Quantum Break

Quantum Break is a very ambitious project that tries to merge the format of a live-action series with a third-person action game about time travel while presenting choices that shape both narrative forms. The story, however, ends up forgotten in the process, plagued by a plethora of one-note characters, underdeveloped elements, and thematic inconsistencies.

The protagonist is Jack Joyce, who one day is asked by an old friend, the tech genius Paul Serene, to come to Riverport to help with his project. Jack’s brother, William, was Serene’s assistant until he started to voice concerns about its safety – it’s a machine that replicates a black hole, after all. So, when Serene begins to activate it with Jack, Will appears to stop the experiment, which indeed goes awry: Serene is trapped inside the machine and a sudden rapture in time affects Jack, who gains some powers over it.

Quantum Break’s story revolves around the concept of time travel. The machine leads Serene to the future, when he witnesses “the end of time,” an apocalyptic event that creates an eternal standstill. Serene, then, goes back to the past to prepare for this event: he wants to build a “lifeboat program”, a Noah’s ark that will allow selected individuals to live while time has stopped elsewhere. Jack, meanwhile, is out for revenge, since Serene reappears after the experiment to take out his brother.

The core of the story is the conflict between Paul Serene and Jack. To build his Noah’s ark, |Serene needs a device that Jack’s brother designed – the same device Jack believes will stop the end of time from happening. This setup has potential, as it gives Serene little reason for being a one-dimensional villain: both he and Jack want to do the best for humanity, but they diverge on the method.

“Anything I try to change, it just triggers the same event,” Paul Serene explains to Jack in a key moment (a key moment we may not witness, however, as it depends on a choice we make). Serene’s belief is that the future cannot be avoided, that time is a fixed event unable to be corrected. This is crucial for his plan to make sense: since he has witnessed the end of the world firsthand, he knows it to be unavoidable. “No future event that I have experienced can ever be prevented. This includes the End of Time. It cannot be avoided,” he explains in a note we may also not read.

Jack, on the other hand, wants to save everyone: he believes he can stop the apocalypse altogether with his brother’s device, betting that people still have a say in how things play out. Since there’s just one device, they both fight for it: Serene, to build the ark; Jack, to stop the end of time.

Even though the setup for its story is great, Quantum Break undermines it at every chance it gets. The first problem comes with the revenge storyline, as it simplifies characterization: Serene is not a good man with the wrong plan anymore; he’s Jack’s nemesis now, he’s a killer, he’s a monster, he’s evil. Actor Aidan Gillen seems to play only this part of the character, with his characteristic acid delivery (when he talks with just one side of his mouth) that worked perfectly with Little Finger in Game of Thrones, but not so much here. Here’s the issue: the setup should have made Serene more of a tragic figure than a bond villain, but Gillen’s characterization leans more in the latter direction.

It also doesn’t help that Serene and Jack rarely get a chance to talk things through – depending on our choices they might never even meet properly before the end. So, despite the setup of the story putting them on opposite sides of a spectrum, Quantum Break is not interested in making these characters try to convince each other that their way is the only right one – it’s symptomatic, then, that the only scene like that is an optional one. Quantum Break is actually only interested in making them shoot at each other – which could have worked if the story had another setup altogether.

In other words, there was potential here to make Paul Serene a fascinating figure, but in the end, he’s just a one-dimensional bad guy. There’s even a line of dialogue in the end that throws his original “good intentions” out of the window, just so he can fully take the mantle of villain.

And Jack is even more one-dimensional than his nemesis. His thirst for revenge could have blinded him for the truth of Serene’s words – making him tragic too – but Quantum Break instead opts for building Jack as just another generic action hero. This approach doesn’t work here, however, since it means that Jack – an ordinary person until the incident – must be able to win constant gunfights against a platoon of trained soldiers – something he can do without even using his powers, which are just overkill.

And here’s the thing: Jack Joyce not only slaughters dozens and dozens of people but also doesn’t care about that. The game tries to acknowledge the body count but, true to form, only goes halfway. So, when any character mentions how many people he has slaughtered, Jack always remains silent, as if shrugging the matter off: “The body count he’s racked up is now INSANE. Who’s gonna stop him? The grunts? HAHA FUCK NO,” a Serene’s employee writes. Jack sometimes makes a comment after reading an e-mail or document he’s just found, but here he chooses to ignore the subject, as always.

Quantum Break’s story is rife with elements that it never attempts to develop. The whole narrative is framed as an interrogation, for example: Jack is talking about the game’s events after they happened to a female agent, who intervenes here and there to ask questions and comment on events. However, this doesn’t lead anywhere besides exposition, with Jack either repeating what we already know or anticipating things we will soon find out. Even the agent barely appears throughout the game.

Jack’s relationship with his brother is also underutilized. They are not on good terms at the start of the game: “About Will – what can I say really? Clearly, I’m not the expert in dealing with my brother. There’s a reason we haven’t talked in six years,” he writes to Paul. But, since the story limits their direct interactions to the beginning and end of the story – even if time travel allowed much more –, this conflict never gets room to breathe and is limited to a couple of lines of dialogue.

