In a zombie apocalypse there's often a quarantine zone: a military-controlled outpost that survivors flock to in hopes of finding safety. There's usually an evil army officer running the joint who ironically proves himself to be more of a threat to human life than the undead, and you can bet that zombies will eventually surround and breach the barriers.
That's the setting in the demo of Quarantine Zone: The Last Check (full game coming in September), a first-person zombie apocalypse management sim where you examine survivors and determine if they've become infected by the zombie virus, then decide if they should be let in and rescued or, shall we say, liquidated.
Papers, Please, but for zombies? Sure, I'll give it a go.
The doctor is in (trouble)
My first patient is a survivor who lost the random name generation lottery: the dude's name is "Scott Scott." Wearing shorts and a T-shirt, he hustles in with a red face, which my checklist of symptoms indicates as a sign that he's "sick." Not infected with the zombie flu, mind you, just sick. I send Scott Scott off to quarantine, a holding area where I'll be able to reevaluate him in the following days. Better safe than sorry, right?
The next guy has dark bruises on his arm and neck, which my symptoms menu also indicates as "sick," but bruises aren't contagious so I don't quite understand the diagnosis. Based on my experience—and I've been a military medical expert for nearly 15 seconds—it seems safe to send him off to the general population zone, especially since that zone currently consists of just him.
My third survivor is a woman with a huge, obviously human-made bite-mark on her hand who insists: "I was bitten by a dog, not a zombie!" This is a refrain I'll hear at least three more times from other survivors, including several who don't even have bite marks.
Sorry, lady! We all know people who have a bite mark and claim they're going to be fine will abruptly turn into snarling zombies at the worst possible time. Ergo, you need to die. I mean, uh, be liquidated.
Curious, I follow as she's led to her death by a gasmasked soldier holding a big gun. The liquidation zone turns out to be a cargo container, but the soldier doesn't impassively riddle her with bullets as I expect. She simply steps inside and vanishes. Yes, the game is apparently so eager to free up GPU memory that she disappears before the door closes, instead of after.
I check on Scott Scott the next morning. He's somehow had enough time to grow a full beard, which strikes me as suspicious. He's also now covered with what appears to be herpes—what the hell did you do last night, Scott Scott?
Medically speaking, I determine he's a super gross dude and because I simply don't want to see him again, I send him off to genpop with the first guy and hope for the best. As a doctor on my second day, I already feel like I'm wildly inconsistent, which is just the kind of person you want running the last bastion of humankind in the zombie apocalypse, right?
Open wide and say "braaaaains"
Back to work! I'm given a medical scanner that appears to run on magic because it lets me examine people's bodies through their clothing. I also have a UV flashlight so I can closely scrutinize the skin of terrified survivors while I try to determine if they're either lightly bruised or deserve to die. Why didn't they give me these tools on day one? I don't ask, I just follow orders.
"This is bullshit!" exclaims the first survivor of the day as I look at his nipples through his shirt and scan the bulge in his pants (the magic gun is discreet and refuses to peek through through underwear). He's only got some bruising on his legs and face so I let him join Scott Scott and the other guy in the safe zone. I try to scan the soldier escorting him but I guess my X-ray wand can't see through army pants? Bogus. An army guy always turns into a zombie in these situations, so I should be allowed to see every soldier's butt for base safety.
The next survivor is wearing sunglasses. Huh. That's odd! I don't suppose he might be trying to hide something, do you? I remove them and his eyes are bright yellow. My symptom map says, strangely enough, that yellow eyes are totally fine, or at least they don't indicate zombie fever. I'm not buying it, so I send him to quarantine.
Slightly more suspicious, the next survivor is a woman with blood smeared all over her mouth. Perhaps to distract me, she's wearing a big dumb floppy hat. I want to reject her from the camp just for being so stupid that she didn't think to wipe her mouth off before entering a life-or-death physical examination, but I send her to quarantine instead. Without her hat.
The following day I check on my two quarantine survivors—Yellow Eyes and Floppy Hat—and yup, they're both zombies. I didn't realize this, but the quarantine zone is just a single room, not a bunch of rooms where you can, you know, keep people quarantined from each other. I guess last night Floppy Hat went all zombie and bit Yellow Eyes. Whoops.
I'm no doctor—this is becoming painfully clear—but it seems like quarantining everyone suspected of having the zombie flu in the same tiny room without so much as a facemask between them isn't a particularly effective strategy. If even one of them is legit sick you're gonna quickly wind up with a tiny room full of zombies, which is exactly what happened. At least I can purge them all by pulling a lever, though once again it's not a cool extermination effect like a flamethrower descending and burning the zombies to ashes. A screen drops and when it rises the room is clean of bodies and blood.
Interspersed with examinations are chores: awkwardly wheeling food, fuel, and medical supplies from one depot to a different depot, and managing the generators so the base doesn't run low on power. This is straight-up boring, and I'm left wondering why this grunt work can't be handled by, you know, a grunt: there are soldiers all over this base and I'm the only one doing any work.
There's also a sequence where I mow down invading zombies with a big machinegun: again, other soldiers? Do y'all want to jump in and help with any of this? I'm supposed to be doing the important work of peering at people's butts through their pants and sentencing people to death for having a rash.
Zed's dead
In the following days I get more tools: a thermometer gun I can point at people's heads and a stethoscope to listen to their breathing. I can also start looking through their backpacks to confiscate contraband. One guy has a glowing, golden baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire. Seriously. It's like he bought the deluxe version of a zombie game and this was his cosmetic reward. He's also carrying a bloody zombie skull and several bones.
He is clearly a sicko, but he's technically not sick, so I just confiscate all his stuff, including a screwdriver, which the game penalizes me for but I think is a wise decision. I'm putting this weirdo in the same room as Scott Scott the Bearded Herpes Monster: someone will definitely get stabbed if I allow a screwdriver into the mix.
Unfortunately, this is where things begin to go wrong: not with my haphazard base management strategies, but with the demo itself. The next day I attempt to reexamine a few people I've quarantined together, but none of them will come out of the chamber. My framerate abruptly drops to, I dunno, one? One frame per second? It's unplayable even after turning my graphics settings way down, so I have to quit the sim. There's no save function, so I decide to end my tenure as army doctor there.
Even aside from the technical problems, I didn't really love the demo of Quarantine Zone: The Last Check, but there's a germ (haha) of a good idea here: screening survivors before they can enter a safe zone at least has the potential to be one of those thought-provoking, morality-testing experiences. The game also doesn't have enough faith in its base management systems and gives you sequences where you can mow down mobs of zombies with machine guns, bombs, and air strikes—as if it suspects you'll get bored with the endless examinations and grunt work. Which, honestly, I kinda did.
But it's just a demo! There's plenty of time to work out the kinks: Quarantine Zone: The Last Check is planning a launch in September on Steam.
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