played - quantum break

I haven’t had an Xbox console in a long time, so I completely missed this game when it came out. I’d wanted to try it ever since Control came out - with Remedy on the rise, didn’t I owe it to myself to check out this entry in their library?

It turns out: no, I didn’t need to. It feels of-its-time in the worst ways: run-and-gun gameplay where your “hero” murders hundreds of other humans without a second thought, writing that’s desperate to be directly applicable to the current gameplay (“we need to get through this door, Jack!” repeated for 9 hours), and decent actors wasted on shoddy characters. No one part of it is explicitly bad, apart from the rampant number of Capitalized Words that are thrown around with heft and significance (the End of Time! The Countermeasure! The Lifeboat! it’s all very serious) and the time travel isn’t even that complicated (did you know it’s a time travel story?), but none of it LANDS. It goes in one ear and out the other.

I think I told someone that my favorite part was the villainous corporation’s logo - and I meant it! It’s a good logo! - nothing else really seems to justify its own place in the game, much less in the Remedy canon.