Characters / Remedy Connected Universe: Paranatural Phenomena

Remedy Connected Universe Character Index
Alan Wake | Bright Falls | Federal Bureau of Control | Paranatural Phenomena | The Dark Place

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Paranatural Phenomena

The various paranatural phenomena which exist in the Remedy Connected Universe. The staff of the FBC dedicate themselves to attempting to contain, study, and/or utilize these phenomena, while other groups seeks to exploit, create, or control them.

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The Hiss

In General

The Hiss

Appearances: Control

"... We stand around while you dream. You can almost hear our words but you forget. This happens more and more now. You gave us the permission in your regulations. We wait in the stains. The word that describes this is redacted. Repeat the word. The name of the sound. It resonates in your house. After the song, time for applause..."

—An excerpt of the Hiss Incantation

An extra-dimensional, extremely hostile self-replicating resonance-based entity attempting to seize control of the Oldest House, the FBC and its occupants by corrupting the bodies of everyone it comes into contact with. Itself bodiless and intangible, it manifests as red light, rippling air/sonic distortion and the strange speech its victims recite.

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• Action Bomb: Hiss Charged are levitating corrupted Mooks whose only form of attack is to drift towards an enemy and violently blow up in their face. Notably, they're designed like this to blow off the HRAs used by the surviving Bureau employees in order to help further spread the Hiss' resonance.
• Almighty Idiot: The Hiss is an incredibly powerful and hostile Eldritch Abomination from outside conventional reality, but aside from minor asides about it having a genuine hatred for Polaris and the Dark Presence, it operates more or less like a non-sapient virus, being only focused on ensuring its own propagation.
• Arch-Enemy: To Polaris. Not only is Polaris the Order to the Hiss' Chaos, but their Color Motifs are in stark contrast to one another (the chaotic and violent swirling red of the Hiss compared to Polaris' ordered pattern of light-blue polygons) and Polaris is literally the only reason why the Bureau wasn't automatically corrupted en masse by the Hiss as soon as Trench let it in, as Polaris' resonance through Hedron was able to serve as a metaphysical lifejacket against the Hiss' presence.
• The Assimilator: The Hiss propagates by infecting the lifeforms it reaches, and the more skillful or knowledgeable they are, the stronger the resulting mook will be. An office worker will most likely become a stationary "transmitter", while a scientist with extensive knowledge of the Astral Plane becomes a Humanoid Abomination with Psychic Powers.
• Bald of Evil: Strangely, it appear to enforce this on those it infects: one line of its Madness Mantra is "All hair must be eaten", and indeed none of the Hiss enemies, nor Dylan, have any hair. Notably, Dylan's hair grows back when he is purged of the Hiss but remains comatose.
• Berserk Button: It really doesn't like Polaris or Hedron, perhaps recognizing her as its main opposition and focusing most of its energies not spent fighting the Bureau trying to destroy her means of interacting with reality.
• Big Bad: The primary — though by no means the only — threat currently faced by the FBC, and the overarching villain of both the game and its two DLCs.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: It's completely unknown if it's even self-aware enough to have an actual sense of personality; for all the characters and players know, the Hiss is as intelligent as a simple virus.
• Body Horror:
  • Basic Hiss-corrupted enemies have no hair anywhere and are covered in enormous bruises, as if the Hiss is destroying them from the inside out. Some of the Hiss' other Mooks also have their bodies either rendered rail-thin or severely bloated.
  • More "advanced" Hiss enemies physically mutate the host in severe and alien ways, like warped upside-down exploding units or something with a dish-like appendage that seems to be the victim's former rib cage. The Hiss Distorted are easily one of the worst examples, to the point where their upper bodies have their heads "squeezed" into a vaguely reptilian snout and their shoulder blades are so twisted that they look both like a flowing cloak and a set of bat-like wings.
• The Corruption: The Hiss taints everything it touches, including humans, paranatural objects, the Oldest House, and the natural laws of reality themselves.
• Dark Is Evil: The Hiss is primarily depicted as a chaotic swirl of blood-red paint, and some of its forces (the Hiss Distorted in particular) appear to be covered in hideous black tar.
• Dragons Are Demonic: The Hiss Distorted, easily one of the deadliest forces the Hiss can bring to bear, resemble wyverns through their long black wings, reptilian snouts, and usage of a devastating Breath Weapon.
• Ear Worm: Jesse, Dylan and Trench all describe it as being like an annoying song that burrows into your mind and won't leave. Part of the Madness Mantra even defines what an "earworm" is, so this is intentional.
• Eldritch Abomination: Basically a sentient wavelength of paranatural energy that hails from an entire other reality. Its motives are inscrutable and it doesn't seem interested in communicating. It has no physical body, but it can distort matter into forms useful to it (people included) and some otherwise unrelated Objects of Power housed by the Bureau also become more dangerous while it's around. It doesn't even really have a name; Jesse just calls it "the Hiss" in front of Emily Pope and the designation winds up in all the documentation relating to it because the new Director said it.
• Empty Shell: There is very little if any humanity left in its victims despite their (usually) normal external appearance. Its infected minions come in two varieties: floating passive non-combat personnel who just recite the Madness Mantra (presumably to signal-boost the Hiss) and corrupted security personnel. While the latter use weapons and tactics known to their human hosts, that seems to be all they retain, as trying to pull the Hiss out of them just makes them disintegrate (and Jesse can't even cure the attacking enemies with the "Seize" power, just stop them from attacking her temporarily before they crumble).
• Enemy Civil War: It doesn’t like other entities trying to muscle in on its territory. Its Corrupted are often seen throwing down with the Mold Infected and the haywire Astral Mimics in the Foundation, and it hates the Dark Presence, with the nightmarish physical state of their joint vessel, Hartman, being implied to be a result of the two entities fighting for control.
• Expy: Of the Dark Presence from Alan Wake. Both are unseen, bodiless, and otherworldly supernatural forces beyond normal human comprehension capable of possessing objects and living things, turning them into their slaves for the express purpose of spreading their corruptive influence as far as possible. Said slaves are then only able to mindlessly repeat certain turns of phrase (the Taken recited random snippets from their daily life before being corrupted by the Dark Presence, while the Hiss Corrupted can only recite parts of the Hiss Incantation) as they attack the protagonist. The AWE expansion implies that this trope was actually invoked In-Universe by Alan Wake, as his Hotlines mention needing an entity that can pretend to mimic human intelligence to act as a Starter Villain for the FBC and Jesse in order to help him potentially escape from Cauldron Lake. It's left unspecified how much Wake set up, but he definitely created the Hiss incantation.
  • This becomes especially apparent once you go into the Foundation and start fighting Hiss Sharpened, who barely even try to hide their expiness, as they are essentially Taken in all but name and colour scheme. They use ordinary tools like pickaxes as melee weapons, throw them at you if you're out of range, and can even zip around at super speed like Elite Taken, though only for short bursts (closer to Jesse's Evade ability).
• Fan Disservice: The fact that the vaguely draconic Hiss Distorted◊ have long legs and wear high heels only serves to make them look even freakier.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: No matter the language you choose for dialogues, the Hiss incantation will always be made in your language to make sure you will understand what it says^note To be more precise, the language depends on your region settings: if you're localized in France, the Hiss will speak in French. It also implies that the game is dubbed in your language, which may not be the case if you're Polish or Portuguese.
• Hell Is That Noise: Hiss-corrupted environments are laden with rippling sonic distortion, and as noted below, their forces are usually pretty loud in combat. The Hiss Distorted in particular will viciously scream after revealing themselves to the player/others before attacking them, and Hiss Charged will breathily screech (gradually increasing in volume) upon spotting the player.
• Hidden Agenda Villain: What the Hiss wants — or indeed, if it is even capable of wanting anything beyond propagating itself and infecting as many people as possible — is not revealed in the main story or either of the DLCs.
• Keystone Army: Subverted. Shutting off the Slide Projector connected to its realm cuts the Hiss off from its source and prevents it from spreading further, but it remains present and dangerous within The Oldest House itself, and those infected by the Hiss continue to be infected.
• Light Is Not Good: Areas contaminated by the Hiss are full of ugly, glaring bright red light that can make it hard to see and easier for its forces to sneak up on Jesse. Most of their forces also have bleached-white skin, with the Hiss's scarlet light visibly glowing just under the surface.
• Madness Mantra: A lengthy one is burned into the minds of those the Hiss infects, filled with nonsensical phrases spoken exclusively in second-person. The corrupted are compelled to babble the mantra endlessly, and it is speculated in-universe that the chanting of idle Hiss victims serves as a signal-booster for its metaphysical presence.
  An earworm is a tune you can’t stop humming in a dream: “baby baby baby, yeah!”
• Meaningful Name:
  • It is/they are possibly named after Hiisi, an evil spirit from Finnish folklore.
  • Furthermore, as lampshaded by Jesse herself (since she's the one who came up with the term), its/their name is the onomatopoeia for the emission/leakage of a gas; this is rather fitting since, like a poisonous gas, the Hiss is spreading all throughout the Bureau and is not just ridiculously hard to detect, but also incredibly dangerous and can cause a major loss of human life if not stopped from spreading in time.
• Mind Rape: Whatever it does to infect people, it isn't a fun time; when it attempts to burrow its way into Jesse's mind after she acquires the Service Weapon, she's left desperately repeating, "You can't let this happen." to herself as she tries to keep a grip on her sanity, as if everything in her being is screaming at her that this experience is wrong.
• Mooks: The basic Hiss are pretty much this. Interestingly there are some RPG mechanics involved: mooks have "levels" above their heads from 1 to 6, with 6 being the strongest of the basic ones encountered. Many of these are also shielded but go down fairly easily.
  • Elite Mooks: These come in several flavors. One of the more common ones are large Hiss machine gunners that can take a lot of damage and hit hard. Others have names and titles above them and are significantly harder as well.
• Motifs: Frequently associated with sound. It's openly described as being an annoying Ear Worm that gets stuck in your head and won't leave, its status as a "resonance-based lifeform" calls to mind a lifeform based around soundwaves and echoes, and Jesse using Polaris to "free" entities from the Hiss's control can be seen as the paranatural equivalent of radio jamming. The Hedron Resonance Amplifers created by Dr. Darling to serve as lifejackets against the Hiss can be even seen as operating under the same aforementioned "radio jamming," and Hiss-corrupted locations in the Oldest House are typically characterized by rippling sonic distortion. The Hiss's most iconic aspect is its lengthy Madness Mantra that is endlessly repeated by its victims, and its forces are usually quite vocal; both the Hiss Distorted and Hiss Charged will violently scream upon spotting/attacking their nearest foe, and most of their other forces will incoherently growl while in combat. Finally, in AWE, Alan Wake describes it and the Dark Presence fighting over Hartman's body as "sound made darker, and darkness made louder."
• No Body Left Behind: Hiss Corrupted leave no bodies when they're killed. The only exception is Dylan Faden (implied to be due to both Jesse's and his own connection to Polaris), who is "only" reduced to being stuck in a coma after Jesse tears the Hiss out of his mind.
• Nominal Importance: Weaponized as part of its powerset: any Hiss Corrupted with a unique name or title is deadlier than regular Hiss Corrupted.
• Power Copying: In addition to assimilating the hosts' skills and knowledge, some of the Hiss' mooks also gain supernatural abilities based on the corrupted Objects of Power — normally these can only be bound to a single person — and retain them well after you've bound those objects to yourself.
• Power Floats: Levitating and telekinetic Hiss enemies are relatively common, and the non-combat Hiss Corrupted float around in midair by default.
• Pronoun Trouble: Subtly; no attention is drawn to it, but people frequently flip-flop between using "it" and "they" to refer to the Hiss. This is partly because "the Hiss" is used to mean the resonance entity itself ("it") and the infected personnel throughout the Oldest House ("they").
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Hiss-corrupted enemies have red light obscuring their faces (passive Hiss victims floating about in the air do not have this).
• Red Is Violent: If a red light appears in an area, the Hiss are about to appear and attack.
• Starter Villain: AWE reveals Alan Wake influenced, if not outright created, the Hiss to give Jesse Faden some practice fighting bad guys so that she'll be good and ready to take on the Dark Presence and rescue him from Cauldron Lake when the time comes.
  Alan Wake: Wake needed a hero. A hero needed a crisis. For the part in the story about the government agency, Wake needed something special. Something to convey an alien force mimicking human intelligence. Something that can't be translated, translated.
• The Virus: Anyone who becomes controlled by the Hiss may as well be dead. The only exceptions are Jesse (due to her being protected by Polaris) and Dylan (who claims he let himself get infected willingly).
• Voice of the Legion: The Hiss incantation is spoken by many voices chanting in unison, and it's incredibly creepy.
• We Have Reserves: There is seemingly no end to the number of enemies it can produce, and the pickaxe-wielding ones showing up in the Foundation imply that it can even infect and resurrect the dead (since it's been decades since anyone lived down there for them to infect). One theory passed around is that once they corrupt someone they can make resonant copies of them, which means until the Hiss is totally exorcised out of the Oldest House by purifying the building's Control Points one by one, they'll keep coming back.
• Wonder Twin Powers: An odd case. The Hiss and the Dark Presence can't possess one another, rather their powers amplify each other when they interact resulting in the birth of the Third Thing when it tried to possess an already-Taken Hartman. Thankfully, the two don't seem to like one another enough to actively exploit this.
  Alan: The sound changes the darkness, and the darkness changes the sound. They both changed what remained of Hartman. They all turned into something else: a third thing. The sound make darker. The darkness made louder.
• Word-Salad Horror: Its incantation, recited as a Madness Mantra by its victims. The AWE expansion reveals that this was a Dadaist poem created by Alan Wake as part of his plan to write his escape from the Dark Place.
• You Cannot Grasp the True Form: As a "resonance-based" life form, it manifests in waves of light and sound rather than anything touchable. The closest we ever see to a "pure" Hiss life form are Hiss Clusters, big glowing red orbs that function as Mook Medics. It's also depicted during cutscenes and loading screens as a blob of red paint mixing chaotically (as opposed to Polaris's geometrically harmonious swirl of triangles).

