Spooky season is here and there is no better time to turn on a good horror game and really take advantage. The release timing for dev team TeamKill Media seemed perfect for Quantum Error, which was actually one of the very first games announced for PS5. Now multiple years later, the game is finally here, and yet Quantum Error feels like it is still undercooked in many ways.
A Sequence of Errors
Quantum Error was talked about quite a bit prior to release due to the developers talking about how the Xbox Series X/S version of the game would have to be a major downgrade, but the game as found on PS5 is far from a visual masterpiece. The cutscenes in the game look pretty good most of the time, though you can see the game’s major pop-in issues from the very first cutscene and they continue through the rest of the game with every hallway you walk down. There is also almost a Vaseline-like look over the character models where they do not look as detailed as they should be, along with a graininess found on people’s faces whenever they talk that emanates around their character model and looks especially bad around their hair. In general, the animations just look janky throughout the entire game, including the playable character, NPCs, and enemies. There is really nothing here that looks like it could not have been on the last generation of consoles visually, which is all the more confusing.
The performance in Quantum Error is actually not too bad most of the time when related to just your character’s movement. There were not really any noticeable framerate drops through most of the game, which was one of the bright spots when playing through the game. Load times were also very short as well, allowing you to jump right back into the action after a death without having to wait very long.
Quantum Error’s story mostly takes place in the year 2109 when firefighter Jacob Thomas and his crew are called to Monad Quantum Research Facility after a major fire that has led to the entire complex being put on lockdown. This facility is full of floors of technology that the Monad corporation has worked on, but something is amiss here and you will take to space before all is said and done. There are some tutorial sections prior to this that take place in the past, but the majority of the opening hour is full of cutscenes and could easily bore a player early on. The cutscenes for the rest of the game also feel drug out much longer than they should, which seems to be done to create more tension.
Once you finally get to play beyond the tutorials and cutscenes, you start by just having to go into the Monad facility, save a few civilians, and get them out using your firefighter skills, but this quickly turns into something much more sinister. The opposition at the start is just a militant group that you know nothing about, but things eventually start to take a cosmic horror-based turn where regular men with guns are the least of your concerns. Not too far into the game, this shifts dramatically to facing various types of zombie-like enemies that start to lean towards Lovecraftian the more you go instead of just soldiers with guns. Something worth giving credit for is the various enemy types and their designs, as they can legitimately be scary as they are running full speed at you.
After initially saving the group of civilians, Jacob gets separated from his team as many of them are killed, and then the game all of a sudden turns stealth-based. All you have at your disposal are tools like your radio, a Halligan bar, and an axe while you are facing off against enemies that have guns. The game tries to have you be stealthy here and sneak around, but on top of there being areas in which it is impossible to sneak up to the enemy properly without them being alerted and shooting you, the stealth mechanics are downright awful. There are moments where you will be in a completely different room and the enemy will all of a sudden be alerted when you haven’t even moved. Quantum Error is riddled with bugs and that does not mesh well with having a stealth system that needs to be very precise to work correctly, but the buggy nature of the game will be discussed a little further down.
The game also feels like it is taunting you early because it consistently gives you ammo for weapons that you do not have, especially shotgun shells. On top of that, every time you kill an enemy with a gun, they drop it to the ground. Like pretty much every other shooter, you would think if they go to the trouble of separating the weapon from the enemy separately on the ground you could pick it up. However, that is not the case as it will just sit there and eventually fade away as time goes on along with the enemy bodies. If this were a game like Alien Isolation where the stealth elements were vital for the entire experience, having such an early section dedicated to it would make sense. In this case, though, it is just a frustration to possibly turn players off from even continuing the game before they even get their pistol.
A unique element of Quantum Error is that not only do you have an arsenal of weapons to use eventually, but also an array of tools that you will gather, including a Jaws of Life. One of the biggest issues in the game though is how completely broken the tool and weapon wheels are to use when selecting them. By holding down left or right on the d-pad, you will bring up the tools and weapons wheels respectively, and can then use the right analog stick to select your tool or weapon or choice. The major problem here though is that this doesn’t even work half of the time. I cannot count the number of times I had the right analog stick hover over the shotgun and the wheel very clearly shows that I have the shotgun selected and it randomly pulls out a completely different weapon that isn’t always right next to it on the wheel. This happened for both the weapon and tool wheels consistently to where I had numerous deaths as a result of the wrong weapon coming out after I selected the one I wanted.
