Six years ago, Helsinki-based independent Remedy Entertainment came in for criticism that, with the long-awaited Alan Wake, it sometimes seemed more interested in making a film than it did a video game. Its follow-up feels like a typically Finnish stroke of dour, deadpan humour: with Xbox One and Windows exclusive Quantum Break, it's gone in wholeheartedly and made a full live-action movie.
Well, a television series to be more precise, and while the four 20-minute episodes that intersperse Quantum Break's five acts speak for only a portion of the 10-hour running time, they mark it out as something very different; an odd mongrel of a game that earnestly plays for the kind of cinematic single-player experience far removed from the current triple-A fashion of open-ended expanse. Perhaps it's a hangover of Microsoft's ill-fated grab for television, made infamous in the mantra that echoed awkwardly around the Xbox One's initial reveal and now, with the closure of Microsoft's TV studios, firmly abandoned.
In part Quantum Break feels like an artefact of a different age - an imposter from an aborted timeline, some chilling dystopia in which Don Mattrick was right all along and that forced smile never subsided - though there's a little more to it than that. Ever since the comic-book excess of Max Payne, Remedy's had an eye on playful cross-media, and Quantum Break sees the studio travel even further down that path. It's a natural extension of the studio's love of pulp of all flavours; whereas before it was comic book noir or American horror, Quantum Break is a celebration of television serials such as Orphan Black, Falling Skies and Sense8 that have proven so crushingly compelling in recent years. Remedy's particular brand is slick sci-fi that takes the faintly cerebral premise of time travel to conjure up entertainment that's wilfully, gleefully mindless.
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