Dylan Faden

Dylan Faden / Prime Candidate 6

Portrayed by: Sean Durrie

Appearances: Control

"You came in through the hole in you. You've always been here, the only child. A copy of a copy of a copy of a copy."

Jesse's long-vanished younger brother, taken by the Bureau seventeen years before the start of the game when he was ten years old, where he has remained since. He has been in contact with the Hiss but, unlike every other victim, not entirely claimed. Partway through the game he leaves his cell and offers himself up to the custody of Jesse and the remaining agents of the Bureau for reasons he refuses to explain.

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• And I Must Scream: In Dylan's last "dream", there are implications that he might not be as willing of a host as he makes himself out to be. He "dreams" that he's watching himself and Jesse having a conversation. The way he describes it makes it seem like he desperately trying to call for help but he can't quite reach Jesse. Similarly, a mysterious unused Hotline has Dylan nervously trying to call Jesse, telling her about a dream of a parade, before realizing the line is "dead" and hanging up.
  Dylan: In this dream, I'm standing in the corner, watching Jesse and Dylan talk about this very dream. "This very dream", he said just now. And he repeated it again now. I'm standing there and watching and that's all I can do... It's as if I'm trapped there.
• Ambiguously Evil: It's never really clear how much of his hostility is malice from the Hiss and how much is resentment of the Bureau for keeping him imprisoned and isolated since he was a child.
• Bald of Evil: Shaven-headed and sinister. Though whether or not he's evil is debatable. After completing the main plot of Foundation, players can visit him in his comatose state, and he's already regrown hair and a beard◊.
• Berserk Button: He really dislikes Polaris. This isn't a trait imported from the Hiss, though the Hiss probably isn't helping.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: Or at least Jesse thinks so. Some of his dialogue makes it sounds more willing than that, and at one point he even flat out tells her "I let the Hiss in". Whether he means he let them into the Bureau or into himself is left ambiguous.
• Cain and Abel: The Cain to Jesse's Abel. Though they're not openly antagonistic towards each other, the siblings are champions of Hedron (Jesse) and the Hiss (Dylan), who are heavily implied to be natural enemies of each other.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Even during times where it appears that he's speaking as himself and not the eldritch malice of The Hiss, his stream of thought is rather odd, preferring to talk about his dreams and the either creepy or just plain weird turns they take.
• Couldn't Find a Pen: Wrote Jesse's name on the wall of his cell in blood. It's never apparent whose blood it is.
• Dissonant Serenity: He's eerily calm about everything that's happened until Jesse brings up Polaris.
• Dreaming of Things to Come: Many of Dylan's dreams elude meaning and appear to be odd prophecies in their own way, but his second one is the most overt bit of Foreshadowing: in it, he dreamt that he was the Director while Jesse was an office assistant doing mundane jobs, which "stayed that way, forever and ever" until the dream abruptly shifted into "a game." It probably isn't a coincidence that this is what the Nightmare of Normality Jesse got thrown into by the Hiss manifested as.
• Fatal Flaw: Wrath. Dylan has very good reasons to be furious, but his rage made him ignore others who might want to help him and made him very susceptible to the Hiss.
• Freudian Excuse: Dylan was kidnapped as a child, raised to be the next director, accidentally killed someone with his powers, and was ultimately thrown aside for the thing all of the above happened for. It's not hard to see why he hates the Bureau.
• The Heavy: The human face of the Hiss, the closest anyone can come to conversing with it as an entity. The result is not very enlightening.
• Humanoid Abomination: It's implied that, even excluding the the Hiss's influence, Dylan has become something far worse than just a powerful psychic. Among other things, he's implied to experience time non-linearly, and many of his movements are jerky and don't slide into each other properly.
• Literal Split Personality: He claims, with dubious veracity, that he and Jesse used to be one person, a girl named Jesse Dylan Faden.
• Manchild: The Bureau dropped the ball hard on raising him. With no strong feelings other than that of abandonment and entrapment, Dylan demonstrates signs of arrested development in his early adulthood even before the Hiss.
• Meaningful Name: One meaning of the name Dylan is 'Son of the Wave'. The Hiss are described as resonance or sound, i.e. a type of wave, and Dylan acts as the avatar of them.
• Mood-Swinger: Dylan can, and does, go from talking calmly if eerily with Jesse to Suddenly Shouting combined with Voice of the Legion while bathed in red light, then back to talking calmly.
• Mouth of Sauron: As the only Hiss infested who is able to speak normally, he's the only method by which it communicates in any manner other than it's mantra.
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: Dylan has a habit of eerily standing around with a glassy expression whenever it's necessary for someone to do that. Understandably, he's quite the unsettling character.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: A tracksuit-clad babbling oddball who tells Jesse about his dreams and never does anything to hurt anybody onscreen... but offscreen, he tore apart his cell in the Panopticon and has killed several people. If it's true that he has powers like Jesse's, then he's capable of mowing down an army barehanded and by himself. It's even invoked somewhat by Dr. Darling, who records a video urging everyone to keep trying to help Dylan even after he killed a Bureau agent, believing it was an accident.
• Power Incontinence: Accidentally killed at least one Bureau agent this way, which was the point where Darling (in retrospect) gave up on him as a candidate for Director.
• Psychic Powers: Like Jesse, but he can't control his as well since he lacks a channel such as the Service Weapon. He also claims the powers weren't granted to him by Polaris as he believes Jesse's were but initially belonged to him.
• Psychopathic Manchild: He gives off this impression, becoming childishly surly over Jesse's inability to help him when he was taken and throwing tantrums at Polaris, though it's unclear how much is the result of his possession by the Hiss and how much is his long imprisonment since childhood.
• Raised in a Lab: Dylan was taken as a child by the FBC to be groomed into the next Director due to his innate supernatural power. Unfortunately, the FBC was unfit to handle a child. Dylan ended up being treated as little more than a resource to be used by staff, keeping him in a cell with his every action monitored. Even their more benevolent efforts to help him adjust to his new way of life failed miserably. Worse still, a fatal injury-inducing outburst due to this treatment caused the FBC to deem him unfit for the role but keep him locked up. By the events of the game itself, almost two decades later, he's understandably become The Resenter.
• The Resenter:
  • His personal hatred for Polaris is that she did nothing to stop the Bureau from kidnapping him. He recalls her empowering Jesse during the accident at Ordinary but that's it. It should be noted that this might be a bit of Unreliable Narrator, as one of the records imply Polaris was trying to communicate with him like she did Jesse but he already blamed her so he didn't listen.
  • Seemingly averted with Jesse herself. While Dylan is aware that she left him behind to be captured, he doesn't seem to hold a grudge against her, since they were just kids at the time. If anything, he's more polite towards her, and he's even eager to share his "dreams" with her.
• Self-Serving Memory: He believed Polaris did nothing to help him, but she gave him the same powers she gave Jesse (even if he believes she didn't) and a recording of an interview implies she tried to communicate with him but he was too angry to listen.
• Talkative Loon: When agitated he lapses into the Hiss's "incantation", a weird rambling monologue, which has this effect.
• Tragic Villain: He Used to Be a Sweet Kid before years of isolation, extremely harsh training, and the closest thing he had to a friend being the Hiss turned him into the lunatic he is in the present.
• Third-Person Person: He sometimes refers to himself as "Dylan", though whether or not that's the Hiss talking is unclear.
• The Unfought: Dylan has all the makings of a final boss, as an Evil Counterpart of Jesse and effectively the avatar of the Hiss. But there is no final boss; Jesse fights through a gauntlet of Hiss to reach him, and he just floats motionless as she cleanses him.
• Uncertain Doom: Jesse and Polaris successfully purge the Hiss from him in the finale, leaving him in a coma that he still hasn't woken up from by the endgame. It's still more than can be said for the other Hiss victims Jesse's tried to purge, and his vital signs are apparently stable enough that his hair's grown back in by the end of Foundation, but whether he'll ever wake up — or if there's even enough of him left in there to wake up — remains in doubt.
• Unreliable Narrator: A combination of him being obviously insane and channeling the Hiss makes a large amount of what he says unreliable.

The Anchor

Ocelot's Anchor / AI11-UE

Appearances: Control

A particularly surly Altered Item that looks like a floating boat anchor, it has the effect of making old analog clocks appear around it. Parts of the Containment Sector are littered (or even flooded) with its cast-off clocks. When Jesse tries to cleanse it of the Hiss, it fights back by taking the form of a sphere of clocks.

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• Attack Its Weak Point: Right before it shoots clocks, the Anchor opens its "mouth" wide. Shooting it or launching a clock at it, takes off a chunk of health.
• Ability Required to Proceed: You are supposed to be unable to reach this thing until you have the Levitate ability, probably because you need it to get around the bottomless pits surrounding the Anchor during its fight. But Evade chains when starting from higher up than the Control Point floor with the help of physics items, and how Launching things into its core stop its most frequent and difficult to avoid attack, along with how Launch never runs out of ammo, means that this boss can be reached and defeated early, once unlocked. Since that necessitates having Evade and Launch.
• Lethal Harmless Powers: A floating anchor that inexplicably produces analog clocks doesn't sound bad, until you realize that not only can it violently expel them from its body as a defense mechanism, but it can do this with no end in sight, leaving entire rooms an un-navigable mess.
• Nonindicative Name: While what Altered Items look like and what they do is usually tangential at best, this one stands out because apparently it didn't even originally do the whole "clock" thing until it interfaced with a Threshold and got mixed-up by the Hiss. Originally, it was the literal anchor point for a wormhole that moved in an offset relation to it.
• Optional Boss: The Anchor fight is received from a side mission and is not part of the main story.
• Plot-Irrelevant Villain: While receiving the mission to fight it is a direct result of a side mission, defeating it has no impact on the story. The only relevance it has it that it may have been the origin of the massive piles of clocks found all over the Containment Sector.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: This thing makes clocks. That's it. It shields itself with clocks, it shoots you with blasts of clocks, it even rotates around clockwise.

Astral Plane

The Board

The Board

Appearances: Control

<You/We wield the Gun/You. The Board appoints you. Congratulations, Director.>

An entity (or host of entities) taking the form of an inverted black pyramid in a massive white expanse within the Astral Plane. They have a connection to all of the Objects of Power, and The Oldest House itself. They are responsible for choosing the Director of the FBC, as well as assigning Board Countermeasures.

Has a page describing itself here. Translated by the Director herself.

