Schroedinger's cat is the pet experiment of Quantum mechanics commonly cherished in the related fiction. Take a wave function describing all the dead-and-alive cat's possible states and you might get an alternative version of it belonging to a parallel, past or future reality: as long as you don't observe it you won't really be able to tell.
In a game driven by an interactive narrative such as Quantum Break the player is in the position of the observer, whose junction choices determine the branching of the storyline, favoring one character to the detriment of another quitting the scene, whether key like Hatch or Amaral, or secondary like Nick or Amy. Taking decisions that have consequences thus is part of a broader time travel concept as it implies causality. Your choices will have a programmed effect on the story plus the TV shows between the five acts, but don't really affect its outcome, nor the beginning: an accident causing a “Fracture in Time”, provoked by Dr. William Joyce's genius time machine or rather, his proper irruption during an unauthorized experiment in Riverport University.
Just imagine a ring corridor not the size of the Hadron Collider based on the idea of the Meyer-Joyce Chronon field and particles as a matrix for time analogue to the Higgs boson one for space. Thanks to a rotating micro black hole setting you move past the event horizon and hence through time as likewise through space—clockwise forward or counterclockwise to the past—and thus may reach the "End of Time"—which is what happened to Paul Serene, mastermind behind Monarch Solutions. Long-term friend of his Serene recalled Jack Joyce from Thailand to help fix whose brother Will, being as mentally precarious as mathematically proficient.
The time is October 9th, 2016, 4am: Paul convokes Jack to a time travel experiment, a project “moderately illegal” for learning what he was up to, Will scared off investors ranting about “miscalculations”. Jack is shocked: after a first 2-minute trial has Paul's double leave the time machine before he did even enter, his brother Will interferes with a gun to stop "his" project, while Serene is still locked in the corridor: Welcome to Project Promenade. The explosion that follows time-freezes the laboratory keeping both people and objects afloat, except Paul who decides to seek his way through the device, and the “Chronon-active” Jack who is able to “unfreeze” his brother for them to escape through the University campus facilities while Monarch security forces arrive to take the central core.
Paul Serene, on the other hand, does find himself at what is not only the end of his travel, but of time itself: Destination: Error. Alas, this undefined nothingness is not empty but peopled by some hostile 4D "Shifters" plus the not-as-lethal Beth Wilder, actually one of Monarch's own security agents, projected here in yet another failed time travel ill-programmed by the abducted Dr. Sophia Amaral on October 10th, 2016, on Will's rogue time machine in the abandoned Bradbury swimming-pool. Past causality, wouldn't his being killed have been without consequences? After some undefined time (!) at the End of Time (2021), Serene manages to make the device work so as to send them back to the earliest possible date, February 28th, 1999, the date of the first time machine prototype's completion (you cannot travel outside the box). This explains why the Paul Jack will meet after the accident is now more than 15 years older than his former friend, gray-haired, and sick. Marked by their respective experiences at the End of Time but without being able to change the causality of future “past” events, like the car crash of the Joyce parents in 1999, or the terrorist attack on September 11th, 2001, Paul Serene proceeds to form the Monarch empire to save humanity (a happy few) and Beth Wilder, to prevent his doings.
Better: meeting herself as a child on September 5th, 1999, she instructs her eight-year-old self by means of a notebook for what is yet to come in seventeen years: meet and save Jack Joyce, and together, try to get hold of the countermeasure to the Time Fracture. First, though, she informs his brother Will about the future abuses of his time machine in order to have him develop this countermeasure, the Chronon Field Regulator (CFR), to repair the fractured time: “I can't fix the past. But it's not too late for the future.” The very day of its completion however, July 4th, 2010, the pentagonal device is taken by Paul Serene, killing Beth Wilder on the way (in memory of the time shared at its end). Still, her future key function in the October 2016 events is assured by her younger self trained to infiltrate Monarch Solutions as a double agent.
