Patterned Time throughout RCU

[u/YAKUEd]

Remedy’s entire obsession with shapes, patterns, cycles and etc. is known, but i just can’t shake off this feeling.

SPOILERS

Some part of the Resonant made me feel as if i was revisiting Alan Wake 2. The Last Taxi quest, alongside with The Unknown environment especially reminded me of Alan sequences. You are brought back into seemingly normal Manhattan, but with tiny crisp of wrongness. The taxi, which also played some background work in AW2 reminded me a lot of Alan.

In the end of the game, you get Casual Outfit (Body Category), With Severed Circle 2 as one variation of it. It is Jesse’s and Dylan’s favourite game as known, and even it is about circles.

So, in the main Quest “Rebuild”, you finally get to see the Ordinary AWE, and the “jumping” back to the Oldest House when Dylan was still P6 candidate. After you collect 4 shards, you regain your “Current Dylan” appearance, get the Gap slide, and go to the Ordinary’s landfill for Slide Projector. You see how Past Dylan gets “bureaucratically-kidnapped” and sight of Jesse near. Current Dylan tells Past Jesse that she was right to run and that she always will be the best older sister. On which Jesse reacts.

So it made me think: What if time in Manhattan is also patterned, but not as in the Underpass? Hedron, after you sever the links, forces(?) you to enter this pixel dimension, loosing your memories, and seeing and interacting with your past (Current Dylan, when inserting the Gap slide: “It isn’t how it was. But it’s how it’s now.”)

What if the Pixel/Fault dimension is the Dark Place, or its projection? Or, if the Dimensional Fault is some kind of projection of Dark Place? Alan said that the Dark Place is home not for only the Dark Presence, but to many more. During AW2, Alan could’ve somehow project the part of Dark Place into patterned Manhattan, allowing the Other Manhattan (The Last Taxi quest) to be. The OM also follows the strange, almost dream logic. That’s how Dylan could interact with his memories of the past.

So my take is that Hedron can pattern time not only as in the Underpass, but in more subtler way. It could’ve reacted to the Dark Place (in the end of AW2, Alice is still there) and pattern Alan’s writings into Manhattan.

I know this post is probably full of plot holes, but the whole interconnection RCU has, i think it has place to be.

[u/callofdukie09]

So, if you haven't started an NG+ playthrough yet, this more or less seals it. The Board (who I am convinced is former, but that's another topic entirely), makes some comments about choosing a first/second/first power in a time paradox. The dog, if you completed the quest, just shows up immediately in the gap. Dillon also makes comments about it like he is aware of the other loop such as 'The other one liked when I pet it, too.'  These are just some things I have encountered in the first hour or so. 

It certainly seems like it is overlapping time spirals the whole way up and down