![]() ![]() 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. In Quantum Break the ability to squeeze, stretch, fiddle, scrub and manipulate is principally, and regretfully, for localised combat. As an action game, Quantum Break falls short of the finest output of the current master of the genre, Platinum Games 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. 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. 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. ![]() Video games have played with this power before, of course. Joyce, who is caught in the experiment’s blast, endures some useful side effects: the ability to speed and slow time. 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. And its quirky failure will surely bury any such future enterprises. Quantum Break is narrative experimentation at the grandest scale imaginable. However, this is the first time such a ‘transmedia’ spectacle has been given the financial backing of a company like Microsoft. 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. 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. Shoots but doesn’t hit its targets … Quantum Break. Your actions and choices in the game sections affect the plot in the live-action episodes – to some degree. The idea is simple, if cumbersome: a five-act, action video game interspersed with four 20-minute long, luxuriously produced TV episodes. 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.Ī 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. Quantum Break, a multimillion dollar video game turned TV series from Helsinki-based Remedy Entertainment, takes a more scholastic approach. 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. In 1978’s Superman, we watch the hero fly around Earth, rewinding history like reeling back a spool of tape. T he 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. ![]()
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