Easter Egg Control: How Remedy's Control is connected to Alan Wake

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For a match that was almost 10 years old and did not sell very well at launch, Alan Wake still has a passionate passion. Remedy can not do much online without hearing from fans wondering who are asking aloud "Yeah, but what about Alan Wake 2?", But this week his seventh album , Control, will come out in the stores. This is the first of several titles at the Finnish gaming house where the turnaround is faster than its previous development cycle of more than five years, taking just two years from start to launch day.

Control procedure | Control Tips | Control objects of power

It's also a lot more than that, though. Control does not just launch a new faster workflow for Remedy, it also highlights the first undeniable proof that it has a broader view of its story-rich video games. Just as Marvel began laying the groundwork for his last century events, Remedy also began charting a connected world with Alan Wake of 2010, and with Control, the Grand Remedy Universe – or the RCU, if you prefer – begins to come into view.

While Control tells its own fascinating story, which alone is worth the taste of Remedy fans or anyone who appreciates AAA games with the freedom to become weird, the most exciting element of this game of 25 hours is perhaps how much the build is doing. In short, the world of Control is no longer the same as that of Alan Wake, Quantum Break and even Max Payne. For questionable business reasons – Remedy does not hold the rights to Quantum Break or Max Payne – Control focuses primarily on its connections with Alan Wake, but these connections go far beyond the fun. Control the Easter eggs. They are, in many cases, full-fledged conspiracy points that would reduce the gap between the first game and anything that might happen later on. All of Remedy's links between Control and Alan Wake, as well as their significance for the future of Remedy's shared world storytelling.

FBC restarted Night Springs to introduce paranormal concepts to the public

The control is unleashed with collectibles, offering around 200 in total. They come in many forms, including partially written documents, tape recordings, and training videos that do not coincidentally call Lost's DHARMA initiative. The first of these who begins to link really exciting points is an internal memo that describes the FBC's media misinformation campaigns, such as a side-by-side radio show called America Overnight, which invites the film community to paper to share its strange disturbances. These, in turn, help the office to seek new objects of power (elements affected by the parallel dimension called the astral plane) and new thresholds (places of power where the doors of the astral plane are the strongest).

The memo indicates that this program was very effective, but it is important to note that they did something similar with Night Springs, the Twilight Zone tribute seen for the first time in Alan Wake, with lower results.

A second document found much later in the game also indicates how the show originally appeared as a legitimate program, but the FBC restarted the series after its release of the show "for a few years now" in order to present paranatural concepts to the film. the general public. In the real world, it is also a common conspiratorial vision of news stories about UFOs. Some people believe that they are shared with us to mitigate the shock of discovering, once and for all, the existence of aliens. One thing that these documents can confirm for us is that in the world of control, Alan Wake exists.

All these coffee thermoses in Alan Wake actually had a purpose

Like Control's hero, Jesse Faden, Alan Wake was no stranger to collectibles scattered all over the world, shining for attention. Over the years, the only variant of Wake collectors that is constantly being reprimanded is the Oh, Deer Diner. In 2010, they seemed useless. Few of them could attribute to them any purpose, perhaps a reference to Twin Peaks, one of the game's major influences.

It is very likely that Remedy did not know their purpose at that time either, but nine years later, the studio decided to recall with humor the reason for their existence: they are modified objects. Unlike Objects of Power, which are the most dangerous objects in the astral plane, altered objects have been manipulated by the "other side", but do not seem to pose a particular threat. They are always observed and contained by the CBF, but that sounds like the difference between being in prison and being in solitary confinement. Coffee thermos are part of the population of certified products, but they are not carefully quarantined. A collectible document explains that these thermoses promise hot coffee freshly prepared, no matter how long it has been poured. It is a lucrative superpower.

Most importantly, the same document mentions Alan Wake and even suggests that he was once an involuntary member of the Principal Applicant Program, but the same program reveals that Jesse is one of those who oversees people with a curious connection to the Astral Plan. . He also calls Bright Falls and Cauldron Lake the "known sites of a recurring AWE event" or Altered World Event. AWE are scenarios where the Astral plane and its objects of power disrupt our world on a larger scale. It is at these events that the CBF trembles and where they need it most. The threads are tied more tightly now.

This House of Dreams ARG revives

In 2012, while no one outside Remedy knew what would be his next project, Remedy launched an alternate reality game (ARG) that already existed in Alan Wake's universe. If you are not familiar with alternative reality games, consider them as online treasure hunts that claim that we live in the same world as the property of a media and can even interact with its characters. They can become really complex. For Alan Wake, the ARG was a blog of a woman named Sam who had written on This House of Dreams some strange dreams that she had had in her new home in a town called Ordinary. She dreamed of a diver and then found a strange shoebox at her home. One day, she dreamed that people in jackets saying "AWE" came to confiscate the shoebox. When she woke up, she could not find the real shoebox either.

Remedy has never really recognized this ARG over the years, but he has not forgotten it. On a white board from The Oldest House's research division, you'll learn more about this shoebox, Sam, and what it means. Remedy even gave Jesse the same hometown as Sam, although she has her own disastrous story, Altered World Event, distinct from Sam's missing shoebox.

