The setup: Dylan takes the lead
CONTROL Resonant follows Dylan Faden after years of confinement and a coma. His sister Jesse is missing, and Manhattan is being transformed by a new resonance. He wants to help the people caught in that crisis while finding the only person who connects him to a life outside the Bureau.
In Control (2019), Jesse stopped the Hiss inside Dylan and he fell into a coma. That is the starting history for this sequel. Resonant tells the other sibling’s story; its finale is a later event.
Freedom comes with the Bureau’s terms
Dylan leaves the Oldest House during Orientation, meets Zoe and begins confronting the city’s Patterning. His relationship with the FBC is uneasy: the institution that held him now needs his abilities. In the early return to the Bureau, Pope discusses the device Dylan wore during his Prime Candidate training and the work needed to hold the crisis back.
Zoe becomes his contact in the field. The personal thread—finding Jesse—runs alongside the Bureau’s effort to contain the crisis. Bureau conversation · 44:52 ▶
Jesse appears at the Faults
Dylan’s search brings him into Faults, where meetings with Jesse and shared rituals sit inside altered spaces. These sequences connect the siblings’ relationship to Dylan’s growing movement abilities. They are part of the main story.
The Incursion Fault and The Subway Fault are early examples. The latter ritual grants Reach. Later, The House in Distress brings the Fault crisis into the Oldest House. Incursion ritual · 2:26:47 ▶ · Subway ritual · 3:00:42 ▶ · Oldest House ritual · 4:20:16 ▶
The containment plan goes wrong
In Enemy of My Enemy, Pope’s CFD test becomes a field operation with Arish. Dylan helps defend the device and follows it to the switch. The attempt does not neatly contain the threat: the machinery and surrounding architecture become caught in the Patterning, and Arish warns about its spread through the area.
This failure moves the story from a seemingly practical containment solution toward further investigation. Recursions and Iterations sends Dylan below the sinkhole to locate the research team and track time fluctuations. Pope’s CFD test · 2:39:03 ▶ · CFD switch · 2:49:32 ▶ · Recursions and Iterations · 3:03:41 ▶
The threat reaches the House
After the Oldest House Fault, The Hedron Link turns the emergency into a rescue: Dylan must reach Pope and sever the link. The later research and Resonant encounters lead to more Hedron links being severed before Rebuild and the final assault.
The Bureau’s own headquarters is caught in the threat, and Dylan is acting to save people inside it as well as search for Jesse. Rescue Pope · 4:33:26 ▶ · Sever the Hedron Link · 4:38:31 ▶
Rebuild returns to the Fadens’ past
Rebuild changes presentation into a retro, pixel-art account of Ordinary and the siblings’ childhood. Jesse and Dylan appear together in their hometown and at the junkyard, bringing the history of the slide projector back into the main narrative.
The shift from the distorted city to the children’s world makes their shared past central to what follows. It also invites interpretation; a memory sequence alone does not settle every theory about the siblings or how its events relate to time. Rebuild · 5:47:48 ▶
The search becomes a promise
Fight to the Core leads into The End and Dylan’s final confrontation with the Hedron. Jesse intervenes after he collapses; he survives, while she is left unconscious. The Beginning then sends him to visit her in the Oldest House, where he commits to bringing her back.
By the epilogue, Dylan can begin choosing a life outside confinement, but finding Jesse has become finding a way to wake her. For the exact sequence and what the final conversation establishes, read the ending explanation. Fight to the Core · 6:42:51 ▶ · The End · 6:55:00 ▶ · The Beginning · 7:10:39 ▶
How to read the unresolved parts
Our reading: Dylan’s story is about gaining agency after other people and paranatural forces have decided his life for him. Helping Manhattan and trying to save Jesse give his actions purpose; the epilogue gives that purpose a future beyond the final boss.
This is a reading of the events, not a complete explanation of every cosmic rule. Claims that Resonant’s Hedron must be Polaris, that every distortion is a literal time loop, or that the siblings are definitively one person remain theories unless the relevant game text establishes them.
Watch the story chapters
Select a chapter to play it here.
Watch on YouTube ↗The chapter links above play the relevant sections here. The full recording includes gameplay between story events, so its running time is not a recommended completion time.
Sources & image credits
Sources, footage and image credits
- Mikael Kasurinen on PlayStation Blog — Dylan’s history, motives and the siblings’ roles
- WoW Quests — full game walkthrough — original gameplay, task sequence and all three images
- Ben-Gun — final boss and ending — the finale and epilogue outcome
- CONTROL Resonant story reference — comparison of premise, footage and interpretation
- PC Gamer — CONTROL Resonant review — opening and the story’s focus on Dylan
Checked October 8, 2026. Story chapters were checked as selected footage, on-screen objectives and dialogue. Images show actual gameplay from WoW Quests; interpretations are labelled separately.