One of the things that I apparently do is hyper-fixate on a single developer trying to consume everything they have ever created. I’ve done this a number of times where if I like game “Z” I dive back into their catalog and try playing “X” and “Y” that came before it. I did this with the Witcher games, ultimately have done this with a lot of Bioware titles that I missed along the way, and more recently dove into as much of the Spiders back catalog as I could stomach. I greatly enjoyed Control, enjoyed the narrative of Alan Wake if not the game-play… and am now trying out 2016’s Quantum Break. I have to say this is maybe the weirdest game-play experience I have ever had when it comes to a video game.
At face value this is a game with exceptionally high production value for 2016, featuring fully digital actors that do a really good job of skirting the uncanny valley. As is often the case with time travel stories, the narrative plays out in a fairly asynchronous manner. At it’s core it is a third person shooter, not that unlike Control with the change being that instead of the “magic abilities” coming from objects of power… you gain yours through an accident involving a time machine. You were left with the ability to manipulate the flow of time, and this ends up playing out in a really enjoyable manner with the ability to replay certain events, freeze others, and speed yourself up. You also get this really cool time vision sort of effect where you can see where objects are allowing you to feel super John Woo as you bullet ballet your way through combat.
All of this is pretty standard fare… but what is not is the fact that after an hour or so of gameplay you are given a 20-30 minute long television episode to watch that is part of the flow of the narrative. Essentially as far as I can tell this game is divided up into five chapters and each chapter consists of three parts. The first is an action sequence where you play as the main character which takes somewhere between one to two hours to play through. Then you are given a short sequence where you play as the main antagonist and make some sort of decision. This decision then reflects how the game is going to play out going forward and determines which television show you end up watching. Then finally you have a fairly high production Netflix style television series episode that closes out the events of the first two parts and sets up the next action sequence.
I have to admit I was not terribly certain what I thought about this, but fortunately… the narrative is interesting enough that I want to push through and see this through to conclusion. This is just pure speculation, but since this is a Microsoft exclusive I am guessing that this was green-lit during the Xbox One era of them pushing television on the console super hard. It also makes me wonder if initially this was designed to be released as a transmedia event where say on Monday you got a new action sequence and on Friday you would get the television segment that completes it. Having this entire experience being made up of three distinct parts… feels odd and I am not sure if it is going to feel any less odd by the time I finish it.
If you are a habitual cutscene skipper… I feel sorry for you because there is no way you would have a clue what the hell is going on in this game/show hybrid. The television show aspect of it is pretty damned solid and has a very good cast of characters.
The standout of these is probably Courtney Hope who plays the character of Beth Wilder. I absolutely understand why they built Control around this actress, because so far she is the one who seems best adapted to this format. I had never heard of her prior to Control but apparently she is a long running cast member of the Bold and the Beautiful soap opera and more recently crossed over into The Young and the Restless. Neither of these means much to me personally other than names I recognize. My wife occasionally gets into Young and the Restless over summer break. At least I think that is the right one… whichever one has the old dude that everyone seems to be inexplicably afraid of… but never actually seems to do anything violent.
The biggest problem that I have with this video game format though is that you can’t save halfway through it. So essentially I need to be prepared that whenever I reach the end of an action sequence, that I am going to get what amounts to 30 minutes worth of cut scene. So last night I finished off the first chapter and then played through chapter two but decided to stop after that. I knew that after I watched the television series episode that there really would not be more time to dive in and start on Chapter three. I guess the positive however is that if you limit yourself to a single chapter a night… in theory you should be able to wrap this up within five nights unless the later chapters take considerably longer. I had heard this is around a ten hour game, which seems about on par with my experience of playing Alan Wake.
So far I think Quantum Break is an interesting experiment… but after playing Control I greatly prefer the way that they pivoted into that game. The little videos scattered throughout the Bureau feel more like a reward than something you are obligated to sit through in a single block. I greatly prefer playing through the narrative to sitting down and watching a non-interactive television show as my reward for finishing a level. The game however is super cheap most of the time and I think this is interesting enough that it might be worth checking out just so you can experience this. I think we can chock it up to an interesting idea that didn’t really work out as well as they would have hoped.