The old gods of Asgard, Thomas Zane and The dreams of a diver

Several less consistent references link more the worlds of Alan Wake and Control. The Old Gods of Asgard, the rock band in the universe performed by the real poets of autumn (who also perform a song in the game under their real nickname), can be heard through Alan Wake, and they also feature in a cool end-of-game moment where Jesse uses the Concierge's mysterious walkman to help her navigate through a particularly tricky part of the FBC's headquarters, called The Oldest House.

Another collectible document, a letter written to the American Psychiatric Council and presumably confiscated by the CBF, describes a recurrent "living dream" that revealed a small empty town with a lake in the center and shadows of people mumbling strange things. The dreamer was awakened by a bright light, a bit like Alan when Thomas Zane calls him in his dreams. This is obviously an allusion to Alan Wake, although, despite all my obsessive madness on this subject, I found no clue about the author of the letter, Richard Bowker. Googling the name indicates an award-winning science fiction writer in real life, so this piece may only be an easter egg for someone from the Remedy team.

Even Jesse herself seems to be a fan of Tom Zane's poetry, though, when she recites it in front of a kind of FBC interviewer on an old audio diary, the interviewer says he does not. there is no poet of this name. She says however that there is a foreign filmmaker who moved to the United States in the sixties and who bears this name. What Remedy is referring to right now, I can not understand it yet. Has the reality changed to change the previous decades? If so, Quantum Break's time travel will make more sense in the Grand Remedy Universe, although it already confirms this in its own performance with several Wake references and its street art "AWE" all throughout history.

Jesse's brother, Dylan, knows the great universe of Remedy

About two-thirds of the game, we meet Jesse's brother, Dylan, who is not doing as well. He talks a lot about his dreams – people love their dream diary in the world of Remedy – and at one point tells Jesse an entity he calls Mr. Door, which comes from the Astral Plan. Door tells Dylan "several worlds, side by side, on top of each other, some inside others." He continues more directly: "In a world, there is a writer who wrote the story of a cop. In another world, the cop was real. The first reference is obviously Alan Wake himself, made famous by his crime novels by Alex Casey, who themselves were supposed to be an allusion to Max Payne. The world in which "the cop was real" is likely then that of Max, linking even this more realistic story of Remedy to their more recent bizarro intrigues.

What makes me less confident but more intriguing is what Dylan says right after. "Door said that he was himself in all games at the same time, constantly moving between them." This sounds a lot like many of the often quoted but barely sighted entity that exists outside of time in Quantum Break. At the end of this game, we get an important clue: Lance Reddick's character, Martin Hatch, may have been such an entity, maybe even the only one. This makes Dylan's monologue special in that it may be the first and only example of Remedy's character alluding to his four connected universes at once.

The events of Alan Wake are a confirmed altered global event that has been reviewed by the FBC.

As noted earlier, Alan's experiences during his "vacation" in Bright Falls are viewed by the Federal Bureau of Control as an altered global event – a recurring event, no less. But two end-of-game documents found in the halls of the program of prime candidates give fans the biggest info-drop of the entire game by detailing the fallout from Alan's two weeks in Washington.

As a result of Control's events, Alan is still missing, along with Dr. Hartman and Nightingale Special Agent. Alice was found and interviewed by the CBF and suffered a loss of memory. Alan's switch, his "clicker," is also considered an object of power. Sheriff's father Sarah Breaker informed the BCF of the event and, as the document surprisingly reveals, "the ex-agent of the office," Frank Breaker.

If you remember Alan Wake, Sarah asks Barry Wheeler, Alan's agent, to alert a small number of people to Bright Falls by phone and pass the codeword to him. " Night Springs. It seems that this emergency action has allowed the FBC to corrupt logging, although they have been unable to find Alan in turmoil.

It's not a lake, it's an ocean

Alan's last famous words were understood to mean that the Dark Presence rabbit burrow was well beyond Bright Falls, although we never received the appropriate follow-up to disclose more about it. Alan Wake's American Nightmare of 2012, a half-sequel for XBLA, was interesting but did not answer many questions and every nod seen in Quantum Break was not as useful. Today, almost a decade later, Remedy has been planning its Great Universe from the beginning or has restored everything so well that I honestly can not tell the difference. In a media landscape obsessed with crossover events like the MCU, could we one day get a complete video game Remedy Crossover? It may be too ambitious, even undesirable. The controls and the changing mechanisms of such a game sound like a nightmare.

Yet, for fans obsessed with the details that have once and always claimed a sequel to Alan Wake, it seems that Remedy is finally ready to stop beating around the bush. With Control, Remedy came out and spelled it out clearly; it's all the same world. He now owns the Alan Wake IP address, having purchased it from Microsoft earlier this year. Time will tell what it is capable of including from its previous games, but Remedy's intention is obviously to link them all in a way that video games have never done before. Even though Alan may still be overwhelmed by the shadows of Lake Cauldron, the studio's fans find themselves diving into the ocean of the Grand Remedy universe.

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