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• Ambiguously Evil: The Bureau seems to have unflinching faith in the Board's authority and wisdom to the point where the Board is what decides who becomes the Bureau's Director without question and the Board itself is seen everywhere in the Bureau's iconography. With that said, a lot of this can be chocked up to the influence of Northmoor, the first Director it chose, a disturbed individual who revered the Board as a god and he its Chosen One. Throughout the game the Board's orders are transparently good (get rid of the Hiss before it invades humanity and fix the Nail before it causes all of reality to fold in on itself) and it even provides tutorials for Jesse to learn new paranatural abilities she learns along the way. With this in mind, the Board is still an Eldritch Abomination that exists beyond human comprehension, so it is not made clear whether or not the Board has humanity's best interests in mind or if their goals are simply aligned on some level (whatever those goals may be).
• Benevolent Abomination: Or at least we are meant to believe such, though time will tell if The Board has humanity's best interest in mind or if they're using the FBC for ulterior motives.
• Berserk Button: Whatever FORMER did, it made it a permanent sore point with them.
• Big Good: As they are allegedly in charge of an organization designed to protect the country and world from extra-dimensional threats and they help out Jesse in whatever way that they can, they can be seen as this.
• The Chooser of the One: It is implied to have been the one who created the Service Weapon — an O.O.P. that is used both as a badge of authority for the Director and the way the Director is chosen — and it decides whether or not a candidate is worthy of the title.
• Cloudcuckoolander: The Board doesn't fully seem to get humanity or language, which leads to things such as calling the Merry-Go-Round Horse a "Choo-Choo". However, it's played decidedly less for comedy and more for creepiness than what one might expect.
• Control Freak: The Board wants things done on its terms, no one else's. This becomes actively detrimental to Jesse's attempts (as well as Marshall's) to save the House in the Foundation DLC.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Occasionally they act as if they were a Board of shareholders or other corporate entity rather than... whatever else they are. Notably, they claim to offer a better benefits package than FORMER, and threaten to blacklist/kill you if you try to switch sides.
• Creepy Good: They're an Eldritch Abomination that works in coordination with the FBC. Much of their intentions are vague, and it's clear that the power balance between them and humanity is heavily lopsided in their favor, only kept in check by both parties sharing somewhat common interests, but so long as you cooperate with them, The Board will serve as a Benevolent Boss.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Board are either an entire host of paranatural entities or singular entity that don't completely exist in our reality (being found only in the Astral Plane, Another Dimension that is somehow intricately connected to human consciousness itself), and are heavily implied to be some form of resonance-based lifeform akin to the Hiss and Polaris. They don't seem to fully comprehend human language or psychology, are suggested to be somehow "realer" than humanity is (when trying to explain Objects of Power to Jesse, The Board complains about how "hyperreal concepts" are difficult/impossible to translate into terms a human can understand), and only take the form of a giant, black inverted pyramid. All in all, they certainly fit the bill. There's also the fact the incredibly bizarre FORMER used to be one of them.
• Energy Beings: It's suggested In-Universe that they might be resonance-based lifeforms; most obviously, they currently seem to lack a physical form in normal reality and can only be seen as an inverted black pyramid in the Astral Plane. Additionally, their messages to Jesse through the Hotline are repeatedly described by The Board as being "broadcasted" from the Black Pyramid, a turn of phrase that seems more than a bit similar to the Hiss's sound Motif. Complicating matters is how FORMER does have a physical form.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: They are only depicted in the form of an upside-down obsidian pyramid. This geometric simplicity forms a shorthand of order and reason compared to the messy, red-lit chaos born out of The Hiss. Given the true form of FORMER, it's likely whatever they are is far, far more alien.
• God's Hands Are Tied: Aside from limited control over the Oldest House and the ability to teach the Director how to use their powers, the Board itself doesn't seem to have much ability to do anything itself, needing the Director and the Bureau to act on its behalf.
• He Knows About Timed Hits: The Board seems to have at least some Medium Awareness, mentioning the Collectibles Menu after Jesse binds herself to the Hotline.
• Medium Awareness: Maybe. The Board lean on the fourth wall so heavily it's a wonder it hasn't fallen over. They often refer to the events of Control as a "game," and describe certain things in video game terms — in one Board Countermeasure objective, they even refer to "Videogame" as a verb.
• Meta Guy: A lot of the Board's Strange Syntax can be read as some kind of Medium Awareness, referring to a lot of the events as a "plot" and "game", and even refers to the Nail-fragments in The Foundation DLC as "MacGuffins".
• Mysterious Backer: The Board chooses and advises new Directors, as well as enables certain Altered Items to be bound to human wielders through the Astral Plane as Objects of Power. Nobody’s sure why they’re helping the FBC, but their motives seem benign, particularly compared to the Hiss. It's not until The Foundation DLC that their motives seem to become, if not malicious, then certainly somewhat selfish.
• Not So Stoic: The Board often communicates in a mostly composed and professional manner (smatterings of odd word choices and vague intentions notwithstanding), but they can lose their cool if sufficiently annoyed. When confronted with any mention of FORMER, their language sharply becomes more competitive and impatient.
• Only the Chosen May Wield: The tests they administer in the Astral Plane are to make sure that only those who are able to handle Objects of Power are bound to them.
• Principles Zealot: Subverted. Initially, it seems like they're extremely pissed about Jesse and FORMER's Enemy Mine situation, and how FORMER got Jesse the other Foundation power, but at the next piece of the Nail they show they've calmed down and recognize both powers are needed, though they're still not happy about the Director working with FORMER.
• Pronoun Trouble: Even In-Universe, people don't know whether to refer to The Board with singular or plural pronouns.
• Puppeteer Parasite: Heavily implied. Dr. Ash's logs in The Foundation seem to show that the Board is not even native to the House, and took it by force by linking it to the Astral Plane via the Nail. It's telling that the Id, whom Ash described as originally harmless and curious entities, suddenly became hostile and mindless after the Board revealed itself to the FBC. The "Astral Plane Counteressay" collectible, written in-universe by Emily Pope, also speculates that the Board's involvement in the effects of Objects of Power is far less than benevolent.
• Sinister Geometry: They're only represented by an inverted black pyramid, made enormous when observed in the plain white Astral Plane. This simple, yet precise symbol establishes them as a form of stability and order when compared to other, more chaotic entities, but Theodore Ash Jr. was disquieted by the implications of it being an inverted pyramid, which he instead interpreted as representing conflict and stagnation. He also infers based on fact that it always appears overhead to human observers that perhaps there's something watching them back on the other end.
• Strange-Syntax Speaker: All of their dialogue is incomprehensible radio noise, <subtitled in brackets/guillemets with certain words presented as multiple true/possible/satisfactory options, which don’t always agree with each other/horse.> In one Hotline dialogue, they blame this on difficulties translating "hyperreal concepts" into plain English.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: They absolutely despise FORMER, and thus for part of the Foundation DLC, where Jesse is working with FORMER, they get begrudgingly taken for the ride and are noticeably a bit more short-tempered with her.
• Word-Salad Horror: Not to the extent of the Hiss, but much of the Board's clumsy dialogue can sound ominous or unnerving, particularly with some of the alternate word choices. In the climax, the Hiss begins to corrupt the Board, and their speech is repeatedly interrupted by fragments of the Hiss' Madness Mantra.
• Verbal Backspace: The Board tries (and fails) to explain Objects of Power in one of their Hotline messages and says that it's because "hyperreal" concepts don't translate well to English (or, presumably, any other human language). Then they backpedal further and say "Ignore this message."
• You Have Failed Me: It's heavily implied that they personally sicced an Astral Spike on Marshall after she tried to destroy the Nail in the Foundation along with her getting dangerously close to certain secrets The Board didn't want revealed. This fight damaged Marshall's HRA, leaving her open to Hiss possession.

The Service Weapon

The Service Weapon / OOP1-KE

Appearances: Control

The Service Weapon's case file picture, in Grip Form

The Service Weapon is, of course, a prime example of an OOP — a VERY powerful one — ingrained in the Bureau's DNA. A key component in our Prime Candidate program. Come out of that Russian roulette a winner, and you... you're it.

—Dr. Darling, Objects of Power

The badge of office for the Director of the Bureau of Control, the Service Weapon is itself an Object of Power that takes the form of a firearm made from an odd black material that fires self-replicating fragments of itself.

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• Boring, but Practical: Compared to the more esoteric powers granted by other Objects of Power, the Service Weapon is, at the end of the day, just a gun that doesn't need external ammo. It's also the first OOP that Jesse bonds to and will be with her throughout the entire game, plinking down Hiss Infected all the while.
• Bottomless Magazines: Downplayed in that the Service Weapon does have finite ammunition, but it eventually regenerates the ammo over time without needing a new clip or magazine to be actively fed into it.
• The Chooser of the One: It is only by the consent of the Service Weapon that someone becomes the Director of the Federal Bureau of Control, and it is so choosy that it kills anyone who picks it up and is judged unworthy, making the process for selecting the next Director after the death of the previous one particularly fraught.
• Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Spin form transforms the gun into a minigun-style weapon. While its damage is far lower in comparison to every other form, its sheer firing speed makes it possible to kill Hiss just as fast.
• Empathic Weapon: It has a degree of sentience since it is responsible for judging and choosing who is allowed to wield it and, by proxy, picks the Director of the Bureau of Control via that method. One of the theories for how Zachariah Trench was able to kill himself with it was that he got Rejected by the Empathic Weapon after getting infected by the Hiss and releasing it into the Bureau, proving beyond any shadow of a doubt that Trench was unfit for the job and giving him the clarity of mind to end his life on his own terms before the Hiss fully overtook him.
• Fantastic Firearms: Doesn't really get more fantastical than a gun that shoots fragments of itself that never seemingly run out and is also responsible for selecting the Director of the FBC.
• Grenade Launcher: The Surge form, only available from the AWE expansion, launches sticky projectiles that detonate after a short delay.
• Iconic Item: For the Directors of the FBC in general, but Jesse's direct predecessor, Zachariah Trench, was said to have had a particular affinity for the Service Weapon compared to other Objects of Power that the Director is expected to bond with, which makes it all the more ironic that he eventually killed himself with it.
• The Poorly Chosen One: Invoked; sometimes its judgement of a person's ability to handle the rigors of being the Director of the Bureau miss the mark as was the case with Zachariah Trench, who much preferred being a field agent to being Director. Eventually the stress got to him, he became the first Hiss Infected, let the Hiss run wild in the Oldest House, and finally blew his brains out with the gun that picked him for the job, leaving the Service Weapon and the colossal mess he made for Jesse to find and deal with.
  • Elements of this are hinted at in regards to Trench's own predecessor, Northmoore, who unironically saw himself as The Chosen One thanks to the blessing of the Board and being bestowed the Service Weapon. While not completely incompetent or amoral, he did have an Awesome Ego that lead him to make a number of poor decisions that hampered the Bureau's development, and ultimately attuning to so many OoPs he became a walking nuclear bomb, forcing him to step down as director. Interestingly, he was the first director to be chosen by the Weapon, so it seems to have a trend of picking people who end up developing into detriments to the organisation.
• Public Domain Artifact: Unconfirmed, but several Bureau employees speculate the current Service Weapon is the latest form of one or several "Only the Chosen May Wield"-type weapons in mythology, including the sword Excalibur, the hammer Mjölnir, and the morphing water weapon Varunastra.
• Short-Range Shotgun: Its Shatter form, which makes the gun have a far shorter range in exchange for doing much more damage up close, and having a wide enough spread to hit multiple Hiss at once.
• Sniper Pistol:
  • The standard of the Pierce form, which makes every shot of the weapon a single, narrow Charged Attack shot that can do major damage to the Hiss from across the room.
  • With the exclusive weapon mod "One-Way Track" from AWE, the Shatter form becomes this as well. With projectile spread decreased by %100, the power of the shotgun is contained in the size of a single bullet which can one-shot basic Hiss from across the room.
• Transforming Weapon: The Service Weapon has several alternate forms that Jesse can upgrade it with that alter its firing mode.

Astral Spikes

Astral Spikes

Appearances: Control

"We have glimpsed movement, native species, always in the distance. And yet, contact was made. We don't have footage of this — a technical malfunction — but when one of our Astralnauts returned, a Brain Cloud, an Astral Fugue, had hitchhiked a ride in his head. It ruptured out, killing the subject in question. It's a relentless predator, pursuing thoughts, minds, lethal to those the entity feed on."

— Dr. Darling, Astral Spike

The Astral Plane is full of forms of life unique to it, but the one seen most commonly is the deadly Astral Spike, a sort of Negative Space Wedgie unrelated to the Hiss that looks like a starburst of fluctuating spikes roaming around. Immune to conventional weapons, they serve as an obstacle to be avoided during the Board's tests while binding an Object of Power or roaming around the Quarry. One of them infected an astralnaut and popped out of his head into the physical world in the Research Sector, forcing Dr. Darling and the others to contain it in a special room. The room in question is full of cardboard cutouts resembling the objects in the Astral Plane, ostensibly to make the Spike feel more "comfortable" in its prison.

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• Bullfight Boss: The Astral Spike in the Research Sector, like other Astral Spikes, can't be killed, and instead needs to be lured into a blocked-off area before shutting the door on it.
• Enemy Civil War: Astral Spikes can be found roaming in the areas near the Turntable or in parts of the Quarry. While they don't seem to be too interested in the Hiss (Darling says they're attracted to thinking beings, which the Hiss victims probably aren't), they will still damage Hiss enemies if they get too close.
• Hell Is That Noise: When it gets closer, it fills the screen with an inhuman, otherworldly screaming that acts like a psychic barrage and hurts Jesse.
• Invincible Minor Minion: They can't be killed, but you can avoid them rather easily as they only slowly cruise around on the ground, lacking any climbing, jumping or flying ability. They can go up short flights of stairs, but not through regular-sized doorways, and they don't seem to be able to take 'big' steps up, as the one in the Turntable area is stuck in the lowest circle of the floor.
• Your Head Asplode: The first Astral Spike the FBC encountered in the Oldest House came through by exploding out of the head of someone exploring the Astral Plane.

Astral Copies

Astral Copies

Appearances: Control

Mannequin-like humanoids found in the Astral Plane that seem to be made of the same marble material as the walls and floor. They are initially used as training dummies in the Board's tests while binding an Object of Power, but in the Foundation DLC they run a bit wild due to the erosion of the dimensions and are sometimes seen attacking Hiss-corrupted enemies when they're not attacking you.

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• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Given how they do not seem to be sentient, the Mimics that assist you in fighting Marshall seem to do so from FORMER’s influence than any benevolence towards Jesse.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: Based on their identical appearance to Ash's description, and how Ash describes them in his later logs, it is heavily implied in The Foundation that they are the Id, formerly peaceful and curious entities native to the Foundation, forced to serve the Board through the Nail's control.
• Enemy Civil War: They prefer to attack Hiss-infected to Jesse if given the choice, most prevalent in the Foundation DLC.
• Invincible Minor Mook: Golden Astral Copies are completely immune to Jesse’s attack, and the ones that do have to be killed are through whatever new ability Jesse had gained that caused her to enter the Astral Plane.
• Rock Monster: The Astral Copies seem to be formed from the same marble-like material as the walls and floors of the Astral Plane.
• Mighty Glacier: The Mimics without any special abilities or weaponry walk very slowly towards you, but if they manage to actually hit you, they do massive damage. The ones in the Chasm of the Foundation are Level 15, the functionally highest-leveled enemies in the entire game by a mile.^note The Final Boss gauntlet in the base game had enemies in the 30s, but Jesse herself was given a power boost for the fight allowing her to mow them down with ease, so their level is basically irrelevant. As a result, they can easily One-Hit Kill you and have truckloads of health themselves that takes ages to whittle down. You most likely aren't intended to kill them at all, just immobilize them with the VHS Tape and run past them, but since they will just sit there and let you shoot them while watching the tape, you might as well.
• Underground Monkey: Functionally they're not all that different from Hiss-infected security personnel.