But the most underdeveloped narrative element is the inclusion of the shifters, people who were corrupted by the rapture in time and became something more than human. They are basically monsters, which is usually an element that calls attention to itself. Quantum Break, however, puts them on the sidelines, limiting them to just add tension to Serene’s arc, as he suffers from a sickness that may lead to this fate. Jack, for example, never runs into a proper shifter until the last minutes of the game, which is just anticlimactic. In the end, the shifters feel out of place in this story, a bizarre addition that promises a lot but actually offers just a taste of things to come in the potential sequels.

And then we have the TV series. Here is how Quantum Break is structured: after each act in the game, there’s a brief intermission, where we take control of Serene as he’s presented with a choice, such as to kill or spare a person, for example. He has a vision of the two possible futures ahead of him and, after we choose one, an episode of the live-action series follows, showing the consequences of that choice.

The first choice, for instance, is about the fate of a college girl found on the premises of the incident with the machine. Serene may order her killed or forced to promote his company and the live-action episode will show the result, displaying Serene’s right-hand man, Hatch, dispatching or coercing the girl – Hatch himself, played by Lance Riddick with the necessary gravitas, is another underdeveloped character, with a promising twist that is left once again for the potential sequels to explore.

These episodes allow the story to go to places simple cutscenes usually don’t dare to, such as lengthy tangents about side characters – focusing on the people who work for Serene but are being pushed to go rogue on him. However, this live-action series suffers from the same problems as the main story, full of bland characters with flat motivations: the agent Liam, for example, wants to protect his wife… and that is Liam.

This live-action section is also streamed instead of downloaded with the rest of the game (at least on PC), which can be a hindrance. Not only does this give the game an unnecessary expiration date when the servers go offline, but they are already not up to the task, failing miserably to stream a single scene without stuttering and freezing – players may have to resort to outside sources (Youtube).

But the most serious issue about this whole structure is the choice itself in each intermission. Paul Serene’s whole plan relies on the fact that he believes the future is fixed, that it can’t be changed. And yet here we are, with Paul making a choice that will impact the future of a lot of people, having literal visions of their altered destiny, and being shown how his choices, his will, matters in shaping the future. It’s a severe contradiction that the game never even attempts to tackle, hoping we just don’t notice or care.

Moving to the gameplay side of things, Quantum Break seems to be more consistent. Combat works well, mainly due to the plethora of powers available to Jack: he can create a time shield that deflects bullets, use a special dodge that grants slow-motion aim, and he can create a time bubble, stopping its passage in a specific area.

However, there are some powers that don’t make much sense but are included in the package nonetheless, since they are staples in the genre: there’s time vision, for example, which highlights every enemy in the vicinity while making the player wonder how that is related to time. And there is what basically amounts to a “time grenade”, which takes out enemies in the affected area… with time.

Quantum Break’s combat works because it transforms Jack Joyce into a superhero. This is a power fantasy through and through, with Jack blasting through dozens of armored soldiers with ease. Remember, Jack is more than able to dispatch them without the powers – some encounters remove them to get this point across –, so they make things ridiculously easy on the normal difficulty, which seems kind of the point. The only problem with the combat is that the automatic “taking cover” animation doesn’t always work, leaving Jack vulnerable when he shouldn’t. But this is a game that encourages a more aggressive approach than taking cover – there’s even a “time shield” available to Joyce for desperate situations.

There are some small, brief platform puzzles in the game as well. They are not the focus of the game in any shape or form, and serve to just make the parts outside of combat less boring. An early puzzle: Jack must jump into a platform that will go down with his weight, so we must use Jack’s powers to stop the platform in time, allowing Jack to jump on it without making it fall.

Finally, we must praise how Remedy makes the transition from the game to the live-action sequences less jarring by showing the actors – and not their character models – in some videos, pictures, and presentations throughout the game. On the other hand, some of these “collectibles” (e-mails, pictures, presentations, videos, etc.) don’t make much sense. For example, we may read an email where a character confesses that the attempt on his life was staged: it’s already bizarre that the character in question decided to register this in writing, but Jack also doesn’t say a thing when he reads it. Later on, however, when we come across “time ghosts” – time is really wild in this game –, they reveal the very same information, but Jack now acts shocked by it, creating a disconnect between him and the player.

But, still on the matter of collectibles, we must praise the script that one of Serene’s employees is writing (and bothering his colleagues about with endless e-mails), as it makes the best and most amusing comedic bit in the entire game: it functions almost as a satire of the main game, with a ridiculously powerful protagonist – named after the writer, too, which is a nice touch – and nonsensical time rules. It’s perfect.

With its curious mix of live-action elements and the tropes of an action game, all enveloped by a time-travel story, Quantum Break is a project that crumbles under the weight of its own ambitions.

September 24, 2023.