Recent reviews by Richard Johnson Wang

this game makes me squeal and kick my feet

An incredibly distinctive and funny game that leaves you with a lot to chew on, pun intended. Honestly, experiences like this are exactly why I love art so much- who would have thought that a gross-out microgame about pre-canning canned sardines would leave me musing on the self-destructive nature of ambition? This weird little adventure has genuinely taught me some valuable life lessons, and I guarantee that those takeaways would be completely different for another person with other problems.

Release the soundtrack please. it is an incredible work of art and its current status as abandonware is a tragedy. It deserves to be enjoyed without being butchered to meet arbitrary length restrictions.

Also- play this game. It is a genuine masterpiece in every way, and its achievements as an experimental narrative are so vast and staggeringly deep that I struggle to overstate their significance. I genuinely believe that this series will be studied by narrative theorists and art historians in the centuries to come as the progenitor of an entirely new form of storytelling, and this is the game that perfected that art. It's revolutionary, and piercingly beautiful.

Listen. I recommend you play this game. It has a lot of great aspects to it and a lot of not so great aspects to it, and a lot of it feels underutilized, but ultimately its uniqueness outshines and mitigates the blandness it's packaged with. Thing is- I just finished the game, and I cannot give it the big blueberry thumbs up, because holy mackerel what a crappy ending. Jesus christ. It totally undercuts the theming of the whole rest of the game. I kind of get what they were going for, and with a lot more follow-through I could see the "big event" working (with different music too, oh god) but as it stands the conclusion totally abandons the rest of the game's aesthetic, tone, trajectory, and symbolism for something confusing and sappy and lame. It couldn't be more unsatisfying. This is a game about fight and self-assurance in the face of apocalyptic amounts of pain and pressure. The ending should not have the same emotional register as TV ad for a retirement home. It's almost unsettling how abrupt the ending is and how fast everything turns on a dime to justify the fade-to-black.

"let go" yeah maybe you should let go a deez nuts lmao

DRM is unacceptable on its own. Retroactively adding DRM to a game years after its release is beyond the pale.

DRM is unacceptable on its own. Retroactively adding DRM to a game years after its release is beyond the pale.

DRM is unacceptable on its own. Retroactively adding DRM to a game years after its release is beyond the pale.

DRM is unacceptable on its own. Retroactively adding DRM to a game years after its release is beyond the pale.

DRM is unacceptable in itself. Retroactively adding DRM to a game years after its release is beyond the pale.

Alright, so, I'll probably do a full writeup review of this game later. The gist: it's a creative and fun game with incredible visuals, a unique premise, and a unique gimmick that make up for its sometimes weak characters, holey and underdeveloped plot, and unresponsive controls. And Lance Reddick's in it, and that guy elevated every production he set foot within a hundred feet of.

More importantly- I want to offer a warning to prospective players. There are a number of decisions you can make that affect the game's narrative; you'll know when you arrive at them, they're relegated to levels labeled "Junction". The first of these is by far the most important. When you arrive at it, choose the option labelled "Hardline". According to the game, only a quarter of people chose this option; it makes sense, it seems like the worse one, on the face of it. But trust me when I say it's far, far better. Not only does it effectively create an entire B-plot out of thin air, and in the process massively improve the narrative arc of the game overall, it replaces a shallow and deliberately irritating character with two fun and interesting ones that you would otherwise miss out on. It's a far better game, and I wonder if Quantum Break would have gotten a better critical reception overall if three quarters of players hadn't been misled into choosing a weaker, more unsatisfying version of the same narrative.

I also think it's important to note that a few of the larger overarching questions and plot threads are clearly meant to set up for a sequel that's likely never coming, and as such aren't fully resolved. You can infer the outline of Quantum Break 2's plot by tracing the holes it left behind in this game, and QB is still a complete and satisfying story, but you shouldn't expect all of the questions raised here to be answered.