Quantum Break is at once simpler and more confounding than any Remedy game that preceded it. It’s simultaneously a throwaway action shooter, a well-meaning but ill-judged experiment in cross-media, and one of the most visually arresting games ever made. It’s a truly paradoxical work, one that I think is Remedy’s most intriguing to date. Not because of the flash visuals or the ambitious time-travel plot, but because it makes a clear attempt to distance itself from the studio’s earlier output.
That it doesn’t always succeed only makes it more fascinating.
From its opening scenes, there’s a clear difference in tone to Quantum Break compared to Remedy’s previous games. Here the framing device isn’t the weary internal monologue of Max Payne or the narration of Alan Wake, but a clipped and confrontational police interrogation. The subject of that interrogation is Jack Joyce, brother of the esteemed (and soon to be deceased) quantum physicist William Joyce.
Suddenly we revert back to a couple of days prior, where Joyce is called upon by a former friend – Paul Serene – to help him test out his brand new time machine. What begins as a friendly reunion soon reveals itself to be Serene’s last-ditch attempt to save his career at the Monarch corporation, in an unsanctioned and illegal test of the machine. Naturally, it goes wrong, and the experiments ends up fracturing time itself. Consequently, Serene ends up head of Monarch, while Joyce ends up a fugitive on the run from Monarch’s private police force.
So begins a time-hopping adventures that is as action-packed as it is visually breath-taking. Remedy’s eye for visual flair has been evident since the players first dropped into Max Payne’s bullet-time. But whereas Max Payne took its visual cues from the Matrix and film noir, and Alan Wake was basically a playable Twin Peaks, Quantum Break takes its aesthetic inspiration from, well, Quantum Break.