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  • Alternative Character Interpretation: Paul goes through the machine because he has to, or else his future self doesn't appear. Jack asks what would happen if he didn't go through, to which Paul insists he has to because it's already happened. How much of the future really is locked in, versus how much is happening simply because Paul honestly believes there's no way out, making it a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?
  • Angst? What Angst?: Although it's clear Jack is distraught over Beth's death at Paul's hands, he claims to Ogawa that it did not affect the events that followed... which is undermined by his own words during the stutter in Act 5, something he leaves out of the interview.
  • Anti-Climax Boss:
    • The Control timeline of the final episode hypes up Liam Burke as a boss fight Jack needs to fight in order to reach the Countermeasure. Unfortunately even though he's a badass on the level of Jack, and Jack doesn't have access to his Time Powers, Burke's too badly wounded by the time he confronts Jack to be anything other than a brief distraction.
    • The final confrontation with Paul Serene can be a bit underwhelming. Jack has to fight off two waves of enemies while Paul spams Chronon attacks but after getting past those (admittedly challenging) obstacles, the player only needs a single bullet to take down Paul and trigger the final cinematic.
  • Awesome Music: The game has a standout soundtrack all around, but special mention goes to Meeting an Old Friend, Suite for Time and Machines, and the ending tune, A Whisper.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: The fact that commercials for the game feature a cover of "Come as You Are" is this due to its release date coinciding with the 22nd anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: This isn't the first story to mention eggs in relation to time travel.
    • Since 2016, it has been a running meme on the internet to joke that the real world is in the "wrong timeline" in a reaction to various chaotic world events. Often, the jokesters point to the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series in 2016 as the point of divergence, which the team did within a real-life month of the game's setting.
  • Jerkass Woobie: Will's in a bad relationship with Jack, is somewhat arrogant and brash, and tries to get Jack to shut the time machine down in the opening by shoving a gun in his face. But he's only trying to prevent the end of the universe, and his documents around Bradbury Pool Hall show that his dedication to this is eating him up and driving him to despair. In particular, he couldn't tell anyone else about his goal, so when he had to sell the Joyce family home for funds, he couldn't justify himself to Jack, leading to them falling out. He still kept Jack's belongings. There's also his relationship with Future Beth, who told him about the countermeasure; when she vanishes due to her death, he nearly loses his mind trying to contact her.
  • Magnificent Bastard: Martin Hatch is the perpetually calm and polite right-hand man to Paul Serene, putting up the appearance of a loyal advisor while truthfully scheming far beyond his employer's knowledge. A Shifter corrupted by Chronon energy who now seeks to ensure the End of Time occurs and impacts all of humanity so he and his fellow Shifters can live in their natural habitat, Hatch works with Paul to build up Monarch Solutions over the course of over a decade, all while subtly manipulating and pushing Paul into certain choices and actions. Adapting to any of the choices Paul makes to suit his needs, Hatch stages an assassination attempt on himself, tries to eliminate Paul's lover Sofia Amaral, and destroys Paul's Chronon treatments, all working together to make Paul more unstable and pliable to Hatch's machinations. As the End of Time approaches, Hatch turns off Monarch's stutterproof shielding and takes the CFR out of the picture before terrifyingly slaughtering Monarch Security to finalize his plans. Ever humble and insisting that he's only trying to bring "renewal and balance" to the world, Hatch accepts even his defeat with grace, quickly taking full control of Monarch from Paul and beginning a new strategy towards victory.
  • Memetic Mutation: Will's "The time egg is fucked!" quickly gained popularity.
  • Paranoia Fuel: Due to the nature of stutters, you can never know when one occurs. Only people with chronon gear (like certain Monarch soldiers) or chronon powers (like Jack or Paul) see when time stops, which means that the End of Time could be coming and you will be blissfully ignorant of it.
