Rebuild is the point where Control Resonant stops looking like Control. The main-story quest yanks Dylan Faden out of a warped, third-person Manhattan and drops him into a top-down, 16-bit role-playing game built from his own memories. It is one long trance sequence: a text-terminal puzzle, a pixel-art version of the town of Ordinary, Maine, and a set of collectible shards that reassemble a shattered projector slide. Finish it and the whole thing snaps back to the normal 3D engine with the quest marked complete.
Quick answer: Rebuild sends Dylan Faden into a 16-bit RPG of his Ordinary, Maine childhood; gathering four memory shards forms the Gap Slide and completes the quest.
What the Rebuild quest is in Control Resonant
Rebuild belongs to the game’s central questline, the push to defeat the Hedron. Rather than a combat gauntlet, it is a memory recreation of the Ordinary AWE, the Altered World Event that first pulled the Faden family into the orbit of the Federal Bureau of Control. The quest reframes that history as a playable childhood, told through a retro RPG that Dylan experiences from the inside.
The sequence runs across three flashback days in Ordinary, spliced with separate memories set inside the Oldest House. Along the way it reintroduces Jesse Faden, their father Harry, Dr. Darling, Director Zachariah Trench, janitor Ahti, and the resonant entity Polaris. The reward at the end, the Gap Slide, is the object that lets Dylan finish the trance and wake up.
How Rebuild begins: from Unknown 7 to a black screen
The story begins in the corrupted area marked Unknown 7, where Dylan and Zoe discuss Jesse’s survival and whether Zoe could be sustaining a barrier from within the Hedron. On the map, the target is an apartment building identified by a yellow marker beside an active Gravity Well at Custom Marker 3.
After Dylan passes through the warped apartments suspended in the air and glides down to the street, pattern-corrupted foes attack as he lands. Zoe’s dialogue turns into a garbled pattern, the display starts glitching, and the image gives way to black-and-white binary. This burst of static shifts the game from its 3D world into the pixel memory.
The WAKE UP DYLAN terminal puzzle
The memory does not start in Ordinary. It starts on a command terminal. The words HELLO WORLD type themselves out across the black screen while streams of binary fall past. Moving Dylan forward through the static spells his name from falling letters, and lining those letters up forms the phrase WAKE UP DYLAN. Completing that alignment loads the top-down pixel town and hands control to a younger Dylan.
Day 1 in Ordinary: the Slide Projector and the slide worlds
Day 1 opens in the Faden house, where Jesse wakes Dylan to skip school and show him something she found at the dump. Downstairs, Harry Faden is mid-rant in the kitchen about his night shift and his kids. Outside, the town plays out as a small RPG: neighbor Mr. Henderson, Marcus Arsenault and his dog Bogus, Mrs. Bartwell, and a trio of bullies, Tom Barlow, Freddy Bartwell and Hugo Stamps, who beat Dylan in a turn-based fight until Jesse jumps in to drive them off.
At the Ordinary Landfill, Jesse arms Dylan with a baseball, mutant dump rats attack in turn-based combat, and she leads him to the Slide Projector sitting among the scrap. Searching the junk piles turns up a set of photographic slides for it.
Each slide opens a light portal into a warped dimension and then returns the siblings to the dump. The four destinations are the Secret Playhouse, a surreal abandoned mansion; the Meadow, a sunny field that rots into a barren wasteland; the Temple, a stone labyrinth stalked by a looming shadow; and the Hand slide, where Dylan and Jesse first meet the resonant entity Polaris. Day 1 ends with a fast-travel home, Harry asleep on the couch, and the siblings going to bed.
Days 14 and 15: the town’s collapse and Sled Hill Cave
Day 14 skips forward by two weeks, and paranoia has taken hold of the town. Jesse informs Dylan that their teacher, Mrs. Chester, has died, and that Neil, their friend, is missing. Locals say pets and people are disappearing. The Slide Projector has been removed from the landfill, and candy wrappers point toward Sled Hill Cave. There, Dylan and Jesse find Bogus’s collar stained with blood, fight a classmate who has mutated, and slip past changed children suckling at the enormous Not-Mother before they escape.
On Day 15, adults have vanished from Ordinary, leaving it overrun by mutants; transformed Cindy Millar babbles in the street. Dylan and Jesse return to the cave, take the projector, and carry it toward the landfill as creatures pursue them. Trapped at the dump, Jesse changes slides, unleashing a blinding Polaris resonance flash that destroys the monsters. She then sets fire to the Temple slide, the Secret Playhouse slide, and the Meadow slide, sparing the Hand slide.
The Federal Bureau of Control arrives with Director Trench in tow. Darling and Trench question the children and follow them to the projector, then agents move to detain both. Jesse escapes; Dylan is tackled and captured.
The Oldest House memories and the four shards
Between Ordinary’s days, the quest shifts to memories inside the Oldest House. At the FBC Test Site, Dr. Darling has Dylan demonstrate the slides’ discovery sequence by stepping across marked floor squares. Dylan encounters janitor Ahti humming a Finnish tango beside a yellow mobile lab, then overhears Trench and Darling debate casualties and slide expeditions. Later, Dylan tries to sneak past Roberts, a sleeping guard, but Darling catches him. Darling suggests Dylan could become a Prime Candidate.
These interludes are where the memory shards live. Each one is collected from a pedestal inside a circular grey chamber that appears after a key memory, and Rebuild needs all four shards to reassemble Dylan’s fractured mind. The first surfaces after the Day 1 Darling and Ahti sequence, the second after the Oldest House stealth memory, and the last two around Dylan’s capture and detention.
Building the Gap Slide and completing Rebuild
Collecting the fourth shard rewards the Gap Slide and reassembles the full memory. In a rewritten version of the dump scene, an adult Dylan manifests beside young Jesse to alter the moment of his capture and protect her. Loading the assembled slide tears the pixel world apart into cosmic static, and Dylan wakes back in the golden, corrupted cityscape of Unknown 7 with dialogue from Zoe.
The QUEST COMPLETED: REBUILD banner confirms the finish, and the reward is +1 Living Shard. A live-action video log from Dr. Darling also plays, tagged RI: D: 2; he discusses Dylan’s P6 designation, guard Roberts’s death, and an “insurance policy” against P6.
When the quest ends, “Something Innate” appears in the menu, and Fight to the Core opens as the next main quest, along with the side quest Carbon Copy: Part II – Freeze Frame. Dylan can then continue exploring Unknown 7 with the Gap Slide.
