What it’s gestating for 2016 brings a new level of spectacle that transforms time from a silent killer into a thunderous one.Fundamentally, it’s an origin story in the modern superhero movie tradition, boasting big-name acting talent in Shawn Ashmore, Aidan Gillen and Dominic Monaghan. In 2001, Remedy gave the gaming world Bullet Time. Before the fragments of explosive barrels, crates and human viscera from one encounter have hit the floor, Joyce has lined up the next. Soldiers who step out into the open are frozen in stasis, or sprayed with bullets that hang ominously motionless in the air before leaping forward and tearing up their target with renewed force. With time paused, he outflanks them and unleashes a temporal blast at their bunched formation.Using a ‘dodge’ that causes time to dam up and then burst forward, he lurches from one assailant to the next, hanging in the air unnaturally before letting punches land. He teases enemies, giving them clear line of sight for long enough to lure several into a cluster. Bestowed with five time-related abilities, protagonist Jack Joyce uses his chronology-bending talents to turn cover-shooter combat into a game of setting traps. Remedy is attempting to do something narratively ambitious with Quantum Break, but even setting aside its dual approach to storytelling, its core gameplay fizzes with possibility. “If we had a time machine and we knew everything back then that we know now,” says creative director Sam Lake, “certainly there’d be things we’d do differently to avoid extra work and time.” In Quantum Break, a thirdperson adventure from Remedy in which the narrative plays out both in-game and via live-action TV show episodes, and which allows players to impact the story with their decisions, it’s more like climbing Everest in a blizzard. A subgenre predisposed to paradox and plot holes, narrative threads getting knottier with every rewrite, it’s a stern enough challenge in any form of media. Telling a story about time travel, a good one, is the scriptwriter’s Everest. Half game, half TV show, ambitious Xbox One exclusive Quantum Break forges new paths through both
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