Quantum Error

Quantum Error desperately wants to just be a dystopian sci-fi CGI film, without any pesky gameplay to kill its momentum. Alas, there is a clunky, antiquated, and unrefined shooter wedged between the game’s Unreal Engine 5 cinematics. Love and attention was poured into the cutscenes, but the shooter is malnourished and not very much fun. Next time, just make a movie.

If your goal this Halloween season is to scare up some heart pounding, palm-sweating first person horror action, Quantum Error should be low on your list of priorities. Its stylish and unsettling camera work suggests a depth and mystery that just is not here. Instead, you’ll be terrorized by some extremely stupid and repetitive monsters and tortured by a painfully austere checkpoint system that comes with sometimes-gamebreaking respawns. Weapons are competent but rather mundane for the rich and moody sci-fi setting, and the ghost of missed opportunity haunts the firefighting system, which appears robust mechanically but is given almost no opportunity to justify its inclusion at all.

There's nothing to recommend Quantum Error. No part of the game shines, and the ambition of a small team can't save it from the fact that ambition didn't pay off. The bad combat, incoherent story, awkward firefighting mechanics, and clumsy level design all come together to create a game I couldn't recommend at $10, let alone $60. There are too many games out there that do a much better job, and the unique ideas in Quantum Error are too poorly executed for anyone to enjoy.

Quantum Error feels like a game the team had passion about. There are good ideas here wrapped in a package that is executed poorly on all fronts. It doesn’t help that the developers decided to enrage fanboy wars on Twitter leading up to the release of the game. It put it in a spotlight the game wasn’t built to take. The price tag also hurts as this is a full-priced game in a budget game build. I could be a lot more forgiving if the sticker price was around $30, but at $60 I cannot recommend anyone lay down the funds for this one. It is disappointing in almost every aspect.

The only interesting part of Quantum Error is the premise, hinting at some intriguing cosmic horror ideas. Unfortunately, it's buried underneath rubble filled with bad controls, janky performance, and humdrum gameplay. Unless a complete overhaul could be implemented, there's no way a patch could save this game from itself.