It wouldn’t be a Remedy game if it wasn’t a little bit referential.
Remedy are huge fans of Easter eggs, and naturally there’s a ton of references to their older games. Quantum Break was filled with cameos for Remedy developers and throwbacks to Alan Wake, so it’s only natural that a few of these would find their way into Control as well.
Of course, talking about this will spoil the fun of actually finding these spoilers. So if you don’t want that ruined, fair warning, although note that I won’t be spoiling the ending or anything genuinely crucial to the plot if you’re worried. But if you just want to know whether Control‘s worth your time, here’s the spoiler-free story you need.
[referenced url=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/2019/08/control-review-pc-ps4-xbox-one-kotaku-australia/” thumb=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/08/control-final-4-410×231.jpg” title=”Every Remedy Fan Should Play Control” excerpt=”Control might not be Remedy Entertainment’s weirdest game – that honour still belongs to Alan Wake: American Nightmare – but it is definitely intriguing.”]
Towards the second half of the game, Jesse will find herself travelling to a section of the Bureau called the Panopticon. It’s a special part of the Bureau where objects of power, items altered by the Astral Plane dimension and Generally Dangerous Shit happens to live.
You’ve come across several of these throughout the game already. Apart from the Service Weapon, your trusty pistol, the game introduces you to objects of power every time you want to level up. You get the air dodge courtesy of a merry-go-round unicorn, for instance, while a rogue fridge happens to be possessed by what looks like a cross between a cyclops and a kaiju.
It’s in this multi-storey room that you can find a whole bunch of tooltips and collectibles. And when you get up to the fifth floor — which the game demands you will, but I won’t describe why — you’ll notice that there’s a window or two off the beaten path that you can float and air-dodge your way into.
In one of these locked-away rooms, similar to the one holding the fridge, is a single sheet of paper. It’s a typewritten page that was written from what a collectible later describes as a typewriter recovered from Bright Falls, the same location where Alan Wake was set.
When you head up to the window for the object, you’ll get a shadowy blue tint on your screen — not too dissimilar from the internal monologue Jesse occasionally has with Trench, the former director of the Bureau — and you’ll see Alan Wake himself (played by Remedy’s Sam Lake, again) having a discussion with himself.
If you’ve been digging around the rest of the Bureau, you’ll probably have come across the Bright Falls case file. It directly ties the universes of Alan Wake and Control together, saying that Wake’s wife had been trapped in the Threshold and that the reality of the two games had overlapped. “Wake has been flagged as a potential parautilitarian,” the notes say.
There’s also a reference to The Alan Wake Files, the book that shipped with the collector’s edition of Alan Wake. One of the pages in that book talks about someone called Bill, who lives in a cabin near Cauldron Lake. Control has a separate case file that you can find which references Cauldron Lake Lodge, the clinic for troubled artists run by Dr. Emil Hartman in the events of Alan Wake.
Control has a file of its own on “The Creator’s Dilemma” — that’s the book written by Dr. Hartman — but the Bright Falls note mentions that Dr. Hartman and Robert Nightingale, the former FBI agent who pursues Alan Wake and is eventually swept up by the Dark Presence towards the end of that game, are both missing. Nightingale would certainly make a great DLC boss.
But that’s not the only Alan Wake reference. Remember the Old Gods of Asgard?
The band, a rock band that first appeared in Alan Wake and featured in the early chapters of Quantum Break on some posters around the university, are part of Control as well. Towards the bottom of the stairs in the Central Research area — not far from the toilets and towards a side mission featuring one of the game’s quirkier characters, Dr Underhill — there’s a small door and an alleyway. After clearing out one of the Hiss enemies, the room opens up to a small, sealed room — where the only thing you can do is stand in a soundproof room listening to Poets of the Fall.
The room even has a little handwritten poster with all the lyrics on it. Hitting the button adds the song, Take Control, to your multimedia. You can’t play multimedia clips while you roam around the Bureau, but you can listen to the song here:
As I mentioned before, Control gets infinitely better the more you go hunting around. Remedy games are generally full of little easter eggs like this, and while it doesn’t do much good in convincing publishers to greenlight Alan Wake 3, it’s nice to know that Remedy are reminding people about the franchise every way they can.
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