Partway through Control Resonant, the game stops looking like Control Resonant. The main mission called Rebuild yanks Dylan Faden out of a warped Manhattan and into a top-down, pixel-art role-playing game styled after old indie RPGs, complete with turn-based battles, a snack-stocked general store, and a childhood bedroom in the fictional town of Ordinary, Maine. It is the sequence that finally shows what happened to Dylan and his sister Jesse during the Ordinary Altered World Event.
Quick answer: Rebuild drops Dylan Faden into a top-down pixel-art RPG that replays his and Jesse’s childhood in Ordinary, Maine, then returns to 3D combat under the objective “Fight to the Core.”
What the Rebuild sequence is in Control Resonant
Rebuild is the story mission that follows Sever the Hedron Links. It starts when Dylan confides in Zoe and wonders aloud whether Jesse is still alive inside the Hedron. The screen glitches, and control shifts into a retro RPG built entirely in pixel art. Rather than a cosmetic filter over the usual third-person action, this is a full mode change with its own movement, dialogue trees, inventory pickups, and combat system.
Battles are strictly turn-based. Each character has a health gauge that reads out of 150 HP, and the menu offers three commands: Attack, Defend, and Ability. Misses happen, flagged by an “Attack missed!” prompt, which matters because the first real fight is deliberately unwinnable until help arrives.
The boot screen and the “Wake Up Dylan” puzzle
The mode opens on a terminal filled with blinking ones and zeros. Interacting with the screen types out the words HELLO WORLD, after which the letter “D” detaches and becomes something you can push around. Below it sits the phrase “WAKE UP,” and moving close makes the word “DYLAN” flash red. The short binary mini-puzzle asks the player to gather the scattered letters of Dylan’s name and spell out the full instruction, “WAKE UP DYLAN,” before the scene resolves into the pixel town.
Ordinary, Maine and the Faden siblings’ day out
Dylan wakes in his bedroom as Jesse tells him they are skipping school to visit the town dump. The house sets the family’s tone early: a locked door hides their mother, who will not come out; a downstairs kitchen holds their father, Harry Faden, drunk after losing his job and best avoided; and a bullet-damaged television sits with its screen somehow intact. Dylan grabs his backpack and heads out.
Out in Ordinary, there is room to explore. The mailbox holds a letter from Grandma that oddly expresses surprise that “both kids” are fine, a line the game lingers on. Neighbor Mr. Henderson turns out to be the family’s landlord, asking whether Harry has lined up new work. Dylan also meets Marcus Arsenault and his dog Bogus before three bullies, Tom Barlow, Freddy Bartwell, and Hugo Stamps, corner him near the store.
That confrontation is the first battle, and it is a three-on-one that Dylan loses on his own. Jesse arrives to even the odds, the fight restarts, and the bullies back down. The moment establishes the sibling dynamic the rest of the sequence leans on.
Between fights, the siblings pick up snacks from clerk Loretta Hosenberg at the general store, including Moxie soda, donuts, and Humpty Dumpty chips, and dodge their teacher, Mr. Young, on the street.
The slide projector and its four realms
At the Ordinary Landfill, Jesse hands Dylan a baseball bat to deal with the mutant rats roaming the junk, then reveals what she is really excited about: an anomalous slide projector that works without being plugged in. She asks Dylan to hunt down projection slides hidden across the trash piles, several of them guarded by more rats.
Loading the collected slides opens a portal, and this is where the childhood story turns into something clearly connected to Control’s paranatural world. Each slide is a doorway to a surreal alternate realm.
The four destinations each carry their own unsettling detail:
- A locked-up mansion or temple interior where an unseen rocking chair creaks behind sealed doors.
- An open meadow that lulls both children to sleep, then looks melted and barren when they wake.
- A dark shelter that lights up into a church-like temple, with a giant shadowy figure watching from an upper level.
- A realm tied to the Hedron, where Jesse bonds with an entity she names Polaris.
The slides bleed into reality. After the meadow, the landfill exterior itself appears to have partly melted, an early sign that the projector is not a harmless toy.
The Not-Mother and Ordinary’s collapse
The story jumps to Day 15, and Ordinary has come apart. Jesse reveals that Mrs. Chester has died and the school bullies have transformed into monsters. Townsfolk report missing children and a missing Bogus, and school is canceled. Tracing the stolen projector leads to Sled Hill Cave, marked by a trail of candy wrappers up the cliffs.
Inside, the children find Bogus’s bloody collar and push deeper past corrupted students until they reach the Not-Mother, a monstrous entity nursing transformed children the game later calls “dung monkeys.” Retrieving the projector means sneaking past the sleeping Not-Mother, with help from a character named Neil and the dog on the escape. Between these events, Harry Faden keeps locking the siblings in their room, and Dylan comforts a crying Jesse before they rest.
The Oldest House memories and four shards
The childhood story is set against flashbacks in the Oldest House of the Federal Bureau of Control. There, Dylan is confined, questioned by Dr. Darling, and monitored by Director Trench. He moves through FBC corridors, avoids guard Roberts, encounters Ahti the Janitor, and overhears Trench speaking with Darling. Each memory chamber presents his pixel childhood as a reconstruction made during interrogation.
Progress is tracked by four memory shards collected from pedestals in a Central Void, with the screen counting up from “1 OF 4 SHARDS COLLECTED.” Gathering all four reconstructs Dylan’s past and rewards the Gap Slide.
The finale of the childhood arc brings the FBC to Ordinary. Agents secure the town and route the siblings to a school command post, where they report the slide projector to Trench and Darling. Back at the landfill, the FBC inspects the burned slides. Jesse flees while Dylan is restrained, and the last memory shows his past self hauled away by agents, calling out for his sister.
Where it leaves Dylan: Fight to the Core
Once the shards are gathered and the capture plays out, the pixel mode ends. Modern Dylan wakes inside a fractured reality receiving cryptic messages from The Board, which warns that the antagonist has “visited” him and that this is “no time for sleep.” Control then hands back to full 3D, with Dylan navigating floating urban platforms under an orange sky and a new objective on screen: FIGHT TO THE CORE, pointing him toward the Hedron core.
You know Rebuild is finished when the retro RPG collapses and 3D gameplay resumes with that Fight to the Core prompt in the HUD. What the sequence really delivers is context: it fills in the Ordinary AWE from Dylan’s side, ties the slide projector and Polaris to the Hedron the sequel is built around, and reframes his childhood as a memory the FBC has been picking apart all along.
