my biggest barrier to writing ab this game is just a fear of """overselling""" it i suppose. general consensus is that this is not an especially accomplished or noteworthy game by remedy standards, it has the least visible cult following (tho it does seem to Exist...its not That hard to find people calling it broadly "underrated") and much like max payne its trapped in the intellectual property of a non-remedy company, making its implementation into the remedeyverse one of flighty circumvention. honestly i think a lot of this is just the fact that its a bit too weird and left-field to be a true Broad Summer Blockbuster, but the fact that it has Broad Summer Blockbuster aspirations at all leads it slightly outside the general tastes of the remedy faithful. remedy games have always had an affection for pulp, but its been neo-noir graphic novels and stephen king-esque supernatural thrillers...self serious in tone, but mostly truly loved by people who are at least a little Nerdy. perhaps after alan wake's weird pitch and slow-burn success, remedy needed something that was more of a sure thing...sam lake isnt even a credited writer (tho the overall story is still clearly his work). its easy, perhaps, to call this Compromised Remedy...a One For Me One For You where the One For You is a showcase of the power of the xbox one
but idk man! i kinda felt that at first, but my skepticism melted away over the course of the game. some parts are hard to swallow...the tv show isnt as dire as some make it out to be but its not something that would have ever been put out on its own either, the fundamental gunplay is a bit loose and spongey, and Jack Quantum Break is bafflingly unfit to fill the admittedly big shoes of Remedy Protagonist. but i dont think any of these things actually substantially hurt the game! the tv show is perfectly acceptable brain-off popcorn intrigue, and i think the choice to have it focus on the goings on inside Monarch does add to the game thematically for reasons i'll talk about later. the gunplay is not the most satisfying on a sensory level, but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ man remedy can design an action game...much like max payne and alan wake, it asks for your involvement and deliberacy as you find an improvisational multi-part Solution to each encounter with a genuinely interesting set of tools, selling even better than max payne how helpless you are without your high concept powers. and while i might drag jack a little bit, i think the actual in-game story is very enjoyable and likable and still has some of that lake and co idiosyncrasy
there's a lot of 2010s chris nolan envy here, but nolan himself would make a more illuminating comparison point years later with Tenet. not just because theyre both about highly deterministic time travel, but because they both use that concept as a launching point to bask in the psychology of what it means to believe in the future, that even in a world with "predestination", someone still ultimately has to go and physically live out The Work instead of passively waiting for fate to strike. a place where they break away from eachother is with their respective villians...where tenet's big bad guy is an embodiment of the feeling that our future has been literally bought and sold for someone's short term benefit, quantum break's big bad guy is working towards a solution in paranoic terms that rest on preserving the terrible power imbalances of our current world, not daring to imagine that things could be any different. and the closed off world he builds out of a seeming guarantee of safety is, as demonstrated in the "junction" points and the tv episodes, unsustainable...it falls apart from a variety of human and systemic pressures that are often completely invisible to his overall view. across both the show and game story there is an insistence that humans feel this fundamental pull towards Righteous Action, even if it takes a bit to get there...characters are faced at one point or another with the temptation to lapse into individual self-preservation, or the burden of Time and its ability to wear down one's resolve. none of this is presented in an especially layered or literate way, but much like tenet, i find a lot of comfort in this kind of story...i like to think people will have it in them to fight for a future that we have been consistently told we wont have, or even deserve.
theres some real heart in there, but the main appeal is just the strong Muscle of the moment to moment narrative mechanics, the big flashy time travel plotting and, especially compared to the winding and shaggy progression of alan wake, an impressive level of directly meaningful narrative context to every moment of gameplay. there are still some rough edges in how its presented...the world is loaded with all this optional flavor text and audio, some of which is quite extensive, but which the game never seems to actually want to slow down and shut up so you can absorb it...are you really meant to just read all of it in the menu later???? but on the whole, i genuinely dont think this is that much weaker, if at all, from remedy's other games on purely its own terms. perhaps thats largely a product of low expectations, i dont wanna tell people to expect a masterpiece when you're not really gonna get one here. but i can imagine that the goal was to make, on both a gameplay and story level, the most Fun remedy game, and honestly to this point i think they entirely succeeded. that might not always be the thing that matters to me, but for the past few months ive been interfacing with just about everything through several layers of burnout and dissociation, and honestly these remedy games have been a great comfort...a new fresh interest that constantly asks for and rewards my attention. and of all of them, quantum break made me feel the coziest...felt nice to play, was undemanding to watch, and ultimately soothed me with much of my own optimism in a time where ive needed access to it. i cant really transfer what it all meant to me to other people, but i feel lucky to have it.