Given its stutter-proofing qualities Serene wants the CFR as “key of survival” for his Lifeboat Protocol, a Monarch project to save 300 humans—mostly Monarch staff and shareholders—at the imminent End of Time for them to find a means to relaunch it in a lapse of fifty years; yet increasingly affected by the Chronon syndrome he unlikely will be able to save himself.
October 10th, 2016, 5am: against all odds, or even thanks to them, Jack manages to get the CFR back, this way annihilating the Lifeboat Protocol, and to return 24 hours to save his brother from getting killed under the dismantled Library debris; armed with Will's know-how they go for the Fracture. It is 7am on October 9th, 2016: although the time experienced during the game's events might equal various years, in the end the actual time elapsed since the initial accident is just about three hours.
Quantum Break's storytelling is as fractured as is its topic: if the events of the main plot's five acts are already happening in a non-linear manner, there are four Junctions and four TV Episodes that make the story even more disrupted. The four junction choices bifurcating the storyline between the five acts permit to get a different take on the story background: whereas we play the game as protagonist Jack Joyce (Shawn Ashmore), we are to identify with antagonist Paul Serene (Aidan Gillen) when having to choose between the "Hardline" or the "PR" approach after the University operation, whether to prefer "Personal" and the friendship with Jack or "Business" and the future of Monarch, suspect the loyal Dr. Sofia Amaral or the borderline CEO Martin Hatch, and lastly, go for the "Control" of Monarch and himself, or give in to "Surrender" to his illness and paranoia. Serene is not the common bad villain and the junction moments artfully invite to sympathize while adding substance and complexity to his profile. But also the other main characters are not just "black and white": levity (Jack) and gravity (Will) oppose the two brothers like elemental forces, but where the pragmatic Jack doesn't refrain from using weapons to clear his way, his unworldly brother lacks the will to bring anything truly viable together. Monarch double agent Beth Wilder (Courtney Hope) appears a strong and resolute female character, but her post-time travel diaries reveal also a fragile and desperate woman, spraying graffiti under the name of "Toto" and hiding while waiting eleven years for Will (Dominic Monaghan) to develop his countermeasure: "Voyeurism and graffiti. That's my life these days."
As likewise the Junctions, the episodic “live action shows” present the story's events from yet another angle: Monarch head of surveillance Charlie Wincott (Marshall Allman) and lead security agent Liam Burke (Patrick Heusinger) are the heroes of the four TV Episodes that make Quantum Break a "television hybrid" and thanks to this protagonism appear more profiled than comparably Sofia Amaral (Jacqueline Pinol) or Martin Hatch (Lance Reddick), public face of Monarch and the game's secondary antagonist. As likewise in Remedy's Max Payne and Alan Wake, those crossover media references intentionally employ movie clichés to deliver a visual spectacle packed with melodrama and while not paramount for its understanding, they add additional facets to the plot.
More cinematic than Max Payne and more surrealistic than Alan Wake, the twisting approach towards time that Remedy Entertainment applies in Quantum Break goes beyond slo-mo bullets, delusional flashbacks, and levitated objects. As the game as such revolves around time, every one of its elements is subject to its effects: storyline, environment, and gameplay. Where the story treats time travel and Meyer-Joyce fields, transient structures and stutters allow for delaying 3D puzzles, and Chronon sources provide time-controlling superpowers. As time itself comes to an end, it becomes Quantum Break's originator: time is an egg, and this egg is broken. Our player character finds himself amidst the destruction resulting from the breakup of the time fabric and has to deal with its consequences that can work out to his favor: people and objects time-locked inoffensively in space like in a moment's snapshot, or to his detriment, with regard to the ill-timed reliability of the surrounding structures. Where Alan Wake experiences Takens teleporting and Max Payne time slowing down around him, albeit largely subjectively, Jack Joyce has the possibility to rush through or temporarily freeze ambient time (Meyer-Joyce pockets) as one of the positive side-effects of his Chronon contamination, and also stays mobile while everyone else is stuck in the time stutters.