FORMER

FORMER

Appearances: Control

< Alone $@$% Long @%@# Visitor @#$! Happy >

An entity disrupting certain Altered Items, including a fridge that kills you if you don't keep looking at it after making eye contact. In the Astral Plane, it takes the form of a gigantic tardigrade-like thing with a huge eye that rotates between two different "modes." According to the Board, it's a former member of... whatever they are... and seems to be making a power play by disrupting Altered Items.

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• Ambiguously Evil: While depicted as completely hostile to Jesse in the main game, it appears in a much more passive manner in the Foundation DLC, peacefully offering Jesse the other crystal-manipulating power you need to repair the Nail. It's clear that it has some kind of motivating agenda relative to The Board, but we don't get any true idea on what it is or why the change in approach.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: It's REALLY big in the Astral Plane and tries to squash you like a bug with its giant limbs or energy blasts from its eye.
• Attack Its Weak Point: FORMER's gigantic white eye.
• Black Speech:
  • It speaks with the same low, distorted radio-noise/whalesong voice of the Board, but unlike them it gets no translation. The Board defensively claims that it's trying to offer you to join it, not that you really have any incentive to.
  • It later attempts proper communication with Jesse in Foundation, though it's even less comprehensible than the Board, speaking in disconnected words that only give the barest idea of what it's really trying to say.
    Jesse: Hungry? I mean, yeah, actually. I'd love a sandwich or something. That's... not what you meant, is it?
    FORMER: < Right @#$#@$ Panini @#$@# Former @#$ Board @#$* Abalone >
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Seen particularly between it and the Board in the Foundation DLC. At the start the Board gives Jesse a choice between a psi power that grows crystals and one that allows the Service Weapon to break them even though she obviously needs both to complete the task the Board gave her. FORMER, previously purely hostile towards Jesse, gives her the other powerup. By the end of the DLC, Jesse's gotten fed up with them both.
• Eldritch Abomination: Maybe the most traditional one in the game, being a giant black tardigrade-like creature with a revolving searchlight eye and long chitinous legs. Its morality and method of speech are equally bizarre and alien, and it only exists in the Astral Plane along with being fundamentally beyond conventional human understanding.
• Empathic Environment: The Astral Plane where you fight it is different in a couple ways; instead of being filled with light, it's pitch-black, and the inverted black pyramid is nowhere to be seen. Wherever in the Astral Plane this is, it's far from the Board's region of control.
• Enemy Mine: In the Foundation DLC, it kinda-sorta teams up with Jesse to stop the Hiss from corroding the Foundation, probably because destroying the Oldest House in its entirety would harm it or its plans in some way. It giving you an upgrade the Board was holding back on is another way for it to try to drive a wedge between Jesse and the Board, which it probably considers a bonus. If you don't harm FORMER throughout the DLC, it'll even assist you with the final boss.
• Eye Motifs: Its most prominent feature is a massive spotlight-like eye, and paintings of eyes are scattered around the Foundation whenever his influence is implied.
• Fallen Hero: To the extent the Board is heroic; it used to be a member, but then it got "blamed" for something that resulted in its exile and enmity with them.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: A strange inversion of the trope: the fourth wall *does* protect you. Specifically, the altered fridge that kills people who stop looking at it. If Jesse turns away from it but the camera is pointed at it, she's fine. If the camera turns away from it but Jesse is pointed at it, you're fine.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: Nothing before or after it in the game is anything quite like it and there's no warning that the unstable fridge was going to lead to a boss fight against a giant monster in another dimension. Twice.
• Go for the Eye: FORMER's eye is its weak point; shooting it there deals more damage
• Hidden Agenda Villain: It's not completely clear what it wants, though The Board seems to think that it's trying to put together a rival board:
  The Board: It is trying to create a Competition/Not Us.
• Ignored Expert: Implied. Some of FORMER's dialogue in the Foundation DLC might or might not suggest that there's something wrong with The Board, and they got ousted for trying to do something about that issue.
• Little "No": The only properly clear answer Jesse ever gets from it is a simple "No" with no other words or distortion, when she asks if it needs her to rescue something (its syntax was confusing her).
• Meaningful Name: Probably refers to the fact that it's a former member of the Board.
• Noodle Incident: If FORMER is indeed, as its name and background information implies, a former member of the Board, what caused it to be fired from or leave the Board in the first place? The Foundation DLC expands on this a little: it split off from The Board because they blamed it for something, though it never elaborates on what it was blamed for or why.
• Optional Boss:
  • Despite appearing while trying to maintain the fridge and later a flamingo, the fight is the end result of a side mission and not part of the main story.
  • He becomes an optional boss again in The Foundation if you decide to attack him rather than speak to him.
• Otherworldly and Sexually Ambiguous: Whatever FORMER might be, they are incredibly alien, and it's pretty clear that concepts of sex or gender are not easily applicable to them — same as with the Board.
• Plot-Irrelevant Villain: FORMER doesn't seem to have anything to do with the Hiss (that we know of), though it may be taking the opportunity of the chaos the Hiss is spreading for its own advantage. Just a reminder that, like Mold-1, the FBC faces all sorts of threats. Subverted in the Foundation DLC, where its private war with the Board becomes an important part of the plot.
• Suddenly Speaking: In the Foundation DLC Jesse can make out some of what he's saying; the transcript usually shows four words with random punctuation symbols between them.
• Tragic Villain: In the main game it's seen as a new potential threat to the Bureau, overtaking Altered Items to gain a presence in the world. Its encounter during the Foundation DLC paints FORMER in a more sympathetic light, suffering from loneliness after its exile from the Board.
• Villainous Rescue: More "ambiguously antagonistic" rescue in this case, but during the Foundation DLC, if you simply talk to FORMER instead of attacking it, it will send in Astral Mimics as reinforcements to assist you during the Final Boss.
• Wild Card: FORMER is a wrinkle in what would otherwise be a straightforward arrangement between Jesse, the Board, and the Bureau. Its actual agenda is unclear, we're not sure what it gets out of disrupting Altered Items, and it both helps and hinders you in the Foundation DLC.

Paranatural Locations

The Oldest House

The Oldest House

Appearances: Control

"After extensive research and investigation, the Bureau made the building its headquarters on November 13, 1968. The Federal Bureau of Control was never out in the open — this was always an obfuscated, classified, top-secret operation. So imagine our surprise when the building's observation-resistant aspects began, in some unquantifiable way, to affect the Bureau as a whole."

—Dr. Darling, The Oldest House

A Place of Power used as the Global Headquarters for the Federal Bureau of Control after it was discovered by the Bureau in New York City during The '60s. Far Bigger on the Inside than the outside, this mysterious Eldritch Location serves as the setting for Control and both of its DLCs.

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• Alien Geometries: its interior dimensions are often set up in a way that make no logical sense (like how parts of the Foundation and Maintenance Sector open up into regions that are seemingly open to the sky despite it all ostensibly being located inside of a building) thanks to the numerous Thresholds it intersects with.
• Bland-Name Product: Even blander than usual. All vending machines found within the Oldest House are stocked with food items that have completely blank wrappers or containers printed with a simple, bold-faced label like "PEANUTS" or "CHOCOLATE BAR." This is because bringing "iconic" items into the Oldest House runs the risk of it turning into an Altered Item; anything in the public subconscious, including name-brand candy bars, are forbidden for safety reasons.
• Bizarrchitecture: It's main feature is its tendency to warp and change seemingly at random, its interior spawning new rooms (some of which are Thresholds to Eldritch Locations) and moving rooms at random. Notably, the Foundation is mentioned as being the only completely static location in the entire House.
• Bigger on the Inside: It's already a pretty damn big skyscraper on the outside, but within it's at least the size of a small city, and that's only counting the tiny fraction of the place that the FBC has been able to sufficiently explore since they first took (nominal) control of the place.
• Bottomless Pits: "Firebreaks" are massive fissures within the Oldest House's structure meant to seal off sectors in case of emergency containment failures. Beyond three sets of thick imposing doors is a narrow bridge over a chasm that seems to span in all directions forever.
• Chaos Architecture: The Oldest House doesn't actually shift the contents of its rooms around in-game, but it's stated to do so on a semi-regular basis; only the technology of the FBC and the good graces of the Board keep things relatively normal. The most seen of this in action is Jesse cleanses a Control Point, causing a room's altered geometry to return to normal.
• Cosmic Keystone: The Nail in the House's Foundation secures the Oldest House to the Astral Plane; if it were to ever be damaged, then the Astral Plane would start to "bleed over" into first the Oldest House and next the world at large, causing widespread devastation ultimately culminating in The End of the World as We Know It.
• Eldritch Location: It is a massive skyscraper hidden in one of the most populated cities in the world by a Perception Filter, it is Bigger on the Inside than the outside, its interior constantly changes seemingly at random, it spontaneously turns ordinary objects into Altered items and breaks modern technology, it opens thresholds to alternate dimensions and is itself existing in the real world and the Astral Plane. Practically half of the Bureau's resources are pumped into researching its own headquarters because of how dangerously weird it all is.
  Darling: August 4th, 1964: we discovered the Oldest House while investigating a suspected Altered World Event case in the New York City subway tunnels. The agents found their way up into the building. Once we became aware of it, it was there. For the rest of the population, it was hiding in plain sight — a slippery blind spot, seemingly discouraging observation. It's, uh, a Place of Power. An ongoing AWE of its own, seemingly adhering to its physical outer constraints, and yet constantly breaking the known boundaries of reality. It's unstable, shifting. Note: for more details on Control Points and the research and process to stabilize and secure the core sectors, refer to a separate presentation.
• Enforced Technology Levels: For whatever reason, the Oldest House does not play well with any technology built after The '80s or so, justifying the game's Cassette Futurism aesthetic and the Bureau having to make do with more analog technology like typewriters in lieu of computers and pneumatic tubes carrying paper documents in lieu of wireless communication. Whenever any "modern" technology is brought past the House's front door, it often violently explodes or completely malfunctions. One document speculates that this could be because newer technology is not yet firmly established in the public subconscious. The Bureau, naturally, have built a special room in Communications set up just so employees can access the Internet on work time, and even then it had to be built in such a way that it basically forces the Oldest House to let them connect to the outside world.
• Expy:
  • invoked Sam Lake has freely admitted that the Oldest House as a concept draws heavily from the supernatural house featured in House of Leaves, as both are Mind Screwy Bigger on the Inside Haunted Houses that randomly alter their internal geometries and are implied to be directly connected in some fashion to an Eldritch Abomination (in this case, the Board).
  • The Oldest House's exterior was inspired by 33 Thomas Street, a tall concrete building with no windows and connected to a secretive government conspiracy^note 33 Thomas Street serves as a massive exchange for the multitude of telephone lines in New York, and thus had been speculated to be a focus point for the NSA's mass surveillance programs disclosed by Edward Snowden and yet is unremarkable and easily missed by the general populace despite being in the middle of a major city.
• Genius Loci: It is constantly referred by staff to have a mind of its own, constantly shifting rooms and opening new Thresholds within its walls seemingly at random. Whether or not the House is itself actively malicious or just mischievous is up for interpretation.
• Haunted House: While the House was never made by human hands, the Oldest House has all of the hallmarks of a Haunted House; a constantly shifting interior that is much larger than the outside implies (and the Oldest House already looks gigantic), possessing a mind of its own and can be a serious danger to the humans that traverse it.
• Malevolent Architecture: It is implied through audio logs that when the Bureau first discovered the Oldest House, the interior (or at least the Foundation) killed several of the explorers before Northmoor discovered the Service Weapon. While the building is never shown to actively harm anyone in-game, Hiss-possessed sections of the building spontaneously grow concrete blocks that block any hope of progressing.
  • It is never stated why, but if any staff member is to find a window in the Oldest House, they are instructed to cover their eyes and try to find the nearest exit immediately. We never find out why this is such a big deal beyond the fact that the Oldest House isn't supposed to have windows.
  • One department of the House sank into the Foundation, trapping everyone in it to starve to death, unable to communicate. The massive scale of this made the people inside sure that it wasn't a normal building shift and that something pulled them down there, but whether it was the Board, the House, FORMER, or some other force entirely, they never figured it out in time to save themselves.
  • Emily mentions that she calculated 39% of workplace injuries in the Bureau are caused by the House itself. Considering how hazardous their work is to begin with, this is a staggering number.
• Mobile Maze: The Oldest House is a vast and intricate labyrinth of intersecting realities that seem to change and move at the whims of its Genius Loci.
• Motifs: Frequently equated to trees. If Jesse asks the Board in the Foundation DLC where the Oldest House came from, they claim that it "grew" from the Foundation (which they also call its "roots"). Tree symbols are found throughout the House and are meant to be representative of it as a whole, and its Malevolent Architecture changing in whatever direction it wishes (sometimes to the direct detriment of the FBC) can be seen as an allusion to how trees can grow big enough in urban areas to crack sidewalks and other valuable infrastructure.
• Mundane Utility: The FBC discover an anomalously invisible skyscraper with a transdimensional interior and what do they do with it? They move in and make it into office spaces, research facilities, training facilities and an Extranormal Prison.
• Non-Indicative Name: Despite being called the "Oldest House," it looks more like a Brutalist skyscraper than anything else.
• Perception Filter: Despite the fact that it's a giant featureless slab of concrete taller than most skyscrapers in the middle of one of the most populated cities in the world, no one seems to notice or acknowledge it. The Bureau (who specializes in these sort of anomalies) didn't notice it until they discovered it by complete accident in The '60s and since then the Bureau has been using it both as a Headquarters, a lab and a containment area for its anomalous content. Notably, this Perception Filter started extending to the FBC's own activities, letting them requisition funds from the government that wouldn't ever get questioned or audited so long as they were reasonable.
• Portal Crossroad World: As befitting its allusions to Yggdrasil (the World Tree of Norse Mythology which linked all of the Nine Realms together), it's definitely one of these. Within its shifting interiors, the House also has Thresholds, which are gateways to other dimensions. Some of them are stable and last for years, while others are much more temporary. The most stable of all is either that which leads to the Black Rock Quarry, one of the most useful to the FBC as it is full of "Black Rock" which is used as "paranatural lead" to contain dangerous anomalies, or Earth itself depending on if the entry way in New York is in fact a threashold which is still subject to debate.
• Rule of Symbolism: Word of God states the House's Brutalist style is a mirror of the Bureau itself; a Utilitarian architectural movement that was made to provide cheap housing for those that need it, only to become a style synonymous with looming, uncaring authority.
• Shout-Out: The Oldest House bares a startling resemblance to the SCP Foundation SCP-001 Proposal "Keter Duty", an Eldritch Location with a Perception Filter taking the form of a Brutalist building that the Artifact Collection Agency of the setting use as a means of containing dangerous supernatural objects, can open portals (called "thresholds" by staff), is Bigger on the Inside and could potentially create other anomalous things when the conditions are met.
• World Tree: It is implied by the Board that the Oldest House was originally in this form before New York became a city, the House changing accordingly as humanity moved in. Tree symbols are found in abundance in the Foundation as well, and along with the various Shout Outs to Scandinavian folklore & Norse Mythology in the game (as per usual for a Remedy game), it's even stealthily implied to be Yggdrasil itself.

