Oh I bought it and beat it and I didn’t post about it in here. I did a little thing in Games U Played I guess.
This was really extremely good. Remedy is the weirdest developer. In the popular imagination they’re still being powered by Max Payne, their first work, and considered an action developer. While that’s not wrong per se, it’s obvious that their focus is really on formal experiments in videogame plotting and formatting. From Remedy’s perspective, the comic book cutscenes and especially the dream levels were just as important as the bullet time.
For anyone who doesn’t know, because I sure as hell didn’t, here is the structure of Quantum Break:
First you play a third-person shooter section broken up into 3 acts. Your guy has crazy time powers, each on an independent cooldown timer, meaning you can do an intricate and flexible series of powers combined with the shooting to do some really stylish, fun, and effective moves. It’s at least as much of a revelatory development on the Cover Thirps as Vanquish is.
At the end of the 3 acts, you have a Junction, which is an extremely short level where you play as the antagonist and make a binary choice about how the story will proceed that affects the next 3 acts that you play as the protagonist. This opens up a crazy amount of gameplay possibilities. Do you pick the choice that you think will make it easiest on your avatar-hero? Do you roleplay the antagonist based on what you know of his personality (which changes as the game goes on and you learn more of the backstory)? Do you just pick what sounds most interesting?
THEN the game streams (which is dumb, but) a live-action TV episode of approximately TNT quality which responds to both the Junction choice you made AND little easter eggy type things you can find during the action levels that depicts the activities both of the antagonist AND of his cronies who form a bunch of shifting alliances, sometimes with you and sometimes against you, so you can see the other side of this corporate structure that spends the action levels trying to hunt you down.
All this is wrapped into a time travel plot. Yeah.
Each of the pieces of writing isn’t going to earn any awards, but the effect of all this stuff wrapped up together and presented to you serially is a real heady mix. I don’t know that this particular structure could work with any other plot and still be effective. But man! I’d never think that a game with high production values and AAA quality thirpsing could be this boldly weird. It’s real good, people.