Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em! That’s both the name of MC Hammer’s third studio album and the phrase someone in Quarantine Zone: The Last Check should have said before promoting me to the title of doctor and handing me a large hammer. Unfortunately, they did not, so I am hurting ’em at every opportunity.
Quarantine Zone is a first-person medical sim you’ve probably been seeing clips of for months: it was a huge hit on TikTok following its first demo, and since the full game launched today on Steam you can expect to see a lot more clips, like this one of me carefully examining a guy before clonking him on the head with a hammer.
The sim is a bit like Papers, Please without the papers or the please: you inspect survivors of the zombie apocalypse for signs of infection before letting them into the safety a military outpost, while also doing some light resource management around the base and a bit of fairly rote turret defense beyond the walls.
You begin with just a flashlight to look for signs of a zombie virus as the survivors stagger in, one by one. Does the subject have red eyes? Weird bruises? A blatantly obvious zombie bite? If they seem a bit sick you can send them to quarantine to see how they fare over the next few days. If they’re healthy, they can cool their heels in the safe zone until you ship them out at the end of the week. If they’re infected, they’re marched off to a cargo container and lit up by unseen soldiers. As a comprehensive medical response to an emergency goes, it’s got some flaws.
Zombie virus symptoms and methods of detection ramp up quickly, and soon you’ve got multiple tools at your disposal. But one of those tools is a hammer and you can conk survivors in the head with it as much as you like. Seems like a bad choice to give to someone like myself with poor impulse control and no medical experience, but hey, I just work here.
It’s a medical hammer, meant to test the reflexes of the survivors of the zombie apocalypse, but it’s so huge it looks like a sledgehammer from Rainbow Six Siege, and after I’ve bonked people’s elbows and knees to test their reactions, it’s impossible not to follow it up with a bonk to the head.
They fall down. Every time. Sometimes I bonk them again. It’s kinda funny. Sometimes they also hit you back, which is listed as a potential zombie virus symptom but feels to me like a completely normal response to some asshole whacking you with a hammer for no good reason.
The other problem with letting me choose who is deserving of rescue is that just about everyone in Quarantine Zone is suspicious to me. Even if they’re not coughing or wheezing or covered with zombie bites, there’s a huge number of people wandering the zombie apocalypse in flip-flops. That’s weird. I keep finding enormous wedges of cheese in people’s backpacks, too. The zombie plague happened and your first thought was to grab a huge hunk of cheese and put your flip-flops on? Into quarantine with you, then.
Then there’s this guy.
Yeah, a teeny bit suspicious. If you want to bonk some potential zombies with a huge hammer yourself, Quarantine Zone: The Last Check is out on Steam now, and it’s even 10% off for the next couple weeks.
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