7 Games to Play if You Love Quarantine Zone: The Last Check

6 days ago 4

Daniel has been playing games for entirely too many years, with his Steam library currently numbering nearly 750 games and counting. When he's not working or watching anime, he's either playing or thinking about games, constantly on the lookout for fascinating new gameplay styles and stories to experience. Daniel has previously written lists for TheGamer, as well as guides for GamerJournalist, and he currently covers tech topics on SlashGear.

Quarantine Zone: The Last Check is sort of a natural evolution of the burgeoning bureaucratic deduction genre of simulation games. It’s all about managing a quarantine checkpoint in the midst of a worsening viral plague, with the primary gameplay loop centering around screening refugees for constantly-evolving signs of zombification, as well as managing the day-to-day of the refugee camp.

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This kind of game has been steadily picking up steam over the last decade or so, though certain real-world events definitely make the whole quarantine element feel a bit more appropriate. Even if you like Quarantine Zone, if you’d rather not think about viral quarantines, and I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t, you can fall back on a number of other titles to sate your cravings for needlessly complex bureaucracy weighed against the metaphorical mass of your steadily-heavier conscience. Hey, let nobody say it isn’t fulfilling work. A certain kind of fulfilling, anyway.

7 The Mortuary Assistant

Working the Graveyard Shift

If one end of a hypothetical spectrum is carefully diagnosing living people to determine if they’re about to turn into zombies or not, theoretically, the other end would be diagnosing people who are already dead. Logic would dictate that there’s significantly less risk, physically and morally, in that latter scenario. If that’s all there was, sure, but in The Mortuary Assistant, there’s also a stubborn demon to contend with.

In The Mortuary Assistant, burgeoning undertaker Rebecca has just started her first shift at the local mortuary, only to discover that she’s been placed under the thrall of an infernal visitor who’s hiding out in one of the evening’s stiffs. To banish the demon and save your soul, you’ll have to carefully carry out the embalming process for each corpse, noting down any differentiating marks, while also keeping a lookout for signals of demonic influence.

Compared to Quarantine Zone, there are definitely fewer moral hangups to worry about in this game, but it’s still a similar kind of tone. You’re still forced to go through a grueling process out of sheer, methodical requirement, but it weighs on you the longer you go on. It’s just that it’s your own immortal soul that’s at risk here rather than a camp full of refugees.

6 That’s Not My Neighbor

For Once, it’s Not the HOA’s Fault

Quarantine Zone is all about carefully examining incoming refugees to ensure they don’t have even the slightest potential of developing zombie lurgy, and disposing of the ones that do. It’s not a pleasant scenario, but it could be worse; at least infected individuals aren’t trying to be actively malicious. In That’s Not My Neighbor, on the other hand, you and everyone in your building are at real risk of being devoured.

In That’s Not My Neighbor, you’re the door guard for an apartment building. Sounds simple enough, but apparently, there’s a bit of a doppelganger problem going on in the world, with shapeshifting horrors using every trick at their disposal to slip into the homes of innocents and eat them alive. To prevent this, you’ll need to inspect their physical appearances, as well as consult known information about your tenants, including their careers, family, and professions, to determine if they’re the real McCoy.

While some of the doppelgangers are too lazy to come up with good disguises, others will get quite crafty, getting nearly everything right except for one tiny detail about their supposed schedule. It’s more of an arcade-style game, so you don’t need to worry as much about the broader social ramifications of getting things right or wrong. You know, beyond the basic ones of potentially sending someone’s mom to a woodchipper, I mean.

5 No, I’m Not a Human

What is a Human, Truly?

In Quarantine Zone, and other games like it, you can largely justify any choices you make because maintaining the quarantine and screening refugees is your job. The worst thing that’ll happen if you make a mistake every now and then is a dock in your pay, at least on the micro level. But what if you were all by yourself? No handbook to fall back on, no fellow soldiers to fight off infected; all you can do is make the call yourself, and hope they don’t say “No, I’m Not a Human.”

In No, I’m Not a Human, it’s become unbearably hot outdoors due to a mysterious occurrence with the sun, and travelers are knocking on your door seeking refuge. To make matters worse, “visitors” are crawling up from beneath the Earth, so any of these refugees could be a man-eating monster. All you have to go on are vague warnings from the daily news, and you can’t stand the heat long enough to check everyone, so you need to carefully select suspects to check for signs of being inhuman and deal with them swiftly.