  • Porting Disaster: The PC version is horribly optimized, running at less than 30 fps at 1440p on a GTX 1080, the most powerful card available at the time of the game's release. According to developers the game was designed to be rendered at a lower resolution and then upscaled, and running it at a native resolution was simply never intended. And even with upscaling enabled the game barely manages 60 fps. On top of that, the live action sequences have to be streamed (as opposed to being downloadable on the console release), and, according to this article, can't run at 60 FPS on monitors designed for 60 FPS.
  • Special Effects Failure: An especially jarring animation error is that reloading the assault rifle will cause Jack to go through the actions of reloading while the rifle stays static and unmoving. The magazine stays on the gun during the entire animation, Jack's hand visibly clips through it at times, and Jack has nothing in his hand while he loads in a new magazine.
  • Spiritual Adaptation: This is as close to a Fringe game we're going to get, between the contemporary, East Coast science fiction setting, the existence of a MegaCorp that resembles Massive Dynamic a little too much, the presence of Lance Reddick who plays a character very similar to an Observer, and a scientific experiment at the heart of the lore that is responsible for the eventual end of the world. Even the game's muted blue-tinged Color Wash resembles Fringe's look. Hardcore Gamer even called it as such before the game's release.
  • That One Boss: SERENE. During the final boss, you're constantly being hounded by enemies that make your powers rather limited in how they're used so you're vulnerable a lot of the time. To make things worse, Serene uses his own time bombs to hurt you any time you are remotely close to standing still, and they ignore your shield. To make matters worse, heavies appear with dampeners which WILL end with you dead if you lose your powers for even a second. The cherry on top is that, on your first attempt, you WILL die to Serene's time 'nuke' during the phases as it envelops a huge amount of space which will kill you in one hit if you are not ready. There are also no checkpoints during the battle. If you die, you don't just have to start the fight over — bizarrely, the restart point comes before the pre-fight cutscene, so you have to interact with a frozen Will to trigger the cutscene again. You can skip it, of course, but you still have to sit through a loading screen before you can even get back to the fight.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Shifters are established as people who succumb to Chronon Syndrome, essentially being people who were mutated by quantum radiation. The only time Jack ever encounters one, it had cleared out most of Monarch's stutter-proof mooks and it came close to attacking Jack before he was saved by the stutter ending. They're established as being unkillable (since they exist in a quantum state where they're simultaneously alive and dead), they only exists in stutters and they attack anything chronon-powered. In the game, they could have been used as an Invincible Minor Minion that Jack would have to either sneak past or avoid in some way, this thing that Jack couldn't put down permanently, but was just as much of a hazard to the Monarch goons gunning for you. Since Jack's time powers comes from chronon exposure, it would have made for an interesting incentive not to abuse his time powers.
  • Visual Effects of Awesome:
    • The game's engine is extremely impressive and photorealistic enough, but whenever the game enters a stutter and time stops, things go from merely pretty to jaw-dropping.
    • Shoot a car during a stutter. It'll explode, as usual, and then the explosion will rewind and the car will be whole again.
    • Anytime the day/night cycle kicks in during a segment of broken time. The stars, Moon, and Sun start streaking across the sky, and shadows and lighting change rapidly.
  • The Woobie: Beth, once you learn her backstory. When she was eight years old, she received a journal from her future self, telling her all about bad things that would happen in her life to convince her of time travel, including 9/11. Since then, she's dedicated her life to finding the countermeasure and stopping the Fracture. When she and Will go to 2010 to retrieve the countermeasure, Amaral changes the destination at the last moment and instead sends her to the End of Time, where she spends months avoiding Shifters and trying to kill Paul, to no avail. She escapes with Paul back to 1999 and Will's first time travel experiments, but the machine is too depleted of chronons to send her back, forcing her to take The Slow Path to 2010. She tries to change several things, but them all happening the way they originally did (including her being responsible for the death of Jack's and Will's parents) drives her over the Despair Event Horizon and convinces her that everything she fought for was for nothing; when Jack arrives for her, she's broken and jaded. And when the two of them finally retrieve the countermeasure, Paul arrives and kills her.

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