Quarantine Zone: The Last Check Is As Janky and Buggy as It Looks
- Antal Bokor
- 2 minutes ago
- 5 min read
To be completely honest, Quarantine Zone: The Last Check isn’t really a game I would seek out on my own. Despite it being at the intersection of Papers, Please and No, I’m Not a Human, something about Quarantine Zone’s lack of distinctive art style and its janky look initially put me off. But I kept seeing headlines like “sleeper hit” and with big Steam numbers, I decided to see what the fuss was all about. It turns out that my initial instinct was correct, but after playing Quarantine Zone: The Last Check through its campaign mode, I realized it’s a little worse than that. Plus bugs. So many bugs.
In Quarantine Zone, you play dual roles: the base commander managing resources, and the front-line agent conducting inspections. Whether that’s realistic is really an aside, as for gameplay purposes it streamlines the player’s interaction with the base management aspects and the gatekeeping duty which is Quarantine Zone’s marquee gameplay feature.
You are the final arbiter of whether these people can potentially live, or die. Make a wrong decision and people die. Make the right decisions and people die. It’s a job I wouldn’t envy in real life. But this is a video game, and therefore a safe space to play with the more extreme regions of what we find tolerable. Right?
I don’t want to offend anyone who enjoys playing Quarantine Zone. This isn’t a critique on you, but more like a critique on myself. I mean, again, it’s all make believe. And even though I more often than not play as a “good guy” in video games, I’ve played a lot of violent games and even enjoyed the darker aspects. There’s just something about Quarantine Zone that gives me an uneasy feeling. I think some people call it “the ick.”
Maybe it’s the barebones presentation. Perhaps there’s a snobby part of me that would gush over Quarantine Zone if it had some sort of flashy or avant garde art style. Or even if there was an attempt at making some sort of poignant or timely observation about human suffering or narratively tying the extreme suffering of a zombie apocalypse with a warning about authoritarianism or something.
Quarantine Zone doesn’t even attempt such pretentiousness.
I’ve seen the gameplay loop described as satisfying in other reviews. It’s satisfying, but I wouldn’t say that it’s necessarily fun in a mechanical gameplay sense. The fun comes from scrutinizing the hapless souls who come through your checkpoint. Some of them are obviously infected–from known and obvious symptoms like blood red eyes, or bitemarks smack-dab in the middle of their forehead. To those with less obvious signs of infection. Are they just sick or are they about to become a bloodthirsty zombie? There is a quarantine zone with a limited amount of space, but sending even one infected person there means it's a death sentence to the whole group of other “what ifs?”
The longer you play through the campaign, the more tools are unlocked to help you find symptoms. From a simple stethoscope to a handheld MRI/X-Ray scanner, there is a whole range of symptoms to look out for.
Thankfully, you can mark patient’s symptoms on your handy tablet, so if they survive quarantine you can see if they’re getting better, worse, or staying the same.
Quarantine Zone does a great job in creating uncertainty. Sometimes I feel like it would be safer to just send a survivor to my limited space quarantine chamber and deal with their symptoms as they progress. It’s almost a relief to come across a survivor with an obvious symptom so you can send them to their quick death.
But sometimes you get symptoms you’ve never seen before. Whether they’re infected or not, if you want to get more information that requires vivisection. Thankfully, this is done without pleading or crying from your victims–er, patients. But the squishy, bloody mess their extracted organs make when you subsequently test them doesn’t make the procedure–and the patient’s sacrifice–seem adequately reverential, much less respectful.
Quarantine Zone: The Last Check somehow manages to keep its tone serious, but not so serious as to ruin your good time of deciding what ants live or die under your magnifying glass, so to speak. That is, until, you’re forced to engage with the game mechanically.
When Quarantine Zone bases its activities on more mechanical gameplay like shooting and moving, it feels as cheap and janky as the whole thing looks. A particularly egregiously bad section is the base defense section where you fly around in a lone drone dispensing immense firepower on hordes of zombies. It does nothing to enhance the core gameplay, but instead breaks up the base management/gatekeeping flow. Bizarrely, despite being full of armed guards and guard towers, they don’t help at all during these sections. If there was more of a tower defense thing, it would have been a lot more fun, and it would have tied into the basebuilding mechanic that already existed.
When you’re not shooting zombies from a drone, or checking people through your checkpoint, there’s a base management aspect, too. I didn’t mention this earlier because it feels like an afterthought. Besides letting in a couple of infected people who killed others when they became zombies (oops) I never lost anybody because I couldn’t keep up with housing and feeding my population of citizens before they were evacuated. Most of the penalties in the game are financial, and since I did a relatively decent job of disposing of the infected and letting in healthy people, I never suffered too much financially, making Quarantine Zone rather easy. Except for all of the bugs.
I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t mention how buggy the whole game is. I saw stories of softlocks, but thankfully I never got stuck from progressing. I was blocked from doing a few side quests, however. And there’s an entire gameplay mechanic that never properly worked on the Xbox Game Pass version I played. Supposedly people would try to smuggle objects inside of their body you could see through the handheld MRI scanner. I never had a single person have an object inside of them, despite thorough checks and the game letting me know I was letting these people through.
Despite the main gameplay loop being reminiscent of a Milgram experiment simulator, it justifies its ickiness through “but zombies!” as so many more violent and exploitative games did in the past. And I really can’t fault it for that, or I’d be a hypocrite. 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 like no other game has.