridor inside the Bureau. It is the game's signature set piece as Jesse runs through it while Old Gods of Asgard's Take Control plays in the background.

As Jesse finally heads out to the Dimensional Research to find Hedron, she inadvertently lets the Hiss in, which destroys the Hedron and casts Polaris out of this dimension, but Jesse thinks Polaris has been destroyed too.

The Hiss finally reaches The Board and corrupts Jesse, leading to a credit roll. However, it is revealed that this is an illusion and not the true ending of the game, as Jesse is caught in a time loop as an office clerk and sees visions of Dylan possessed by the Hiss. She also sees a tussle between herself and Trench for the position of Director.

Thanks to Ahti's cassette and a message from Dr Darling, who has now entered the Astral Plane, Jesse snaps out of this illusion. As she shoots the vision, she escapes the illusion to become the director of the FBC.

Polaris was never limited to Hedron, as a dormant part is still inside Jesse, leading her to become a source of the frequency. At the other end of the room, she finds Dylan using the slide projector to feed the Hiss invasion. She shuts down the projector and cleanses her brother of the Hiss. But Dylan doesn't die and manages to survive thanks to his old connection to the Polaris from childhood. This leads to him falling into a coma.

Who Wins

There is no clear winner as the portal is closed and the Hiss is still present in the Oldest House. The lockdown is still in place, and Jesse has a new job as the Director of the FBC, something which she never asked for. Dylan is now in a coma in the medical wing while Darling is gone. Helen Marshall, the head of Operations, is also missing.

Control DLC 1: The Foundation Story Recap

Now, let's recap the story for the first DLC for Control: The Foundation. Picking up right after the base game, Jesse discovers a second crisis: the Nail, a massive crystal monolith buried beneath the Oldest House that anchors reality against the Astral Plane, has cracked. Astral energy is now flooding into a cave network called the Foundation, and Helen Marshall, the Bureau's Head of Operations who vanished during the main story, went down there alone and hasn't been heard from since. Jesse descends and gains a new power, Shape, split into two uses: Create, which grows crystal platforms for climbing and can impale enemies, and Fracture, which shatters crystal blocking her path.

Working through four ritual sites to repair the Nail, she's guided by cryptic Hotline messages from Marshall and aided by the Former, the ancient entity she'd cleansed back in the main campaign, who clearly doesn't trust the Board. Audio logs from the Bureau's first Director, Northmoor, and his head of research, Dr. Ash, fill in how the Bureau originally bound itself to this place. Jesse races to find Marshall before she meets the same end Trench did, repairing the Nail and containing the breach. True to Control's style, it closes without full closure: the immediate threat is handled, but the story of the Board's true nature is left wide open for what comes next.

Control DLC 2: AWE Story Recap

Set shortly after the ending, the story recap for the second DLC of Control AWE, begins with a Hotline call from Alan Wake, still trapped in the Dark Place at Cauldron Lake, using the line to guide Jesse and, it turns out, script her adventure in real time. He directs her to the Investigations Sector, sealed off since Dr. Hartman, driven to study Cauldron Lake himself, was possessed by the Dark Presence from Alan Wake and later broke containment on a rampage. Director Trench sealed the sector with survivors still trapped inside rather than risk a rescue.

When the Hiss swept through during the main game, it reached Hartman too, and the Hiss and the Dark Presence fed off each other, twisting him into something new. Panopticon warden Frederick Langston asks Jesse to clear him out so the sector can be reclaimed. She fights and gains a new weapon form (Surge, a grenade launcher) against a new enemy type (flying Hiss Rangers), while visions of Wake bleed through a spiral door at the Oceanview Motel. She also finds an old spec script Wake wrote years earlier that eerily predicts Trench and Darling's fate, hinting he'd been writing Control's events all along.

The finale at Bright Falls has Jesse using light to beat back Hartman's darkness and destroy him. Wake himself stays trapped in the Dark Place, but the DLC exists to confirm that Control and Alan Wake share the same universe, setting the stage for Alan Wake 2. However, you don't need to play or even know the story of Alan Wake to play the Control series.

Where Things Stand Before You Play Control Resonant

Here's a short story recap of where things currently are before you start Control Resonant:

Resonant picks up with the threats no longer contained, spilled out into Manhattan and reshaping it, and Dylan finally out of his cell. So what do you think of the Control story recap? Are you excited to play Control Resonant? Do let us know on our X account.