Steam’s Big New Zombie Game Is Tense, But Comes At A Bad Time

I screwed up real bad in my first few in-game days of the latest Steam hit, Quarantine Zone: The Last Checkpoint. I let an infected person into the safe zone of our military-run camp. They turned into a zombie overnight, and I woke up to dead survivors. The reason I let them in? Right now, the last thing I want to do is hand off random citizens to soldiers in masks who will take them away to get “liquidated.”

Before you email me or screenshot this article and share it online, let me be very clear: I know I’m breaking the rules. I know I’m not supposed to talk about the real world when writing about video games. That’s a big no-no. To dare connect the dots between a digital game and the real world we all live in is often seen by some of the loudest online as a cardinal sin. Unforgivable. Well, get over it because I find it genuinely impossible to write about Quarantine Zone: The Last Checkpoint without addressing the current state of America.

In Quarantine Zone: The Last Checkpoint, out now on PC, you play as a commander who has just arrived at a hastily put-together military installation in the middle of New York City. Your job is to help make all the big decisions on this base, including managing resources, upgrades, and the health and safety of personnel. But most of my time in Quarantine Zone: The Last Checkpoint was spent manning a single entry point at the front of the base, where survivors crawl out of a post-apocalyptic zombie-infested city in the hopes of finding shelter, food, and medicine. But first, they have to get past me, the asshole with a flashlight and gloves who decides who lives and dies.

The majority of Last Checkpoint revolves around operating that point of entry. Early on, you are equipped with a flashlight and a small list of various symptoms and injuries to look out for, like bites and bloodshot eyes, and must use that list to determine who is healthy enough to enter, who needs to hang out in a quarantine cell for a few days, and who might need to be taken over to a non-descript room just out of eyesight of everyone to be shot in the head. As the in-game days go on, you start getting new tools, like a rubber mallet to check reflexes, and an X-ray gun to scan for hidden bites.

In my first few days, I avoided sending anyone to the kill room. I’ve spent the past few months watching President Trump’s jackbooted thugs in masks, aka ICE, grab people off the street, sometimes at gunpoint, and take them away to places none of us can see. Not everyone comes back. And as I played Last Checkpoint, my phone was filled with photos and videos from out of Minnesota, where ICE continues to cause mayhem and destruction, even shooting an innocent woman in the face in broad daylight. So the armed guards decked out in full masks and carrying large assault rifles in Last Checkpoint were hard to trust.

©Brigada Games / Kotaku

But eventually, as space in quarantine ran out and I sent a few too many infected people into the safe zone and got others killed, I had to start sending people away to get shot in a room for the good of everyone else. There is no cure for the zombie plague in Quarantine Zone: The Last Checkpoint, so once you think someone is infected, there’s not much of an option left. Each time I’d send a survivor away, I’d wait for the message to pop up on the screen confirming whether they were infected or not. When I finally screwed up and realized I’d sent an innocent man to his death at the hands of gun-toting soldiers, I wasn’t sure if I was having fun anymore.

Tracking symptoms and managing a small military base in the middle of a zombie apocalypse using various tools and having to make hard calls is a very tense experience. And when I could disconnect what was happening in Quarantine Zone: The Last Checkpoint from the world I currently live in, I found myself having a good time succeeding at helping people, something the game also rewards you for and makes clear is the main goal of all this. But then I’d check my phone and see what government-controlled soldiers are actually doing at a time when we aren’t being eaten alive by zombies. The in-game soldiers and officials in Last Checkpoint have more restraint and empathy during a zombie apocalypse than the authorities walking our actual streets do right now. Wild shit.