The Oceanview Motel and Casino

The Oceanview Motel and Casino / Oceanview Hotel

Appearances: Control | Alan Wake II

"During an AWE investigation, our agents discovered a light switch cord in a Butte bungalow closet. They pulled the cord and were instantly transported to the Oceanview Motel and Casino."

— Dr. Darling, Oceanview Motel and Casino

The Oceanview Motel and Casino is a "Place Of Power," like the Oldest House itself, on a tinier but more intricate level. It is said to look generally like "every roadside motel" at once, suggesting it's part of the collective unconscious. In practice, it became linked to the Oldest House and people who pull a certain light switch three times briefly find themselves in the Motel, then upon exiting find a new path through the Oldest House (or are transported to a different location entirely).

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• Appearance Is in the Eye of the Beholder: Being a shared dream, the Oceanview Motel isn't bound to one form or state. In Control, it appears as an old roadside motel comprised of a hallway and the entrance lobby, with many locked rooms with markings on them that are implied to be Thresholds accessible from the real world. In Alan Wake II, it takes the form of a much larger historical downtown Hotel overrun with Taken and an eccentric claiming to be Thomas Zane, those same marked doors scattered throughout the building.
• Dream Land: Emily theorizes that the Motel and Casino isn't so much a physical location so much as it is a "shared dream" that people can only visit physically thanks to the Light Cord's paranatural properties. This is why people all tend to have a sense of deja vu when entering it for the first time; it isn't one motel, but the very idea of a "motel" that everyone has made manifest.
• Empathic Environment:
  • When Jesse tries to clear out her head of Hiss infection, she wills herself into the Motel (since it connects to dreams too) and all the posters within have changed to motivational posters about Jesse herself, Polaris, the Board, and so on.
  • When Jesse enters the Motel to follow Ahti (who has gone "on vacation"), the travel posters change from generic America-based scenes to reading "Visit Finland".
  • In AWE, the Motel is in a gloomier "nighttime" mode to reflect the lingering Dark Presence.
• Genius Loci: It's implied that it's in some way sapient. While it doesn't seem to "mind" agents using it as an actual motel, it also seems to actively mess with agents' attempts to observe and understand it. One agent actively staking out the Oceanview for weeks ends up believing the motel itself is toying with him before encountering... something. When other agents find him, he's apparently been Driven to Madness.
• Hell Hotel: The Oceanview Motel is itself harmless, though an agent's attempts to see how it works left them in a rough state. In the form it appears in Alan Wake II — the Oceanview Hotel — it's swarming with Taken, the narrative Alan writes to navigate it making it the sight of many grisly events; murders, suicides, and a grotesque ritual performed by the Cult of the Tree in the ballroom.
• Inn Between the Worlds: With no apparent staff, but hey, at least the mini-fridges keep getting restocked.
• Mundane Utility: It may be a gateway to other places, but sometimes it gets used as an actual motel by FBC agents. For instance, Trench says in one of his Hotline videos that sometimes he just takes a break and sleeps in the Motel to get away from it all.
• Non-Indicative Name: It doesn't have a definite location, but one agent memo calls out the whole "Oceanview" name considering it's evocative of a motel you'd find in a coastal region. For that matter, there's also little to show of its "casino" portion besides a door supposedly leading into that area.
• Nothing Is Scarier: The motel is pleasantly set-dressed, but there's a lingering eeriness regarding its lack of staff, isolation from the rest of known reality, the fact that other... things seem to have a connection to it, and the inherently surreal nature of the place. During one visit, a sudden scream can be heard coming from one of the rooms whose door has a bit of blood coming from under it, and in AWE, one agent reported seeing something in an attempt to stake it out for personnel after a few weeks, and other documents reveal that said agent came back insane. Neither incident gets any explanation.
  • A minor, surprisingly disturbing incident occurs during one visit: tourists banging on the door trying to get in and book a room for the family, sounding generically American. They cannot be seen outside the doors. It's unclear if this really is a mundane family stumbling upon a physical manifestation of the Motel, or... something else trying to get in. And if it's the latter, the statement about finding a different motel is somewhat ominous.
• Pocket Dimension: It's not very big, but it's definitely not a normal part of reality, either. Nobody can leave through the front door and it's not clear whether there is a "real-world" location for the Motel or not. Strangely, during one trip into the motel, a couple can be heard outside the front door, confused as to why the front door is locked despite it being daytime and all the lights being on, and wondering if there is even anyone inside, before giving up and going to a different motel.
• Portal Crossroad World:
  • Played with. The only door Bureau visitors can (usually) leave through is the black triangle door, but where they end up is different every time and dependent on where they enter. There are other marked doors in there, and Darling theorizes they could lead to different places entirely, if only one had the key...
  • The AWE DLC elaborates that other areas of paranatural phenomena are also linked to the Oceanview Motel. One of the door symbols, the two overlapping circles with a dot in the middle, is apparently linked to a Ghost Town called Keystone, while the "Spiral" door appears to lead directly to the Dark Place.
  • The Oceanview would manifest in the Dark Place during Alan's time trying to escape it in Alan Wake II as a Hotel swarming with Taken.
• Third Time's The Charm: The motel explicitly operates on Rule of Three and in practice that means for actions to work they need to be repeated three times.

Paracriminal Groups

The "Blessed" Organization

The "Blessed" Organization

Appearances: Control ^note Mentioned only | Alan Wake II ^note Mentioned only

A mysterious group only alluded to in documents and occasionally an audio log or two, the "Blessed" Organization (or "Blessed Pictures," "Blessed Productions," and a variety of other shell companies and aliases with the word "Bless" in their name) are apparently a cabal of occultists using Altered World Events to create Altered Items or Objects of Power. While their methods are somewhat elaborated upon in the AWE expansion, they are never made clear.

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• Alliterative Title: At least one of their movies is called Delivery Disaster.
• Arch-Enemy: Seems to be starting to treat the FBC as one; as of their latest known activity, they've started targeting FBC activities with items directly intended to kill.
• Conspiracy Placement: Not as obvious as some other examples, but putting "Bless" into the names of all their shell companies can't be helpful in keeping FBC off their trail. Possibly justified — one interrogation record implies they may just be taunting the Bureau staff with their overt behavior.
• The Ghost: They are mentioned only in documents and a couple audio files but are never directly shown or encountered. The fallout of their actions can be seen, however, as several of their Altered Items are encountered by Jesse, including a jukebox which teleports Bureau staff into the Quarry Threshold (as seen in the Expeditions) and a movie camera that traps Jesse inside a cheesy action sequence.
• Hidden Agenda Villain: What they get out of their meddling is unclear, though they may be trying to deliberately engineer AWE's to generate Objects of Power or at least to harness supernatural forces. The Investigations Sector dealt with hunting down "paracriminals," which means with Investigations currently shut down, nobody's really keeping track of what they do.
• Meaningful Name: Aside from the more obvious connotations, "Blessed" is used in mild expressions of annoyance or exasperation, which they certainly seem to be to the FBC.
• Sequel Hook: One of several possible future antagonists for the FBC if any future Control content is made.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Several of their companies have a good rapport with the public, with Alan Wake II revealing Barry is completely taken with Chester Bless and his resort to the point he tells Alice all about it.

Cult of the Tree (Unmarked Spoilers)

The Cult of the Tree

Appearances: Control ^note Pictured only | Alan Wake II

"We are the Cult of the Tree! We watch in the night!"

A mysterious cult founded around the Bright Falls area and surrounding woodland, who are behind a series of grisly killings.

