QUANTUM ERROR
This cosmic-horror first-person shooter is playing with fire
Something has gone horribly wrong at the Monad Quantum Research Facility, and it now stands aflame. But rather than taking centre stage as an unlucky member of staff, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, you instead play as a first responder to the disaster.
You are firefighter Jacob Thomas and as a captain this ain’t your first rodeo… but fighting a blaze at a site at the mercy of a cosmically unknowable entity is a little bit above your pay grade. Alongside your partner, Shane Costa, you fly to the isolated facility to search for survivors and make sense of what has happened. But as this is a cosmic horror FPS with stealth elements, you have to navigate threats other than collapsed architecture or out-of-control flames.
Micah Jones, development studio TeamKill Media’s lead programmer, artist, and owner, says, “You’re gonna start with an axe. And then eventually you get the Halligan bar [a firefighter’s tool], and some other things. But you really don’t get a pistol until a certain point in the game where you get it from another character... or enemy.”
ONE UP
In our demo, Captain Thomas and his partner have been separated. Sirens blare as he receives a garbled message over his walkie-talkie. Thinking it might be Costa, Jacob heads towards Security Office Alpha. No sooner has he begun to investigate the area than
“YOU FLY TO THE ISOLATED FACILITY TO SEARCH FOR SURVIVORS.”
things start to get weird and a strange apparition appears before him, walking into the flames. Prying a fire extinguisher from the wall, Captain Thomas douses the fire and follows the trail to the armoury. However the door has warped from the heat and we need to pry it open.
Dakota Jones, Micah’s brother and the game’s writer, says, “You’re not going to be starting off with tons of guns, because we have to tell the story first.”
Micah adds, “It’s not going to be guns ablaze until maybe way later, but even then it’s still going to be more [...] do you fight? Do you sneak?”
“The enemies are always more powerful than you. And they’re always bigger than you,” he later stresses. Having to pick your fights and conserve your ammo gives things a distinctly OG Resi feel.
You’re far from a super-soldier, Dakota tells us, adding, “As a firefighter, you’re obviously not going to be like carrying around tons of guns with you. These are going to be things that you’ll find throughout this facility that you’re at because it is a more or less military facility.”
FAMILY VALUES
The team didn’t simply start with the concept of a professional out of their depth. The studio is run by four brothers and the inspiration for their latest project also keeps things within the family; their dad was a firefighter for most of his career and Micah admits “The main character’s pretty much him.”
“When it comes to a lot of the techniques or equipment or like how fire reacts, he’s given us all the information he can possibly remember,” Micah says. Father Jones even contributed to the design of the game, collaborating with level designer Noah Jones on a recently revealed combat encounter involving a thermal camera. Cautiously creeping down a darkened corridor, you see a strange form lumbering towards you through the viewfinder. The lights soon flicker back on and whatever it was vanishes with the darkness.
A shotgun will blow away chunks of the enemy before they go down. The enemies we’ve seen have looked corpse-like but Micah tells us, “The enemies are getting remade to an extent – we’re going more in the alien kind of direction. [...] The monsters and stuff in the game are going to get a much more unique take on a cosmic horror kind of look.”
We can’t wait to see what alternative direction the team later takes their enemy designs, especially as Dakota tells us that a fear of the unknown is central to the project’s cosmic horror angle.
He says, “You’re not going to know everything that’s happening – you’re going to get a lot of information, but you’re not going to know everything.”
He goes on to compare the game’s plot to the television series Lost, saying, “It’s like, okay, you have all these characters, you have the normal part of reality, but then you have the crazy part of reality that starts to trickle in and things start to not make sense and the deeper you go into that the more things [feel] overwhelming.”
He later adds, “Big things [...] are happening [that] you might not fully understand unless you really dive deep and read.”
You’ll be able to do your homework and unravel Monad’s mysteries sometime next year.
“HAVING TO PICK YOUR FIGHTS AND CONSERVE YOUR AMMO GIVES THINGS A DISTINCTLY OG RESI FEEL.”