While accessing these tools and weapons can be questionable a lot of the time, the usage of these different tools along with the firefighter element when you actually get to use it can be pretty neat. Using the previously mentioned Jaws of Life to open a door or crush a pipe adds some puzzle elements in a few places where you need to access certain rooms. When you walk up to some doors in the game, you will be prompted to either press Triangle to touch the door to see if it’s hot or to press Square to use your Halligan bar to pry the door open. If you pry open a door that is hot, you will create a backdraft upon opening it and instantly be incinerated. The prying element also uses haptic triggers with R2, which was cool to mess around with to find the correct area of the button to press harder to open it. Another element I’ve never seen in a game outside of the Nintendo DS and 3DS was blowing into the microphone of the controller when doing CPR. I wish we had gotten more focus on the unique elements like this rather than focusing more on the overly standard shooting elements.
Identity Crisis
Quantum Error seems to not be able to decide if it’s a roguelite or not. Most of the time, enemy spawns have patterns and allow you to strategize how to proceed forward. You will expect that to be the case for the full game, but that is not quite how it goes. A few areas are completely randomized with their enemy spawns, but the majority of them follow a pattern, most of the time. You will keep trying the same area 10 times and randomly one of the times things will change for some reason, which just seems like very poor game design. It would be one thing if it was a mechanic in the game, but here it just feels scattershot and like the developers couldn’t make up their minds on how they wanted to handle things.
For the early portion of the game, most of the environments are pretty much the same as you traverse through the facility. There is an abundance of hallways and occasionally larger rooms for you to explore here, but the rooms and the confusing map system start to blur together to where it doesn’t help you too much with the winding hallways unless you literally draw the map yourself and keep up with it. Thankfully, the game does get some new environments later in the game when you travel to Mars and beyond and get to even drive around in sections, but they are around way too little compared to the rest and even have you going back into similar hallways throughout those areas as well.
Quantum Error starts off being split into various floors of the Monad facility before branching out elsewhere, with you being given an objective and can bring up an objective marker with the press of a button. There are occasionally alternative objectives that you can find along the path, such as when you have to save Mike who is trapped and gives you an armory code that you can use, but otherwise, the game is pretty straightforward.
At certain points in the game, you will come across major boss fights that up the difficulty even further, but in a good way. These are some of the most ambitious moments in Quantum Error, as the fight against Waylayer is definitely one of the highlights of the game. Even the first boss fight against Rosegthune takes some good strategy and is laid out well. It is just unfortunate that much of the rest of the game did not receive the level of care that some of the boss fights did.
In the early sections of the game, the checkpoints feel semi-fair to where you won’t usually be sent back too far if you end up dying. This changes drastically though once the A.R.G.U.S. system is introduced a few hours into the game as a save and upgrade station. From that point, checkpoints outside of those stations are few and far between, typically after a boss fight or something. In a normal game, this would be acceptable as it just makes the game a good bit harder and tests you to keep trying. The issue here though is that more times than not, your deaths in Quantum Error are a result of some bug or the broken weapon wheel giving you the incorrect weapon rather than pure difficulty, which will start to drive you crazy eventually.
While I have brought up a number of bugs already, Quantum Error just doesn’t even feel like it was a completely finished game in a lot of ways, or at least needed a lot more polish before release. My first experience with this was on the first actual mission in the game where you enter the Monad facility and are supposed to find all of the civilians and lead them to the exit. I was able to find them all and everything, but a major problem arose upon returning to the exit. The door that was supposed to be open, and was open on the subsequent attempt, was sealed shut and there was no way to open it. This led to me spending the next few minutes trying to find out if I missed something until my oxygen tank dwindled down and I died and had to start over again.
Enemies often clip walls also, happening whether they are alive or even after being shot and both the body and their gun or limbs have flung in another direction and clipped a wall. There was even a time when one of the big bulky enemies literally got stuck on my character model after dying and there was no way to get it off. Another particular moment I remember was a wave-based fight where there are four doors surrounding a room you are protecting and usually all four doors open at the start. Occasionally though, one of them just wouldn’t open and the enemies from that location would just stand there attacking and clipping continuously through the door. It’d be one thing if this was a nice touch to help players who are struggling by sealing up one door, but it just adds to the unfinished feeling of parts of the game.
