Quantum Break

The Family Blazkowicz

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It was an interesting weekend from a gaming standpoint and a real world standpoint as well. I played a mix of games in part because in my current exploration of all things single player… I aimlessly found myself searching for the next game a few times. Friday I wrapped things up with Quantum Break pretty early, and I feel like I have already shared most of what I want to say about the game. It absolutely stuck the landing and if you find yourself with roughly eight hours of time and this game on sale… I highly suggest checking it out. There is no doubt in my mind that the standout performance by Courtney Hope is ultimately what ended up with her as the protagonist for Control. I really enjoyed this game and its setting and I hope we see elements of it in future Remedy games.

In the realm or real world stuff… I did in fact set my mind to configuring everything downstairs in preparation for Horizon Forbidden West coming out next Friday. This was a bit more tricky than just dragging the console downstairs and connecting it up. It involved adding a new powerstrip, rearranging the base unit for our security system, and also hooking up a small 4k60 HDMI switch that I had been originally planning on installing upstairs at some point. Essentially I was out of HDMI ports on the television and now my consoles are sharing a port. At some point I would like to relocate my Nintendo Switch to downstairs in prep for maybe some Switch Sports and Ring Fit shenanigans. Ultimately I got everything fit into the small area I was working and my controller charger in a manageable state. However I think it goes without saying that the PS5 is always bigger than you expect it to be in your mental math.

From there I was looking for the next game to explore and ultimately I decided to reinstall the 2017 version of Prey by Arkane Studios. I had bounced off this game a few times in the past, but after six hours… I am deciding that this is just not my jam. It is a mechanically interesting world and I dig the whole art deco appearance of the space station you are roaming around. However there just isn’t enough character to drive it forward. It reminds me a lot of a Bioshock game or more directly System Shock… but those games had a much more interesting mythology as well as way more interesting characters to keep you moving forward. This station feels dead and most of your story is delivered in the form of audio diaries you find laying around or emails that you can read off open terminals. There are three voices talking in my ear trying to get me to do what they want, but also… I don’t really have any attachment to any of them.

So ultimately I chucked Prey back in the bin and reinstalled Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. I am not exactly sure why I stopped playing this, but if I am remembering correctly there was some technical issue that I had encountered with a save file. As a result when I returned this weekend I rolled back a half dozen saves or so and gave myself a bit of an on-ramp to get caught up to where we were in the game. This is honestly not a bad practice because I remembered the general shape of the story, and backing up a few missions helped to ease me into remembering what was going on. I loved the first game and I have to say that the second game continues introducing us to interesting characters as we take the fight to America.

All told it was a much shorter game than I was expecting, and I think that the intent was to have players spent more time running around and retracing their steps hunting the commanders in various areas you had already visited. I did some of this but nowhere near all of it, because really… at the end of the day on this current play through I was there to see the rest of the story… not be a completionist. There are definitely some really interesting moments, and some others… that I am not sure what the heck was going on. There is one particular moment at the very end, or really close to it… that made almost no sense but whatever. Up until that point I was fully on board with this game, and honestly continued to be on board in part because Debra Wilson is a great actor and Grace Walker is a deeply enjoyable character.

After finishing up Wolfenstein II… my initial thought was to roll straight into Youngblood. So far… I am not really enjoying it as much as I would have hoped. It is very clear that this game was designed to be a co-op experience first… and as a result the single player experience suffers greatly. What you have is a series of big open zones that feel very much like Dishonored 2, where you can roam around freely… but this is also a game where stealth is either perfect or not at all in the form of a stealth suit. So as such skulking around is way less interesting than it was in Dishonored, and it also means you are going loud pretty much from the moment you enter the zone. I can already see the shape of this game and it is going to involve me retreading the same set-pieces over and over as I knock out smaller missions until I finally take on the big boss towers that are seemingly the final area. I want to see the story… but so far I am not really feeling the game.

So apart from some errand running, that was pretty much my weekend. I finished Quantum Break and Wolfenstein II: New Colossus and bounced off Prey and am on the border of bouncing off Youngblood.

A Land Without FOMO

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Do you ever find yourself not taking action because you can’t wrap your brain around exactly how you want to do something? This is something that has plagued me my entire life as I sit back and overanalyze a situation and end up just postponing actually doing anything. If I am under pressure I am extremely good at making snap decisions, but when I don’t feel that sense of pressure… I tend to sit on something indefinitely without actually ever taking action. So much of my life, I put myself into situations that artificially cause that pressure and tension… so that I actually go through with things.

For example I’ve had an additional camera for our security system for two years now, but never quite got around to figuring out how I wanted to mount it. Yesterday I decided that I would mount it by the end of the day… and in truth, it took me all of ten minutes to do it. However, I spent two years at least once a week mulling over what angle and position I wanted to mount this damned camera when in truth it doesn’t really matter that much. Its entire purpose was to let us watch Tripod, the three-legged calico that has been living in our backyard for going on three years. I put it up and it is finally serving this purpose… and also letting us know that apparently Splotchy, the cat that is patiently waiting on Tripod to finish eating… is back hanging out in our yard again. I think while phantom (the cat we found his original owners for) was around he had made himself scarce.