But messing with Chronon has its cost: the negative effect of long-term exposure is the increasing unwellness Paul Serene is suffering, the Chronon syndrome, which in the end will make him a "Shifter" alike the former Dr. Henry Kim, Will's allegedly dead predecessor in the Chronon Research Lab. Yet we won't observe many of those Chronon Disrupted Lifeforms, a superposition of two simultaneous states—smeared contours like in a painting by Francis Bacon—that inhabit a Zero State environment, just learn of their extreme hostility and dislike of movement, and we wouldn't be able to shoot them, either.
For the weapons having nothing futuristic—pistols, assault and carbine rifles, shotguns—Quantum Break has us make ample use of Jack's time manipulation powers to match every combat situation: whether Chronon-harnessed Strikers and Juggernauts who can move through stutters or ordinary security guards that compensate through their sheer number, Monarch foes require the use of different strategies in order to proceed. Unlike Wake or Payne, Jack automatically gets into cover when standing next to anything suitable though the enemies' AI usually doesn't let him stay there too long, while the cover system feels natural and not too “sticky”.
Most of the time powers that can be purchased and enhanced by means of the points gotten from Chronon sources—exactly as many as points are required to max them all out—are quite self-explanatory and of use not only in combat. So creating a time bubble to trap enemies ("Time Stop") can be used also to overcome obstacles, necessary in several of the environmental puzzles, as likewise "Time Dodge" and "Time Rush" permitting to evade and surprise enemies as well as deal with stutter-caused hazards. Correspondingly, "Time Shield" deflects incoming damage and provides faster recovery, while "Time Blast" immobilizes and levitates enemies. You'll likely invest in Time Shield (Recovery, Slow Time, Increased Power) and Time Dodge (Increased/Maximum Focus, Extra Activation) first, but also Time Stop and Time Blast often come in handy in order to keep enemies at bay. Creating spectacular visual distortion effects the time manipulation powers are fun to use at an easier difficulty level but vital at a higher one, where stacking up Time Dodge and Time Shield up to three times can be a real life-saver.
While these abilities have a reducible cooldown period which requires their use in a strategic and well-dosed manner in tougher combat situations, others are passive and help exploring the terrain, such as the basic "Time Vision" to highlight enemies and points of interest, and the occasional "Time Echoes" available when checking the surroundings to replay past memories, in the manner of Remember Me. At certain points of the game Jack's powers permit him also to unfreeze friendly NPCs (Will, Beth...), but most of the time having them inanimate is rather an advantage.
Exploring the environs is advisable in any video game, but gathering some of the about 200 Collectibles divided in Chronon Sources, Quantum Ripples, Intel, Documents, Computers, and Media some of which are due to a specific Junction choice is crucial not only for the necessary time power upgrades, but also for the understanding of the complex story. The eight Quantum Ripples in particular are supposed to complicate the story rather than make it easier, as their activation will affect the following TV Episode and moreover have various long-term “butterfly” effects that the player won't see. For instance, in the junction Hardline/PR, Paul can find a ram statuette that he will have sent to the HQ, with one of the effects being that the selfies of Monarch employees posing with the ram will start trending in social media.
Quantum Break is an elaborate video game one will play at least twice in order to experience the narrative consequences resulting from the junction point dilemmas, while the troubling effects of the Time Fracture will make one think still afterwards: “All you have to do... is hit that switch.”
Many interesting documents (such as Bruce Livingstone's grotesque “Time Knife” screenplay) that are not here just to be collected make it worth replaying the different levels, as does their oftentimes artistic design. A transmedia game in the line of Alan Wake and Max Payne, Quantum Break doesn't shun the risk to think “outside of the box”, which makes it one of the most innovative titles among this year's releases. Whatever game Sam Lake will create next, it will be something novel: “The audience will understand because of the way the actor says it. It's [gonna be] a real intense moment.”