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A good few minutes of our first proper look at The Order, the PlayStation 4's high-profile, big-budget exclusive, pass before we see anything resembling traditional gameplay. Even then it's brief - a short, staged shoot-out in a crowded Whitechapel alleyway where third-person cover-based gunplay gives way to a fist fight before our hero Galahad crashes through a weak timber roof. Except it's one of those fist-fights, as Galahad's actions are brought to life via on-screen prompts that, when pressed in the correct order, see him reaching for a knife before plunging it into a rebel's neck. This isn't a QTE, though - or, rather, that's not what developer Ready at Dawn is calling it. In their parlance it's "branching melee", whereby failure at any stage in the process simply sends you down another path. The knife isn't the only option open to Galahad, and the fight can be concluded in many more ways. All of which sounds very much like a QTE, albeit a very generous one. It seems it's not just in The Order's twisted take on Victorian history that there's been some slight revisionism and a little bending of the rules.
Since its announcement at E3 last June, a fog has existed around The Order as dense and impenetrable as the one hanging over its arcane London streets, and it's only just started to clear. The fiction has been established through brief scene-setting trailers, focussed on an alternate vision of late 19th Century England where Arthurian legend is tangled up with a dense thread of other mythologies as you take control of a secret order of heroes. It's a fiction that stretches even further back to the early days of developer Ready at Dawn; the idea began to take shape just as it had finished its first game, the PSP's Daxter.
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