Last night I made marinated boneless pork ribs and stovetop stuffing and sat down after dinner to play some more Quantum Break. Yesterday I have to admit I was not entirely sold on this game but felt obligated to see it through to the end. Yesterday however the game hooked me and by the time I got through the fourth chapter I am honestly on pins and needles to see how this all shakes out in the end. I have to give credit to Remedy for a handful of things. Firstly they make extremely interesting landscapes for your characters to roam around in. Even in Alan Wake which was basically a blue-toned rainy woods simulator… there were some absolutely stunning setpieces. Control was a visual feast and each time you discovered a new area you were introduced to some situation that should not be able to exist in the real world.

The other thing that I have to give them credit for is creating very interesting stories. A time travel story is something that has been done so many times, but they managed to figure out a way to make this feel fresh. I guess another aspect of this is that they seem to be able to capture really great acting performances both with in-camera live-action sequences worthy of a high production value show and in the orchestration of assets to create very believable digital actors. I mean I have been impressed by acting performances in games before, but always it was in the voice-over delivery… never really in the digital manifestation of those actors in video game form. Sure there is a noticeable difference… but it feels natural when you shift between the player-controlled digital sequences and the live-action denouement at the end of each chapter.

It is extremely likely that I am going to wrap this up in a few hours this evening, and now I am not really sure what I am going to roll into next. Right now I am thinking probably Ghost of Tsushima, which I left in a very partially completed state on the PlayStation 5. My goal for today… like my goal of putting up the camera yesterday… is to stop calculating how to do it… and just move my PS5 setup downstairs to live beside the Xbox Series X. Ultimately this NEEDS to happen before Horizon Forbidden West launches next week. Essentially most of this single-player gaming has been me in a holding pattern until that game releases, but I have been greatly enjoying this time.

One of the core problems that I have playing MMOs is the constant sense of FOMO that they instill in the player base. There is always some new thing that is coming around the corner and will only be available for a limited amount of time. Be this a new season in Destiny, a holiday event in FFXIV, or the feeling of needing to do your daily chores so that you don’t fall behind in World of Warcraft. It is the aspect of those games that I like the least and honestly, over the last few years, it has been one of the major turn-offs. Instead of making me want to engage and no-life something until I have ticked all of the boxes… it makes me want to check out completely and not even participate.

Playing all of these single-player games has made me realize that more or less they are completely immune to FOMO. The game exists as it is and the experience will more or less be the same if I play it tomorrow or if I play it three years from now. They are experiences that happen on my schedule and on my terms. There is no need to rush around and make sure that I get this thing done by this deadline… because the game will always be there waiting on me. That is not to say that I don’t want to play MMORPGs anymore, but this week and watching the zeitgeist scurry around Lost Ark has made me realize that maybe just maybe I am done for a while. I greatly enjoyed the story of Endwalker and I do want to return at some point and play more… but I also don’t really feel like I am on a specific timetable for that.

You Got Television in my Game

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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.

The Well-Lit Room

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Last night I put the wrap on Alan Wake, and I have to say the longer I played it the more it grew on me. I still don’t love the conceit of shining a flashlight at shadow demons in order to drop their invulnerability and then having to figure out some other way to actually kill them. I think the game should have gone for one or the other. Either we kill them with mechanical means… or we use the flashlight to burn them away but the combination of both just feels awkward. When you get to needing to burn away shadow manifestations like possessed objects and the ever present shadow goo… that feels way more synchronous with the setting.

I think my biggest complaint is still the sheer number of times the game resets any advantages you have and forces you to go fumbling helpless through the dark. Now I get what the game was going for. This is literally a horror story being acted out by you the protagonist and the game tells you that directly. The story is about all of the near misses and times you were placed in danger along the way, and in order to do this the game keeps taking tools away from you only to force you to fumble around until you replace them. However… holy crap Alan… learn how to secure your gear because exiting a vehicle should not cause you to lose all of your shit. You would think if you need these things to survive you would be less careless than most toddlers.

The thing I am learning about Remedy through playing these games is that they are really damned good at setting up some pretty cool visuals. There are a lot of sequences in the game that are very memorable and designed in such a way as to give you an interesting vista while you are struggling through them. This is very much the case with Control, and given that I somehow completely missed playing any of the games from this studio. In theory I should have played Max Payne, but I think at the time my PC wasn’t quite sturdy enough to really tackle it and I had strayed away from consoles. All told it took me about eight hours to play through the main campaign of Alan Wake, and I am glad that I did. I have no real interest in playing through the two DLC episodes however.

I do this thing where I hyper fixate on a specific franchise, or connected franchises. Two years ago I burned through almost all of the games by the developer Spiders, and now I am seemingly revisiting anything that might be connected to the Control universe. I wrapped up Alan Wake pretty early last night and started Quantum Break which is the game that came between those two titles (three if you count Alan Wake’s American Nightmare… which does not appear to be canon). First up it is a gorgeous game, and dealing with some very different subject matter. However it appears that Alan Wake is a television show in this universe which I find interesting. I have no idea if this one is going to grab me but I figured I would give it a shot.