Remedy has been playing the long game. Ever since the release of Alan Wake in 2010, the studio has been teasing the tortured writer’s return through sneaky easter eggs, retrospective references, and alternate reality games. But with Control: AWE and the official launch of the Remedy Connected Universe, the studio’s methods have pivoted into something far more surreal.
Remedy regained the publishing rights for the Alan Wake franchise back in 2019. Then, in March 2020, the studio signed a deal with Epic Games to publish two next-gen titles. The first is a AAA multi-platform game already in pre-production – which plenty of fans are hoping is a sequel to 2010’s cult hit Alan Wake – and the second is a smaller-scale project within the same franchise. Remedy is also working on a live-service multiplayer title called Vanguard.
Narratively, the team’s most recent release – the AWE expansion for Control – has raised far more questions than it answered, and we’re going to do our best to piece together Remedy’s fractured web of interconnected worlds, stories, and games.
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SPOILER WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS FULL SPOILERS FOR CONTROL, ALAN WAKE, QUANTUM BREAK, AND THE AWE EXPANSION
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[ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/09/01/how-control-and-alan-wake-are-linked"]
Note: the video above was produced prior to the release of the AWE expansion - if you'd prefer to watch that, you can pick up where it leaves off by clicking here.
Control and the RCU
First things first: let’s talk about Control. A masterclass in atmospheric game design, IGN named Control its Game of the Year in 2019. But after the AWE expansion, which Remedy calls “the first RCU crossover event,” Control feels a little less like a game and more like a platform for shared-world storytelling.
[ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/control-a-refresher-for-returning-players"]
The base game establishes the Federal Bureau of Control, a shadowy government organisation that investigates paranatural happenings known as “Altered World Events.” The Bureau stores their findings in The Oldest House, a Brutalist-inspired skyscraper that doubles as a dimensional gateway, as well as a living library and prison for otherworldly monsters and artifacts.
Given their supernatural nature, the FBC has documented the events of Alan Wake – but while it originally appeared to be little more than a fun reference to another Remedy game, the AWE expansion directly addressed Alan Wake’s relationship to The Oldest House.
Control’s setting has become a heterotopia – a portal to worlds within worlds that lead to other worlds within them – and appears to be being set up as the nexus of the Remedy Connected Universe. Whatever the next step in the studio’s crossover plans may be, Remedy’s been planning this for a long time - and it all starts with the events of Alan Wake.
The Story of Alan Wake
Alan Wake centers around Cauldron Lake in Bright Falls, WA. In Control, we find out that the Bureau has studied this area over the span of several decades, as the lake is both a Place of Power and a dimensional gateway containing an evil entity currently known only as “the Dark Presence”. There’s a lot going on, but the short version is that the lake can manifest people’s imaginations as reality, and the Dark Presence is trying to exploit that ability to escape the lake - which is where our titular writer comes in.
Wake, a mystery author and thinly-veiled Steven King allegory suffering from a bad case of writer’s block, arrives in Bright Falls to kickstart his creative process. However, the Dark Presence has other plans, kidnapping his wife and turning the townsfolk into shadow monsters in an effort to get Wake to help it free itself.
Wake ultimately prevents the evil from escaping, saves Bright Falls (and presumably the rest of the world), and frees his wife, but in order to do so – to maintain the cosmic balance of good and evil – he has to take her place as a prisoner of the Dark Presence beneath Cauldron Lake.
In subsequent DLCs and the standalone expansion/spinoff Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, we learn that an evil doppelganger of Alan has escaped into the real world. Known only as Mr. ██████ – the █████ being a static, scratchy sound that obscures his true name, thus earning him the nickname “Mr. Scratch” – this "Nega-Wake" is all the negative rumors and theories surrounding Wake’s disappearance manifested in the flesh by the power of Cauldron Lake… but we’ll get to him a little later.
The Shoeboxes
Wake overcomes his predicament in the base game – as much as one can while being trapped in an evil demiplane, we suppose – with the help of a writer named Thomas Zane. Also called “The Bright Presence,” Zane is a (literal) beacon of light for Alan, guiding him along and offering supernatural assistance much like Polaris does for Jesse in Control.
Zane is a writer who had his own run-in with a Dark Presence in Bright Falls decades before Wake, and had to use the power of Cauldron Lake to write himself out of existence. Before doing so, however, he wrote one rule — anything he left behind in a shoebox stayed in the real world. Alan finds two of these shoeboxes on his adventure - one in a mysterious cabin containing Zane’s books, and another with a manuscript page relating to Alan’s childhood and a device known as The Clicker, which he uses to subdue the Darkness.
There, is, however, a third shoebox – and this brings us to a little town that’s long been part of the Remedy conspiracy – a hidden village in Maine called Ordinary.
The Town of Ordinary
If you’ve played Control, you’re no doubt familiar with Ordinary. It’s one of the most important AWEs studied by the FBC and was the catalyst for pretty much all the events of Control.
For those unaware: in 2002, Control’s protagonist Jesse Faden and her brother Dylan found a slide projector at the local dump which, when used, opened doorways to alternate dimensions. One slide led them to encounter an alien intelligence they dubbed Polaris, who imbued the Faden siblings with supernatural powers. Other slides, however, released far darker creatures. After one of them unleashed some sort of evil – which the kids called the Not-Mother – the siblings burned the slides and the Bureau arrived to clean up.
[ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2019/12/10/why-control-is-igns-game-of-the-year-for-2019"]
The Faden siblings were fast-tracked into the Bureau’s Prime Candidate Program after the Ordinary AWE, with the goal that one of them would be the next director of the FBC. One of the burned slides was also stolen by Jesse’s predecessor, former Bureau Director Zachariah Trench, who would later use it to unleash The Hiss, an alien resonance that serves as Control’s main villain.
Yet this isn’t the first time a town called Ordinary has appeared in the RCU. The first reference to it was hidden deep within American Nightmare in 2012: there’s a song played in-game called Balance Slays the Demon, which if you reverse the final part of the music, you’ll hear the hidden message: “It will happen again, in another town, called Ordinary.”
But where do Thomas Zane and the shoebox thing fall into all this, you may ask? Well, if you head to a blog called This House of Dreams – originally published in 2012 as a viral marketing stunt for the unproduced Alan Wake 2 – you’ll learn about a woman named Samantha Wells, who also lived in Ordinary.
The blog follows Samantha as she renovates an “old house.” In the attic, She finds a shoebox that seems to have belonged to Thomas Zane. It’s full of black and white photographs of people with faces blocked with inky smoke, and several poems – one of which Zane recites at the beginning of Alan Wake. Other notes on the poems are marked with initials T and B (Zane’s wife was named Barbara).