Back in mid-December, my Instagram reels feed was plastered with gameplay footage from a game that seemed interesting, but had visuals so rough I wasn’t sure if the footage was actually from a real (but cheap) game or if it was just another AI slop polluting my feed. A few weeks later, and not only do I find out that said game is actually real, and trendy amongst PC gamers, but that it would also get a full release by none other than Devolver Digital. Said game is Quarantine Zone: The Last Check, and I’m glad first impressions weren’t the ones that stuck at the end of the day. That’s not to say that the game is great, but it sure has some decent ideas worth respecting.

“It’s just glaucoma, I swear…”

This might be yet another game set in a zombie apocalypse, but it has a far more original premise. You’re not a lone survivor scraping for supplies. Instead, you’re a government worker, someone hired to do a simple job: run a survivor camp, and decide who to allow to get into the camp, who to quarantine, and who to immediately shoot down as a safety measure. You get financial rewards by completing weekly quotas of saved survivors, and can then spend said money in survivalist resources for your base (food, medicine), or invest in new kinds of technology that allow you to better examine who’s a survivor or who’s not.

At first, you only have rudimentary tools to help out with your examinations, such as a flashlight and a thermometer. The initial rounds of examination are simplistic, with you only being able to check if someone is infected by the color of their eyes or their body temperature, but further cases require you to check for bite marks, or even use X-ray scanners to see if organs have already been compromised. In essence, it’s what happens if Papers Please was set in a zombie apocalypse.

As much as this Tower Defense mode changes the pace of the game, it’s not as exciting as it seems.

It’s not just about doing busy bureaucratic work with infected people, however. As previously mentioned, you gotta check the finances and condition of your base, and you will also be forced to defend your base from an onslaught of invading zombies with the help of a fully armed drone, in a pure tower defense mode. While I appreciate the inclusion of these ice-breakers to add a bit of variety of the mix, I don’t think either of them are deep or engaging enough to make the game feel less shallow. The issue with Quarantine Zone is that it is somewhat of a one-note experience at the end of the day.

Once you acquire a few new examination trinkets, the game turns into a repetitive and uneventful routine: scan for diseases, kill the infected, quarantine the sick, save the healthy, hope you’re right with your findings, partake in the occasional tower defense section. The campaign is over in a minute, so all you can do after that is engage in an endless mode, which will showcase how little else Quarantine Zone can offer outside of the aforementioned gameplay loop. The underwhelming presentation doesn’t help, either.

Baby, you’re hot. But not in the way you’re thinking.

I do appreciate Quarantine Zone‘s gameplay loop. Its mixture of the bureaucracy analysis popularized by Papers Please, thrown into a zombie apocalypse setting, is, without a shadow of a doubt, very unique, and, at least at first, pretty engaging. Sadly, there’s just not a lot meat in it to keep you invested for long. With such a short campaign and a one-note endless mode that doesn’t add anything new to the table, you will have fun with it for a couple of hours, appreciate its creativity, and then move onto the next indie hit.

Quarantine Zone: The Last Check is available now on PC.

Reviewed on Intel i7-12700H, 16GB RAM, RTX 3060 6GB.

A copy of Quarantine Zone: The Last Check was provided by the publisher.