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Across the first day of Steam Next Fest, the top three entries in the wishlist charts didn't move; Half Sword rules the roost with its brutal medieval combat, and Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era seems to be proving there's life in the old series yet. And rounding out the podium is Quarantine Zone: The Last Check, which casts you as the final line of defense in a zombie apocalypse.
So what are you? A soldier holding the line against the zombie advance? A survivor desperately eking out an existence? A settler desperately trying to guide your new home through winter? No. In Quarantine Zone, you're a doctor, tasked with making sure that no walking infected make their way into the safety of your military holdout.
At the beginning of each day, a line of survivors appears at the door of your compound. One by one, you'll invite them in and screen them for symptoms that could mean they're about to turn into the walking dead. Massive necrosis or bright red eyes? Chances are, you can send them off to liquidation straight away. But it's not always that easy - a cough could be the sign of a deteriorating immune system, but it could also just be a cough.
Thankfully, you've got some tools to help with your diagnosis. If your scanner reveals a massive bite mark hidden beneath a t-shirt, chances are you've got an infected on your hands. Later on, you'll get a stethoscope to check breathing, an oximeter to check pulse, and a thermometer to check temperature. If you're really not sure at the end of that, you can purchase tests that 100% confirm the presence (or absence) of the infection, but they'll set you back a significant amount of money.
That's important, because you're not only in charge of screening, but of keeping everyone you've admitted to the compound alive. That means making sure you've ordered in enough food - not only for those waiting for safe evacuation, but for those in quarantine whose symptoms weren't clear the first time around. It means that as you expand your base to accommodate more people, you'll need to make sure there's enough fuel in the generators unless you want to deal with rolling blackouts. In the demo there's not really enough money going around for any substantial expansions, but it's clear there's reasonable depth to the base-building system.
There's less of that depth in the defense missions, where you're tasked with downing your stethoscope and instead picking up your laptop to act as a drone pilot, defending convoys or clearing swarms away from the wall. Upgrades allow you to increase your firepower here, but these are relatively simple horde shooter segments. It pales in comparison to the detail added to the medical checks, which quickly become very detailed - while some people are so clearly infected that you can send them away for liquidation at a glance, others hide their illness much better. At one point, I was entirely sure my patient was healthy, only to be told that after they slipped through my checks, they turned and killed three people.
There's a level of repetition inherent in any sim that might turn some people off, but Quarantine Zone does make a solid attempt to break up the tedium of a day of medical screenings. And clearly there's something about the setting that's making things stick - the demo is so far up the Next Fest charts that the rest of the game is sitting comfortably in the top 20 for all of Steam. And with a release date coming up as soon as next month, this could be about to become a substantial hit.
Time for a new contender on our list of the best zombie games?
