GamesReviewWith this time-spanning opus, Remedy Entertainment hoped to unite narrative gaming and linear television for its Xbox One title. But neither comes out of the experiment well
The problem for any writer of time travel fiction – at least, the kind that tries to fortify its premise with a spattering of science – is how to communicate the theory behind the time-hopping high jinks. In 1978’s Superman, we watch the hero fly around Earth, rewinding history like reeling back a spool of tape. In Back to the Future, by contrast, Doc Brown scribbles the word ‘Past’ on a chalkboard then draws a line toward the year 1985 to explain his invention. Quantum Break, a multimillion dollar video game turned TV series from Helsinki-based Remedy Entertainment, takes a more scholastic approach. There’s an early invitation for the player to – no joke – sit down and watch a short documentary outlining how the game’s swimming pool-sized time machine actually works.
A failure to show rather than tell is just the first of this curious multimedia project’s problems, which ripple out far beyond the fiction and into the very structure of the whole enterprise. The idea is simple, if cumbersome: a five-act, action video game interspersed with four 20-minute long, luxuriously produced TV episodes. Your actions and choices in the game sections affect the plot in the live-action episodes – to some degree.
In this way, the grand promise of the video game experience, the ability to choose your own adventure, is played out across two mediums, stitched together in one single, unwieldy entity. We saw something notionally similar attempted with Defiance, which existed as a multiplayer role-playing game and a SyFy Channel TV series, until the latter was canned last year. However, this is the first time such a ‘transmedia’ spectacle has been given the financial backing of a company like Microsoft. Quantum Break is narrative experimentation at the grandest scale imaginable. And its quirky failure will surely bury any such future enterprises.
You play, primarily, as Jack Joyce, the brother of a scientist wunderkind who, through a series of clandestine experiments, has opened up a temporal fracture that threatens time itself. Joyce, who is caught in the experiment’s blast, endures some useful side effects: the ability to speed and slow time.
Video games have played with this power before, of course. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Blinx allow us to wind the clock back a handful of seconds in order to retake a faulty leap or to lunge out of the way of a once-deadly sword stab. In Chrono Trigger, the classic Super Nintendo adventure game, we travel through the ages, fixing social and generational issues at the source, then whizzing forward to see how our benevolent meddling has played out through the centuries. And in Braid, Jonathan Blow’s clockwork ode to Super Mario, we undo protagonist Tim’s mistimed leaps, carefully lifting his body from the spikes on which he was impaled or prising him from the jaws of a ravenous plant.
As an action game, Quantum Break falls short of the finest output of the current master of the genre, Platinum GamesIn Quantum Break the ability to squeeze, stretch, fiddle, scrub and manipulate is principally, and regretfully, for localised combat. Joyce is able to envelop hostile soldiers in a slow-motion orb, allowing him to line up a hail of bullets before the bubble bursts and they pepper their target. Our hero can also teleport forward a few yards to snip around an enemy, or, later in the game, slow time for a few seconds in order to sprint through a closing door, like Indiana Jones scraping under a falling slab. On top of this, the lingering fighting sections are puffed out with some light platforming elements when, for example, you might need to rewind time to un-topple a crane, thereby providing a route to an open first floor window.
As an action game, Quantum Break falls short of the finest output of the current master of the genre, Platinum Games, but the time-scrubbing abilities at your disposal lead to unquestionably dramatic and satisfying shoot-outs. Creative players can use Joyce’s palette of abilities in expressive ways, and working out how to combine them is a big part of the appeal.
Remedy Entertainment’s ambitions are grander than mere action blockbuster, however. Prior to each live-action episode, there’s a brief interlude during which you have to make, supposedly, a dramatic decision that will affect what happens in the subsequent high-production cutscene. Each of these is a straightforward A/B choice which veers the narrative one-way or the other. You’re even given a brief overview of the two choices, and why you might want to select one over the other.
It's a mongrel that, in its disjointed pairing, fails as both a video game and a piece of interactive dramaThe filmed episodes are stylishly shot and filled with a cast of pricey actors including Game of Thrones’ accent-veering Aidan Gillen, The Wire’s stiff-shouldered Lance Reddick and X-Men pin-up Shawn Ashmore in the lead role. The drama falls short of the current crop of Netflix darlings, instead competing with populist action sci-fi such as Orphan Black and Falling Skies. It’s B-movie TV, in other words, even if it’s acted, shot and produced at tremendous cost and effort. After a slow start, the schlocky drama draws a willing viewer in – but the fact remains that, live action or not, these are, essentially, long FMV cutscenes, the sort ridiculed in early-era PlayStation titles two decades ago.
Telltale Games, with its video game adaptation of The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones, and Supermassive Games, with 2015’s teen horror drama Until Dawn, have both demonstrated how interactive drama can work in the living room. Each of these games is directed by the player holding the control pad, but can involve a group of viewers, who pitch in with suggestions of where to take the drama. Those experiences perhaps hint towards the true future of games as a social living-room spectacle.
Quantum Break is, by contrast, unplayable in a group. It is, rather, a single-player dead end; a mongrel that, in its disjointed pairing, fails as both a video game and a piece of interactive drama. While the boundaries and possibilities of storytelling within the video game medium are being explored, such missteps can be forgiven. This is, nevertheless, a costly mistake that should never be repeated.
Microsoft, Xbox One, £40, Pegi rating: 16+
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