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• Adaptational Villainy: In-Universe. While they are very much antagonists in Bright Falls, that's mostly due to the Dark Presence's influence. They're actually meant to be a Benevolent Conspiracy of townsfolk trying to keep the Dark Presence's influence down with their limited understanding of the paranatural. In the Dark Place, they manifest as a more nefarious murder cult — the Cult of the Word — who worship Mr. Scratch as The Devil and Alan Wake's novels are prophetic scripture foretelling of grim times ahead.
• Animal Motifs: The cult as a whole share a deer motif. The first of them fought by Saga is heralded by a deer bursting through an abandoned general store before one of them (literally) bursts through the store as well. They also all wear deer masks as well to hide their identity.
• Arc Symbol: A pair of intersecting triangles. Their presence — whether it's on their jewelry or graffiti around town — denotes the Cult of the Tree's influence, the most common of these symbols (two triangles on top of each other) looking not unlike a spruce tree. This was based off of The Board — an Eldritch Abomination associated with the Federal Bureau of Control that takes the form of an inverted pyramid — from the perspective of a drunk with double-vision.
• Banishing Ritual: The reason for their habit of removing the heart of their victims. With the heart removed and the Clicker inserted, an impromptu ritual to force the Dark Presence out of a Taken can be performed.
• Benevolent Conspiracy: The "Cult" is in reality, a bunch of concerned citizens who wish to protect Bright Falls from the Taken. Their sacrifices are all rituals to keep the Taken dead, their iconography and presence in the woods all simple scare tactics to keep the scared youth away at night.
• Card-Carrying Villain: They're a murderous, darkness-obsessed band of psychopaths who refer to themselves as a cult. As Saga and Casey note in conversation, even other cults do not openly name themselves as such because of all the negative connotations the word carries. This image is actually intentionally invoked; Ilmo Koskela suggested the name and, in his own words, that did half the work of keeping uninformed people away from the woods; the rest of its perception likely fell into place after that, with the obsession with darkness actually being aimed at fighting it.
• Creature-Hunter Organization: Their true purpose as a group is to find Taken in the woods and force the Dark Presence out of them. While they are able to do this for a time, when Taken come singular against the large group of cultists, they prove ineffective at managing the larger hordes of the Dark Presence.
• Cheap Costume: Their "uniform" is just a Deerfest mask available for public purchase and green parkas.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Prior to their proper introduction in Alan Wake II, a sticky note mentioning them appeared in the final cutscene of Control's AWE expansion.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: For all their faults, Cult is evidently not restrictive or prejudiced toward any particular group. The models for the generic Taken Cultists Saga can fight in the woods include women and people of color, even if all of their named members are white men (and they aren't very evil, either).
• Good All Along: Near the end of Alan Wake II, Ilmo reveals that the Cult are actually fighting the Dark Presence and are aware that Alan is dangerous. Most of the murders they have committed are to stop the Taken (it is unknown how many instances have happened where someone innocent is killed, such as with the Deputies).
• Heroic Wannabe: They are truly all well-intentioned and are trying to stop the Dark Presence, but the way they go about it leaves much to be desired. Their attempts to scare the populace are ineffective on many hikers and tourists and they are so disorganized a half dozen of them take so long to sacrifice Nightingale the ritual to keep him dead is interrupted.
• Hidden Supplies: In order to aid in their secret activities, the Cult has hidden supply caches all around Cauldron Lake, which Saga can find and appropriate for her own use.
• Malevolent Masked Men: The majority of the cultists wear deer masks to obscure their identity and none of them hesitate to sacrifice innocents or try to kill Saga. In reality, most of the "cult" are Knight Templar Well-Intentioned Extremist townsfolk at worst; all of their rituals are intended to kill any Taken that appear out of Cauldron Lake, and the cult members who try to kill Saga are all unfortunate Taken.
• Mystery Cult: A large cult with an abnormally prevalent iconography and mysterious origins. Saga's campaign centers around trying to find the purpose for their sacrifices and origins in Washington. It's revealed later on that the Cult was the successor to a group of concerned citizens fighting the Dark Presence; their rituals were all aimed at Taken who ended up rising out of Cauldron Lake.
• Paper Tiger: While the Cult is played up as a sinister force that has infiltrated Bright Falls and has the entire town under their thumb, in reality, they're just a biker gang with delusions of grandeur about combating the Dark Presence just because they happened to come into possession of the Clicker. While they're able to eliminate individual Taken that occasionally surface from Cauldron Lake, they are swiftly and almost completely wiped out once the Dark Presence makes a serious effort to escape again.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": Thankfully, the security on their locks is frankly terrible as they always leave clues on how to open said locks (possibly a result of Ilmo's obsession with puzzles). Any decently intelligent person, much less an experienced FBI investigator like Saga, will find their puzzles to be child's play.
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: Despite their reputation, Saga never finds any of them in the woods and their sacrifices are few and far between. In the opening sequence, despite at least one of them having a gun, they chase after the Booker couple on foot. This all serves as hints toward their real goals and desire to keep innocent bystanders safe from the woods.
• Real After All: The danger of the mysterious Cult hidden in the woods is a major urban legend for the people of Bright Falls, which becomes a serious concern when real victims begin to show up from their actions. In reality, the cult was intentionally created as a way of masking the efforts of a group of townsfolk, from Bright Falls and Watery, to combat the Dark Presence and the Taken that continue to appear within the area.
• Renegade Splinter Faction: Several of their members were once part of the all but defunct "Torchbearers", who they came to see as ineffective in protecting the town. Ilmo retained their basic goal, but took to the most extreme method he could to actually keep people away instead of offering passive assistance to those already in danger.
• Right Hand Versus Left Hand: Several of the cultists want to go to more intense extremes in dealing with the government's influence in Bright Falls. By the time of the game, at least one is messing with FBC outposts and research stations, which Ilmo notes is bad, and will lead to more attention on them.
• Sigil Spam: Their icon, two upside down triangles stacked atop each other and overlapping, shows up as crude stick figures, graffiti in town, and well-made jewelry the cultists wear. Documents in the hideout reveal it to have been inspired by the FBC logo during a drunken fit, and be completely meaningless for anything other than to spook locals who see the symbol in the woods.
• Skewed Priorities: The Cult discovers the mysterious FBC are aware of the group and have filed reports on them as a terrorist organization. Their only seen reaction are annoyed notes complaining about how the Bureau consider them poorly coordinated and a low level "Category Orange" threat.
• Unknown Rival: It turns out, the Cult is well aware that the FBC is spying on Cauldron Lake and the surrounding towns and actively sabotages their operations, while the FBC don't seem to be aware of them at all. This is played with in the fact that the FBC do know of the Cult's existence, it's just that they don't consider them to be any sort of serious threat due to how little the Cult understands the paranatural forces they're dealing with.
• Vigilante Man: What the cult actually is; a group of citizens within the Bright Falls-Watery area taking the fight to the Dark Presence as best they can...Which admittedly isn't too well, as the notes in their stashes and the fact that Saga has to deal with a good deal of Taken still can attest to.
• Villains Out Shopping: Several of their notes are bickering about the necessity of the complicated puzzles they lock their stashes behind. Saga also finds evidence of them playing poker and drinking at the scene of their murders. This is one of the first hints they aren't the murderous fanatics they initially come across as.
• Walking Spoiler: Their true goals and purpose in Bright Falls are a major reveal with massive repercussions to the plot of Alan Wake II and the framing of Saga's half of the narrative.
• We Are Everywhere: Several of the notes in their caches make claims to this effect as a means of threat to anyone who come across information about the Cult they shouldn't have.
  "YOU CAN'T HIDE FROM THE TREES WE ARE WATCHING"
  "THE CULT OF THE TREE SEES EVERYTHING"
• The World's Expert (on Getting Killed): They are unfortunately rather incompetent at their true goal of fighting off the Taken. Many of them are attacked and, if not Taken themselves, killed without much struggle. As early as the second Taken Saga comes across, and steadily among the Taken afterward, are cult members, and of cult members who are identified, only Ilmo Koskela survives to the end of the game.

Cult of the Word

The Cult of the Word

Appearances: Alan Wake II

"This is the ritual to lead you on... Your friends will meet him when you're gone!"

A murder cult whose members worship the work of Alan Wake and re-create the murders described in his novels in the real world.

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• Ambiguous Situation: Whether the cult was real or just a plot device Alan used to traverse the Dark Place. Evidence pointing to them having been real to some capacity is Casey talking about dealing with a murder cult in New York years ago, and the FBC having a file on a similar incident that occurred three years after Alan's disappearance — involving a murder cult that appeared to worship Alan and worked to re-create deaths described in his novels, and whose members were arrested some time before the Cult of the Tree began operating in Bright Falls — that Saga can find in Return 6... but on the other hand, it's been shown that Return is able to rewrite reality to change people's memories and even reality itself to a limited extent, and even create documents acknowledging the "fake" history.
• Apocalypse Cult: Several of their operations work to summon Scratch. They still acknowledge how evil he is and revel in how bloodily horrible his return would be for the world which he proves in the endgame of Alan Wake II.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Just like the Cult of the Tree, they make the odd choice to openly refer to themselves as a Cult. Unlike the Cult of the Tree, they are fully as villainous as the connotation of the word suggests.
• Cargo Cult: They worship the writings of Alan Wake and work to make them a reality for their own ends. Late in the game, at least one sect of them are revealed to worship Tom the Filmmaker's film "Nightless Night" for its depiction of a real murder and lost status.
• Cop Killer: They hunt down and kill off a federal agent who stumbled across their hideout in the Subway. When the uniformed officer duo who have been trying to join them fulfill their purpose, the Cult kill them off as well.
• Mystery Cult: They have a wide reputation throughout New York but have kept themselves mysterious and well-hidden. Their endgame is also not fully known, though they seem to have some awareness of the Dark Place.
• Poke in the Third Eye: In the final echo Alan finds in the theatre, the Grandmaster acknowledges and taunts him directly. How and for what reason he does this is left a mystery to Alan by the end of the base game.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: A duo of cops who become enamoured with the cult try to join them throughout the Murder Scenes. After using the cops to hide their crimes and dispose of evidence, the Cult uses them for sacrifices within the Cinema.

Other Paranatural Entities

Hedron

Hedron

Appearances: Control

"We've never seen anything like it. We've built a container for it, we've brought it in. This changes everything! It's beyond our understanding. We have brought so many questions with us, through that hole in the wall. I will dedicate... I'm never going home!"

— Dr. Darling, Hedron

Hedron was a paranatural entity which was discovered in Slidescape-36 by the Federal Bureau of Control.

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• Ambiguous Situation: Did Hedron implant Polaris into Jesse's mind, or did it simply bring out Polaris from within her? Is Hedron really dead and what's left lives on in Polaris, or was Hedron just another vessel for Polaris all along like Jesse is? Was Hedron able to communicate with Jesse and Dylan because they're parautilitarians, or is it the reason why they're parautilitarians in the first place?
• All for Nothing: Jesse believes this when Hedron is killed by the Hiss. This is all part of its Thanatos Gambit, though.
• Eldritch Abomination: Hedron is a giant grey polyhedron-shaped thing, or at least that's what we are able to comprehend what it looks like. Being an entity of pure-resonance like the Hiss, it is able to meld itself with the minds of human hosts manifesting as Polaris, which is able to live on through Jesse even after its destruction and is capable of banishing the Hiss' influence in people and areas in the Oldest House. It is even implied that constant direct exposure to it caused Dr. Darling to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence.
• Greater-Scope Paragon: While there is no real way of knowing if Hedron is sentient, let-alone benevolent, Hedron is the biggest guiding force for Jesse and the Bureau at large next to The Board. Its influence on Jesse as Polaris protects her from being possessed by the Hiss and even led her to the Oldest House at the start of the game. By harnessing its power, Dr. Darling was able to create the HRAs that were able to protect a chunk of the Bureau's staff from being possessed by the Hiss.
• Good Counterpart: To the Hiss. Both are Eldritch Abominations from the same paranatural dimension brought into this world through the slide projector, and both are capable of implanting aspects of themselves into human minds. However, the Hiss corrupts those it possesses, twisting them into extensions of itself like a virus. Hedron, by comparison, amplifies the best qualities of those it chooses and protects them, and appears to be highly selective in who it actually grants power to. It is only known to have done so with Jesse and (to a lesser extent) Dylan in the form of Polaris.
• Hero of Another Story: Darling's last recording hints that it managed to cleanse Slidescape-36's dimension of the Hiss sometime before the FBC's expeditions there. Unfortunately, some remnant of the Hiss was still lying in wait, and it just so happened to worm its way into Director Trench's head...
• Killed Off for Real: Jesse manages to finally reach the entity but her removal of its protections, at Hedron's request, results in the Hiss quickly killing it. It is implied this is all according to plan, though. Some part of Hedron may also live in Doctor Darling and Jesse, though.
• Thanatos Gambit: Hedron allowing itself to be killed results in Jesse being taken over by the Hiss but her ordeal gives her insight into where the Slide Projector is and thus how to end the Hiss threat forever.
• Touched by Vorlons: According to Darling's theories, Hedron isn't a source but a catalyst, only bringing out qualities that subjects already had the potential for.

The Not-Mother

The Not-Mother

Appearances: Control ^note Mentioned only

An extradimensional entity residing within the Temple slide directly responsible for the Ordinary Incident.

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• The Corrupter: While Tom Barlow and his fellow bullies where already pretty unpleasant, the Not-Mother lured them into drinking her "milk", which made them violent and homicidal. Then after all the adults in Ordinary disappeared, she turned them into monsters that Jesse called "Dung Monkeys".
• Eldritch Abomination: Like the Hiss and Polaris, she's an extradimensional entity and is capable of warping people into monsters that Jesse and Dylan call 'Dung Monkeys' with her 'milk'.
• Expy: Bears at least a passing resemblance to IT, being an Eldritch Abomination who preys on the children of a small American town, isolating them from the adults and using the local gang of bullies as personal pawns. Given Alan Wake's hand in shaping Jesse's story and his clear affinity for King's work, the resemblance is probably intentional.
• The Ghost: She was banished back to her home reality when the Slide Projector was shut off and never appears in the present, but none of the events of the main story would've happened without her.
• Greater-Scope Villain: She's the direct cause of the Ordinary AWE, and as a result Dylan and the Slide Projector becoming known to the FBC in the first place. If she hadn't destroyed Ordinary, the events of the main story would've never happened.
• Only Fatal to Adults: The specifics aren't clear, but she did something that wiped out all of the adults in Ordinary.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: She's still alive, merely sealed back into 'The Temple' when Jesse and Dylan turned off the Slide Projector.
• Villainous Legacy: Dylan and Jesse stopped her by sending her back to her home dimension, but she's directly responsible for Dylan's Start of Darkness by destroying Ordinary and bringing him and the Projector to the attention of the FBC. As a result, everything in the main story can indirectly be traced back to her.

esseJ

esseJ

Portrayed by: Courtney Hope

Appearances: Control

".uoy naht redliw hcum m'I .nedaF esseJ ,olleH"

An entity that appeared while Jesse was investigating an Altered Item, called the Mirror. Jesse is pulled into a Mirror World where everything is the same, but reversed. While traversing the mirror world, Jesse comes across esseJ, a mirror version of herself. esseJ fights using the Service Weapon and telekinetic abilities.

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• Actor Allusion: One of her lines during the fight says that she is "wilder" than Jesse. Courtney Hope played Beth Wilder in Remedy's previous game, Quantum Break.
• Ambiguously Evil: It's never established if the entity (and by extension the Mirror itself) is only hostile because of the Hiss's corruption of the Mirror or if this is normal behavior. One test subject who went into the Mirror World pre-Hiss Invasion came back speaking backwards and was clearly afraid of the thing lurking there, but was it hunting him or was his fear just a response to encountering an unknown paranatural entity by himself?
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Defeating esseJ grants Jesse access to the Asynchronous Suit (which esseJ herself wears in the boss fight) in the Synchronicity Lab.
• Badass Longcoat: Dons one during the fight against her which adds to her dark and sinister image. Beating her lets you wear it yourself.
• Me's a Crowd: Possibly. While esseJ has a single health bar, the fight is split into 3 different phases, and for every third taken off, she vaporizes into health pickups as if she was a downed enemy before an even stronger version of her appears. Killing the first form prompts Jesse to give out a quick Bond One-Liner before being surprised at there being "another one," but it's unclear whether esseJ is multiple clones or is merely really persistent.
• Mirror Boss: esseJ fights using much of the same arsenal as Jesse, both of her various Service Weapon forms and of her psychic abilities, regardless of whether or not the player's gotten far enough in the game to have obtained them themselves.
• Mirror Self: esseJ is this for Jesse, looking like her but with a black Badass Longcoat and being much more hostile. It's unknown whether or not it has some kind of true form, but based on comments from past Bureau agents who ventured into its territory, it's existed in some form for a while.
• Mirror World: The location where esseJ exists, created by the Victorian Mirror Altered Item. Bureau info indicates that it acts as a sort of Pocket Phantom Zone only reflecting its nearby vicinity wherever it's actually placed, and it's imperfect at that. It also causes speech to flip backwards (only Jesse's inner monologue isn't reversed), a trait which afflicts some agents even when they emerge from the mirror.
• Optional Boss: The esseJ boss battle has no impact on the story.
• Outside-Context Problem: While esseJ has the same "red is evil" motif as the Hiss, it's not clear if there's any actual connection between the two. It's otherwise just an entity found inside an evil Altered mirror.
• Psychic Powers: Over the course of the fight, esseJ uses a similar telekinetic arsenal as Jesse. In the second phase, she begins to Launch objects offensively and will form a Shield to protect herself. In the third phase, she'll start Levitating and occasionally attempt to use a divebomb move onto you.
• Sdrawkcab Speech: esseJ is Jesse's name backwards, and like all dialogue in her Mirror World, all her dialogue is also backwards. The encounter with her is briefly foreshadowed with a nearby tape where the Bureau attempts to interview an agent afflicted with the backwards speech; once you enter the Mirror World, playing the same tape allows you to hear what the agent was trying to say, being unable to warn them that something is inside the mirror.
• Swiss-Army Gun: She has her own version of the Service Weapon, and she alternates regularly between Spin and Charge to wreck shop with it.