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Something interesting about this game is that, by design, pretty much everyone who comes to your door looks like a total freakazoid. You can’t make any assumptions of anyone based on a casual glance. It gradually gets to the point where you’re not even sure what a human is anymore.

4 Lil’ Guardsman

The Only Non-Dark Game on this List

Games that involve a lot of bureaucratic deduction and difficult moral choices tend to have rather dark and/or dystopian narratives and settings. You can draw your own conclusions about that, we live in a society, etcetera, but it’s not necessarily required that such a game have that kind of story. Case in point, Lil’ Guardsman has a similar kind of gameplay, but a much lighter setting and story.

Lil’ Guardsman is a deduction game in which the titular Lil, a 12-year-old child, is placed in charge of her dad’s post at the guard shed of the castle town they live in. People of many races and affiliations are always coming and going, so you’ll need to flex your True Crime detective skills with a combination of basic sleuthing and magi-tech tools to suss out who’s planning on starting trouble.

Compared to pretty much every game on this list, Quarantine Zone included, Lil’ Guardsman is a much more light-hearted, silly affair, helped in large part by its fantastical setting. Of course, you do still need to make some careful choices, as depending on who you let into the castle, the plot can unfold in one of several ways, some more overtly unpleasant than others.

3 Papers, Please

You Don’t Get Paid Enough for This

Of course, when it comes to bureaucratic deduction games, the first and foremost name just about everyone thinks of is Papers, Please. I don’t think it’d be hyperbolic to say that Papers, Please walked so games like Quarantine Zone could run. Specifically, walked very, very slowly in a massive line toward a checkpoint inspection booth. Nobody said bureaucracy was action-packed.

In Papers, Please, you’re a newly-hired border checkpoint agent for the nation of Arstotzka, right after the country ended a lengthy war with its neighbors. The borders are open, but tensions are still high, and any piece of falsified documentation could be a sign of agitators or criminals. It’s your job to account for an ever-growing laundry list of passports, tickets, and identifying information to prove who’s fit for Arstotzka, and who needs to be taken away by some friendly gentlemen for a few questions.

Papers, Please really hammers home the brutality of this kind of bureaucracy by making your pay reliant on processed individuals. You need to move quickly and efficiently to get enough money to support your family, and mistakes will cost you. However, the occasional “mistake” could prove vital in getting your family out from under Arstozka’s iron thumb.

2 Not for Broadcast

Someone’s Going to Get an Angry Letter

Have you ever sat behind the controls of a live feed before? It’s not as easy as it looks; it’s all about timing and angles, trying to get interaction between the folks on stage to look as seamless as possible. That’s in the best-case scenario, too, where you’re just trying to make it all look good. Now imagine adding mandated censorship on top, and you’ve got Not for Broadcast.

In Not for Broadcast, Alex Winston has become the new studio director for a national television network, right around the same time a major regime change begins enforcing stringent rules on censorship and information manipulation. As you sit behind the controls, you’ll need to cut between multiple cameras for each program, not only to keep the editing consistent, but to censor out anything your overseers don’t like and focus more on what they do like.

What you choose to emphasize will determine whether you keep getting a steady paycheck, but more than that, you’re uniquely poised to deliver information to a society that’s rapidly plummeting into totalitarianism. You could just keep your head down, or you could risk it all for a chance to be a whistleblower. It’s a more nuanced dilemma than in Quarantine Zone, but people will definitely get hurt in equal measure if you don’t commit.

1 Contraband Police

Got Any Fruit to Declare?

I’ve only ever traveled out of my home country once in my entire life, and only by plane, so I don’t really have any experience with roadside border patrol. That’s probably good, because if it’s anywhere near as intimidating as the process seems to be in Contraband Police, I’d probably completely crumble under the pressure and confess to carrying contraband even if I didn’t actually have any.

Contraband Police casts you as a border patrol officer of the communist country Acaristan. A lot of people are coming and going through your mountainous region, and that means a lot of smuggled drugs, weapons, and other assorted no-nos. In a similar vein to Papers, Please, you’ll need to carefully verify an ever-growing list of required documents, but you’ll also need to check vehicles and possessions for even the slightest hint of hidden contraband.

Much like Quarantine Zone, things will occasionally escalate, forcing you to grab a gun and fight off both smugglers and rebels against the current regime. Who you decide to let through, and how thoroughly you fight against potential agitators, could end up leading to the crumbling of that regime, not to mention your paycheck.