This probably won’t be the last I write about Witchfire this year. It’s just so damn good. If you told me a game was able to blend Dark Souls with first-person gunplay, I’d be horribly skeptical. But Witchfire not only pulls it off, I think saying it’s "Dark Souls with guns" undercuts just what developer The Astronauts has accomplished here.

Despite the main gameplay loop being reminiscent of a Milgram experiment, it justifies its ickiness through “but zombies!” as so many more violent and exploitative games did in the past. Maybe I’m just getting too old for this shit. I’ll just go back to chunking people into giblets with my boltgun in Darktide like a respectable person. But Quarantine Zone: The Last Check is ultimately a janky, buggy mess of a game that happened to nail down the feeling of a zombie apocalypse