Unless You

Unless You

Appearances: Control ^note Mentioned only

A book written by J.D. Brooks that exhibits an odd set of abilities relating to the reader, changing the content of the story to correlate to the reader's eventual fate. It was the next book to be discussed by the Bureau Book Bunch, a book club consisting of four FBC employees.

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• Ambiguous Situation: What is Unless You? How does it predict the reader's death? How does it change form? Who, or what, is J.D. Brooks? There are many questions to be asked about Unless You, and in a world where stories can write real life, the answers may not make complete sense.
• Appearance Is in the Eye of the Beholder: The plot and genre of the book are completely different for each person who reads it. It's a sci-fi action novel for Samson, a dystopian YA romance novel for Lopez, and a horror novel for Phillip.
• Captain Ersatz: The Fix/Fixers are depicted as a deadly virus rapidly spreading across the world in one story, a mysterious Eldritch Abomination in another, and an alien race who uses brain worms to transform people into more of themselves in another. If you combined the three of them into one entity, you'd get the Hiss. Lopez is also the only member of the book club to be killed by the Hiss, while her corresponding book character dies from the virus.
• Catchphrase: Samson notes how the characters have a tendency to say the book’s title with different meanings, explicitly comparing it to a catchphrase.
• Foreshadowing: In-Universe, the book subtly tells anyone who reads it what is in store for them in the near future, as far as we know always for the worse.
  • Phillip mentions a character who is "ordered to watch those monitors for the rest of his life," saying how he enjoyed the mystery of not knowing what truly happened to him by the story's end. Phillip would later be forced to near endlessly watch the Arctic Queen refrigerator, and ends the story having disappeared, his fate left unknown to Jesse and the player by the story's end.
  • Samson, the first book club member you encounter, mentions his favorite character dies "not even halfway through the story by getting a battery cylinder launched into his face by a gravitational anomaly." Sure enough, he is struck by a mail tube cylinder thrown by the Floppy Disk's gravitational powers in one of the early missions.
  • Lopez mentions the main character dying a "out in the unknown, alone and surrounded by danger, but never loses sight of the goal. That's a good soldier's" death. Lopez would also die a good soldier's death, surrounded by an unknown enemy, but dedicated to getting a final warning out in time to save others.
• If Only You Knew: The agents reviewing the book don't seem to notice the supernatural elements of the book they're reviewing. Presumably they would have if the book club had been able to meet up again and discuss the book, but the Hiss invasion obviously prevented that.
• Meta Guy: Phillip's book report mentions how the characters in his version of the story would talk about how their lives felt "out of control" and how they felt programmed to repeat the same pointless actions over and over again. Phillip himself then proceeds to criticize the "clunky dialogue" and how the characters sometimes made dumb decisions nobody would ever make in real life.
  Phillip: I mean, who the hell would follow orders from their boss in the middle of such horrible slaughterfest? But I guess I shouldn’t demand too much realism from a work of fiction.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Samson thought the Fixers were pretty badass in his version of the book and declared he would have willingly joined up with them. Given what their real world equivalent is clearly supposed to be, and assuming that any willing host for the Hiss retains their intelligence and sense of self like Dylan, perhaps Jesse should be relieved that he got beaned upside the head when he did.
• Recurring Element: Throughout all three stories shown, the one element that stays the same is the antagonist being named after some derivative of "fix", including the Fix, a virus in one story and a monster in another, and the Fixers, a group of advanced aliens.
• Story Breadcrumbs: The entire layered plot of the fates of the readers of Unless You is told through documents found in the Oldest House, and carefully remembering character names to reveal just how odd the book really is.
• Tomes of Prophecy and Fate: It is either this or a Reality-Writing Book. The reader ends up suffering the same fate as the character they end up becoming the most attached to, but it's unclear whether the book is causing these fates or merely predicting them.

Fra

Fra

Appearances: Control

"Jumble grand. Up and loose and heavy treats sandwich."

An alien being that stowed away on a NASA spacecraft and was taken into FBC custody. He knows English, but has a poor command of sentence structure, leading him to speak exclusively in Word Salad.

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• Aliens Speaking English: Subverted. He speaks grammatically correct English, but the actual words tend to be incomprehensibly jumbled, as the above quote shows. His tone and some of his word choices still make it possible to decipher the general meaning of his sentences, though it takes Jesse several tries to figure out what he's asking of her.
• All There in the Manual: His colloquial name, "Fra", is only given in the Fra Mauro Supplement; the game itself simply labels him as a "Prisoner".
• Ambiguous Situation: Why he stowed away with the astronauts is anyone's guess. The FBC tried to interrogate him about this, but weren't able to make sense of his answers.
• Animated Armor: He takes the form of a space suit. There's nothing inside (at least when you look with your own eyes, x-rays showed something in there that was redacted), so it seems he is the space suit.
• Benevolent Abomination: He's a paranatural entity under lock-and-key by the FBC and he is nothing but nice and cordial to Jesse.
• Butt-Monkey: Was supposedly treated as such by Investigations staff, who laughed at him and even took his head for no known reason.
• Fake Memories: According to a report, he induced these in the astronauts he stowed away with, making them think that he was a fourth member of their crew.
• Graceful Loser: His words are garbled nonsense, but you can infer what he's saying based on his tone of voice, and he seems to have a "no hard feelings" attitude about being captured and investigated by the feds. He's similarly just riding it out despite being locked inside his cell by the time of the Hiss outbreak in AWE.
• Losing Your Head: Being a sentient spacesuit, his head (helmet) can be easily removed and reattached with no consequences to him. He can even still speak without it. It's sitting in the Investigations Sector Head Office and he'd really like it back.
• Moon-Landing Hoax: Not really, but because the FBC puts reconstructions of AWE's in its containment areas, Fra's happens to be a set of the moon landing which invokes this look. Jesse makes a joke about it if she revisits this area after the Third Thing has been dealt with. "I knew it! Aliens are real! The moon landing was fake!"
• Nice Guy: Judging by his tone, anyways. He seems pretty good-humored about getting taken in by the FBC, appears to be trying his best to explain his situation to his interrogators, and only gets irritated if people don't understand his requests or try to remove pieces of his suit — and even then, he chuckles casually when mentioning his head getting taken, suggesting he's not too resentful about it.
• No Name Given: He is called "Fra" by the FBC because he was discovered at the Fra Mauro crater on the moon. If he has a real name, the player never learns it.
• Perception Filter: In addition to their Fake Memories of a fourth astronaut, the other astronauts also found nothing strange about an empty spacesuit who refused to remove his helmet even after touching down back on Earth.
• Riding the Bomb: He impersonated the form of an astronaut and made them think he was a fourth member of the crew, but there was no fourth seat on the space ship, so he had to cling to the outside when they made re-entry on Earth. This singed him a bit and made him easily stand out from the rest, so he was quickly captured.
• The Voice: At no point do we ever see a depiction of what he looks like (beyond the spacesuit helmet you're tasked to bring for him), but we do get to hear him speak a lot in both interview tapes and over the intercom as he hides in his holding cell.
• Voice Changeling: Based on its shapeshifting nature, we can strongly assume that the otherwise unassuming, even pleasant human male voice Fra speaks with isn't what it originally sounds like, and was done to blend in with the other astronauts.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: He took the form of an astronaut wearing a space suit in order to blend in with the others. Since he's never changed to a new form since, the researchers theorize it might have been a one-time manifestation or construction of a physical form rather than Fra being able to shift forms at will. Alternatively, since they removed his "helmet" and stored it seperately from the rest of him, it might have locked him in that form until Jesse brought it back to him.
• Word-Salad Humor: Due to his poor command of sentence structure, his sentences primarily consist of strings of words that would make no sense to human ears. However, it's implied that he's improved his grasp of English over the years since his discovery, as some of his words are actually comprehensible in context: For instance, "head" actually does mean "head", he refers to Jesse as "lady" when annoyed with her failure to understand him, and "gerbil" appears to be his word for the FBC investigators, judging by his description of the head of the Investigations Sector as "Chief Gerbil."

The Clog

The Clog

Appearances: Control

An entity that infests the pipes of Maintenance, and grows to dangerous size if not beaten back regularly. With the Hiss incursion, it has grown large enough to block the NSC pipes and threaten the building.

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• Ambiguous Situation: Whether it is intelligent or not. Ahti rants and swears at it like it can understand him, and he is convinced there is cunning behind its actions, and in general acts like it can think. Considering the implications surrounding Ahti himself, there is a very real possibility it actually can.
• Arch-Enemy: Ahti sees the Clog as this, referring to it as his "old enemy" in Jesse’s first encounter with it, and being one of the only threats in the Oldest House he seems concerned about.
• Eldritch Abomination: It's not clear what exactly this thing is, other than it's inscrutable, not from our reality, always growing, (supposedly) intelligent, and a way to actually kill it for good has not been found.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: At least FORMER gets some level of explanation. This thing comes out of nowhere and is barely referenced, with only one or two collectibles speculating on it. Apparently, it and Ahti have a history, but not much more than that is known.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: The FBC treat it like an easily handled nuisance, but with no one to keep it in check, it fills up the cooling pipes in Maintenance, which if not solved by Jesse, would have caused the Oldest House to explode.
• The Pig-Pen: It looks like a living mass of raw sewage with eyes. It's so gross its secretions can be lethal to the touch.
• Puzzle Boss: You can't fight it conventionally; the trick is figuring out how to hurt it enough to drive it into a pipe and flush it down the drain.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: To Ahti. Its very existence drives him to ranting, and he even refers to it as his "old enemy".
• Super Spit: It attacks by periodically belching out filth.

The Mold

The Mold

Appearances: Control

An invading fungus from another dimension that got tracked in from unknown sources. It covers the deepest parts of the Research Sector in Alien Kudzu.

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• Alien Kudzu: The Mold carpets every available surface in what looks like normal mold and fungi — magnified to macroscopic size.
• Attack Its Weak Point: The zombies are vulnerable to headshots, with shooting zombies having noticeable "flowers" on top of their heads. Hive Queen Mold-1's weak points are the large projectile-shooting blossoms atop its vines.
• Body Horror: Mold zombies are humanoid but unrecognizable as their former selves, shuffling, lumpen golem-like figures covered in waxy yellow mold.
• Botanical Abomination: Mold-1 is a monstrous fungus^note Or according to Dr Underhill, not even that. from a Threshold (another dimension breaching through ours in the Oldest House) that is the source of an Alien Kudzu that lures humans into eating it, turning them into Parasite Zombies. Mold-1 looks like a huge Man-Eating Plant instead, rooted in place, giant vines topped with huge flowers that fire projectiles.
• Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": It's an alien lifeform and not really mold or fungus as such, instead being constructed at a microscopic level by highly sophisticated microbial animals. But it looks like giant-sized mold, which makes the name a convenient shorthand.
• Festering Fungus: A very straight example, infesting the lower levels of the Research Sector in a matter of days, with smaller colonies springing up in every other sector of the Oldest House. Able to infest humans (and at least one dog) like cordyceps, infected animals become encrusted with fungus, and seem driven to protect the Mold from intruders. Interestingly, the Mold is described as being the result of incompatible molecular structures from different dimensions interacting, with the dominant one overriding the inferior one. Therefore, the Mold might actually just be a simple form of matter native to an extremely alien dimension and not even an actual mold after all.
• Forbidden Fruit: The Mold smells and tastes delicious. This is just its ploy to trick people into eating it, whereupon they become moldy humanoid Parasite Zombies. After Jesse gets the antigen to the Mold, the delicious smell becomes a horrible stench (which is good, because then she's no longer tempted to eat it).
• Foreshadowing: Eagle-eyed players may have noticed instructions on the walls as early as the start of the game for FBC members to always wash their hands and to "NEVER EAT THE MOLD."
• Fungus Humongous: Aside from Mold-1 looking like a colossal Man-Eating Plant, Mold in general resembles normally microscopic fungal colonies blown up to massive size, almost like moss or glowing coral in places.
• Keystone Army: Downplayed. Killing Mold-1 does slow down the Mold's spread, but doesn't completely stop it.
• Optional Boss: The fight with Mold-1 occurs at the end of a side mission and is not required to beat the game, and the central plant and its minions are likely dangerously over-leveled compared to other enemies Jesse encounters around the same time.
• Parasite Zombie: What becomes of its victims. The Mold spreads through the chest cavity and kills the host, then spreads to the rest of the body and takes it over.
• Plot-Irrelevant Villain: It mostly serves as an example of a different containment breach unrelated to the Hiss to showcase how this kind of thing is everyday business at the FBC.

Spoiler Characters^note Due to the spoiler-heavy nature of these characters, all the below entries are spoiler-free. PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK!

The Third Thing

The-Thing-That-Had-Been-Hartman

Portrayed by: Mark Blum

Appearances: Control

"DEVOURED BY HUNGRY DARKNESS!"

"HARTMAN WAS STRETCHED!"

The former administrator of the Cauldron Lake Lodge, he managed to survive his encounter with the Dark Presence, but he certainly didn't get out of the game's events unscathed. The FBC took an interest in his business and investigated him. He was determined to be a low-level threat, but the Bureau, never one to take risks, got his psychiatry license revoked and confiscated all his research on the power of Cauldron Lake. Hartman, however, wasn't deterred. After all, there was still one way he could continue researching the lake.

He dove in, confident that he possessed a strong enough mind and will to escape the Dark Place underneath unscathed. He did not.

Hartman became a particularly powerful Taken, and rambled around Bright Falls for a little while before being recaptured by the FBC. All was well for a time, as he was securely locked up in the Investigations Sector... until the Bureau brought in Alice Wake for an interview. Sensing her presence (or, more specifically, sensing Alan's presence through her), Hartman broke free, slaughtering most of the sector's personnel and necessitating its sealing behind a Firebreak, leaving Hartman alone in the dark.

And then the Hiss showed up.

The Hiss resonance and the power of the Dark Presence mingled inside Hartman’s being, fighting for control, turning him into... something new. Something neither Taken nor Hiss Corrupted, yet both at the same time. Now, the Third Thing prowls the sector, and only one person can defeat him...

For more information, see his folder on the Bright Falls page.

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• And I Must Scream: It's implied that if there's even anything of the original Hartman left, it's long since been nearly crushed and obliterated into submission by serving as the battleground for two different malevolent abominations from beyond conventional reality.
• Asshole Victim: Considering how he was an utter jackass in Alan Wake who tried to gaslight the titular character in order to become a Reality Warper to stroke his own ego, it's pretty hard to feel that much sympathy for Hartman even after he gets Mind Raped by two different Eldritch Abominations.
• Barrier Warrior: He's not too quick on his feet, but as long as he's in darkness he's totally invulnerable. Taken usually had a "darkness shield" around themselves that made them resistant to damage unless they were in the light, but Hartman's seems even stronger than normal, possibly because it's mixed with the shields Hiss can create.
• Big Bad: The-Thing-That-Had-Been-Hartman serves as the overarching antagonist and primary threat of the AWE DLC.
• Body Horror: The combination of the Hiss and the Dark Presence is a particularly toxic one, as Hartman can attest. He has extremely long arms and legs that are disproportionate to his already gigantic physiology, and his ribs poke out of his hunched back. Langston, once he sees him, likens the sight to something out of a 1980s horror movie, and is thoroughly disgusted beyond anything else he has encountered.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: In a last-ditch effort to gain the reality-warping power of the Dark Presence, he ends up diving into Cauldron Lake itself. He finds out the hard way that although he gained a hefty power boost from the experience, enough to slaughter his way through the Investigations Sector and require it to be sealed off to stop his rampage, losing all but the barest vestiges of himself was the price he had to pay for it.
• Creepy Asymmetry: While all of his body is stretched, his left hand is far bigger than the other, having distorted into a massive claw while the right remains fairly consistent with his body's proportions.
• Creepily Long Arms: And legs. The humanoid torso at the center of the monster is roughly normal-sized (for a being of his height) but everything else is way too long, giving him an uncannily elongated appearance.
• Cross-Melting Aura: If you try to bring a portable light into his boss fight arenas, the light will break instantly. Only very bright floodlights from the House's installations will work on it.
• The Dreaded: After escaping from his containment, the Bureau were willing to lock down an entire sector just to keep him contained.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: In his final audio log, Hartman calls both the Bureau and Alan Wake foolish for not wanting to exploit the powers of the Dark Presence.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: The files and audio logs you find in the DLC reveal that though Hartman miraculously evaded being eaten by the darkness after being locked in a room with it by Alan Wake, he couldn't escape the long arm of the paranatural-law. The FBC seized all his research and rescinded his license and took his lodge away for good measure, since he was just one man meddling with forces even they could barely comprehend. Then he decided to hop in the cursed lake, positive he was more "mentally prepared" than others who went there and whoops, he's a Taken now.
• Exit Villain, Stage Left: For most of the DLC you can't really fight Hartman, just drive him away by activating all the lights in an area. It takes depriving him of any hiding places in the sector to secure the chance to take him down.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: From a Smug Snake Non-Action Guy to an avatar of two Cosmic Horrors merging into an even bigger Cosmic Horror.
• Fusion Dance: An unusual example. The Dark Presence's power inside him merged with the Hiss's resonance when it tried to possess him. So while the Dark Presence and Hiss as a whole haven't merged, whatever bit of them is inside Hartman has combined. Alan implies it's possible what was left of Hartman himself may also have been caught up in the merger.
• Horned Humanoid: A really ugly variation, as the "horns" he's got are really his elongated ribs jutting out of his back. His hunched posture and framing make them look like antlers, but coming from the wrong place.
• Humanoid Abomination: He was already turned into a powerful Taken like Nightingale, Jagger and Mr. Scratch before exposure to the Hiss made him something much worse.
• Hybrid Monster: An extremely powerful Hiss-Taken hybrid. He's got the pale grey skin and weird body mutations of a Hiss victim, and the darkness shield of a Taken, but both are amped up due to the two resonating within him.
• Hybrid Power: Being a Hiss-Taken hybrid makes him far stronger than either. He's so large and powerful, he makes even the largest Taken or Hiss minuscule in comparison. While a simple flashlight is all it takes to weaken even the most powerful Taken, it takes floodlights to do the same to him and he possesses a Cross-Melting Aura that causes any smaller light sources to explode when brought into proximity to him. Alan even outright says any ordinary person would be torn to shreds by him and it takes Jesse to stand a chance against him.
• Insistent Terminology: Alan keeps addressing him as "The-Thing-That-Had-Been-Hartman", and that's just for him as a Taken. After the Hiss get mixed in, he becomes "The Third Thing", being so far removed from the original Hartman at that point that there's not enough of him left to mention by name. While The-Thing-That-Had-Been-Hartman was still Hartman enough to at least recite quotes from his book for his word salad, The Third Thing only recites the Hiss Incantation and, for some reason, snippets from Alan's Hotline messages.
• Insufferable Genius: Hartman considers himself the world's foremost researcher in the Dark Presence and demeans the Bureau for not wanting to work with him. He also believed that he was smart and sane enough to be immune to the corrupting power of the Dark Presence and thus, dived into Cauldron Lake to test this theory. It did not end well for him.
• Irony: A manuscript page in Alan Wake demonstrates that Hartman preferred to use others to accomplish his plans, since he lacked both creativity and strength. He’s certainly not lacking in the latter anymore, having become The Heavy of the DLC.
• Just Think of the Potential!: As with Alan, Hartman tried to convince the Bureau to work with him to exploit the powers of the Dark Presence. Unfortunately for him, the Bureau did not want to tamper with powers beyond their understanding and confiscated all of his research.
• Kryptonite-Proof Suit: The merger between the Hiss and Dark Presence infecting Hartman resulted in this. While even the strongest Taken are vulnerable to as little light as a flashlight, Hartman causes weaker light sources to break by his mere presence. It takes full-on floodlights to actually hurt him and dispel his darkness barrier.
• Laser-Guided Karma: If you’re aware of his interactions with Alan Wake, you’ll know he’s an absolutely contemptible moron who imprisoned and manipulated Alan, in order to harness the reality-warping powers of the Dark Presence for his own ends. But despite managing to escape a terrible fate the first time round, his own foolishness catches up with him all the same. First off, the FBC make a house call, confiscate his research along with his lodge and have him struck off the medical register. Then the Darkness ultimately gets the last laugh when he decides, despite the efforts of the FBC, to double down on his efforts to understand and master its power by diving into Cauldron Lake itself. The Dark Presence ends up spitting him out as one of its Taken playthings, used and abused by the power he sought to abuse himself.
• Mana Drain: The darkness around the areas he inhabits is so stifling that it drains Jesse's energy meter.
• Mêlée à Trois: He can be seen going out of his way to attack standard Hiss infected when nothing else is around, but they will mostly ignore each other to attack you if you happen to be in the room.
• Nigh-Invulnerable: He has a shield of darkness like any Taken, but his is even stronger to the point smaller light sources explode when brought close to him and it takes floodlights to affect him.
• Outside-Context Villain: Jesse was uniquely qualified to take on the Hiss since Polaris negates the Hiss resonance, but the Dark Presence is out of her wheelhouse entirely. This also counts from the way the Dark Presence normally works, as most Taken are vulnerable to even a flashlight... but thanks to the Hiss being in there, weaker light sources break by mere proximity to Hartman and he requires far stronger ones to be harmed.
• Power at a Price: Alan claims that the merge is less like The Dark Presence and The Hiss merging their powers in him and more like stretching him between them, which could have dire consequences if the two split apart again.
• Puzzle Boss: Hartman, thanks to the power of the Dark Presence, has a darkness shield which renders him immune to conventional weaponry, and unlike Alan, Jesse does not have a flashlight handy and even if she did weaker light sources break in proximity of him, so her battles with him requires her to turn on the House's floodlights to drive him away, as well as stay in areas bright enough to protect yourself from attacks, and deprive him of hiding places so she can hunt him down.
• Regenerating Shield, Static Health: During his boss fight, the first phase has Jesse whittle down his health. Once it hits a sliver, Hartman will knock out the lights and generate a shield as a second layer of health which will quickly regenerate if he's allowed to hide in the darkness. You have to keep up the pressure on him so he doesn't get a chance to disable the lights again.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: The entire Investigations Sector was totally abandoned and sealed off to keep him inside, and only Alan sending a message to Jesse brings it to her attention. He was only a Taken at the time (though a very strong one) but the Hiss invasion made him something a lot worse.
• Smug Snake: Audio logs indicate that he remained as smug as ever even after the disaster of the "Bright Falls AWE" event. (If he had a "punchable face" in Alan Wake, he maintained a "punchable voice" here.) He offers "joint research" with the FBC despite being a lone guy dabbling in forces that an entire government with an infinite budget cannot comprehend, acting like he's the one being generous. He's also positive that his superior mental intellect and preparation will allow him to survive being in the Dark Place like Thomas Zane and Alan Wake did, but he just got gobbled up and turned into a Taken, probably because he had no creativity whatsoever for it to make use of.
• Tempting Fate: After confiscating his research, the Bureau left Hartman alone, seeing him as a minor threat. What they do not predict was that the evil psychologist is willing to use himself in order to continue with his research with the Dark Presence.
• Too Dumb to Live: One would think that surviving a brush with death against the force behind the power of Cauldron Lake would make Hartman rethink his life choices, yet it did absolutely nothing to deter him from jumping into the lake itself. This costs him dearly.
• Took a Level in Badass: From a moronic sociopath in way over his head to a lovecraftian monstrosity of potentially apocalyptic power.
• Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: His current state is the result of the Dark Presence and Hiss being this to each other. When the Hiss found the Thing-That-Had-Been-Hartman, it tried to possess him, only for the Dark Presence already possessing him to try to defend its territory. Neither was able to overpower the other and the end result was their aspects inside of Hartman merging together and 'stretching' Hartman between them as they fight over him.
• Transhuman Abomination: Hartman was a normal — if evil and extremely immoral — human, but the Dark Presence and the Hiss's influence and their attempts to fight each other over who claims dominion over Hartman resulted in him becoming a monstrous Humanoid Abomination.
• Unexplained Recovery: Nearly everyone who had contact with the Dark Presence either becomes a Taken or went mad. Hartman somehow survived his encounter with it when his cabin was attacked without so much as a scratch on both his physical and mental state. Of course, he wasn't so lucky the second time.
• Villain Teleportation: It's hard to see because he sticks to the shadows, but he likes to flash in and out of existence to chase you around dark areas.
• Voice of the Legion: A staple of both the Hiss and the Taken. Hartman's seems to combine both the reverberation of the former and the random deepening of the latter.
• Walking Spoiler: His presence in the game not only spoils one of the biggest plot twists of Alan Wake, but also showcases how Control is a Stealth Sequel to Wake's game.
• Was Once a Man: Alan doesn’t call him "The-Thing-That-Had-Been-Hartman" for nothing. And that was just his name for Taken Hartman. Add the Hiss into the mix and he's become so alien-looking he's just "The Third Thing", a name so mundane as if to imply it's impossible to imagine he could have ever been anything but what he is now.
• Weakened by the Light: As you might expect of something at least part-Taken, Hartman really does not like light, and is immune to all attacks until his darkness shield is burned away. Unlike normal Taken, however, it takes a lot of light to weaken him.
• Word-Salad Horror: Hartman wouldn’t be a Taken if he didn’t spew random nonsense phrases. Notably, unlike most Taken, very little of what he says originates from his own personality, with much of it coming from either the Hiss Incantation or Alan’s Hotline messages, implying that the dual presence of the Hiss and the Dark Presence is overpowering his remaining sense of self. According to FBC documents, when he was just a normal Taken, most of what he said was lifted from his book The Creator's Dilemma.

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