Quarantine Circular

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

Quarantine Circular is a Graphic Adventure that is a successor to developer Mike Bithell’s prior entry in the genre, Subsurface Circular, although the plot of the two games are unrelated. Where Subsurface followed the story of a robotic investigator looking into reports of mysterious disappearances in the robot community, Quarantine, as the name may imply, has a story that likely hits a bit closer to home for many of us in the current COVID-19 crisis.

The setup is this – the world is being overrun by a horrible virus that’s sweeping the planet. Millions are dying, and entire cities are being placed under quarantine. In the midst of all of this, an alien visitor arrives and is detained by the military and placed in its own individual quarantine (as it happens, this is the second of at least three meanings the word “quarantine” has in this game), while scientists and military personnel try to determine what to do about the extraterrestrial, as well as the increasingly bleak situation with the virus.

As with Subsurface Circular, the entire game of Quarantine Circular plays out in text conversations between the characters, with the detailed characters themselves standing around looking at each other in a static environment. Where this made sense in Subsurface, since the characters were all robots, it also makes sense here, as all of the characters save from the alien are wearing futuristic hazmat suits that obscure their faces. The alien itself is particularly detailed, with an mouth that has numerous flaps that animate when it’s… breathing, I’m guessing? This movement doesn’t correspond with talking, but again, this makes sense – one can only guess how the technology enabling communication with this creature is making that happen. While we’re on the topic of presentation, the music here is all solid, and does a good job of conveying the weight of this situation.

Where Subsurface Circular had players finding clues in conversations to use to forward the story, Quarantine Circular is less interested in social puzzles and more in weighing the social effects of how you interact with characters, as well as the ethical choices you make in these conversations.

Interestingly, players will take the role of nearly every one of the game’s six characters at some point, which is an interesting idea, but one I’m not sure works all that well – these different characters all have not only very different personalities, but different goals, and it’s jarring to switch from playing one character to another whose goals are completely antithetical to the previous one. Do you want this new character to succeed since you’re now playing as them? Do you want them to fail so the other character succeeds? Do you try to answer in the way that you feel is fitting for the character? This uncertainty is one of the biggest issues I had while playing the game.

Having said that, while the narrative point of view switching from one character to another was disorienting, the story remained completely riveting throughout, so much so that upon completing the game (it’s rather short, just a few hours long), I immediately went back in to see how much my choices would affect a second playthrough. I’m happy to say that, while the branching narrative here isn’t quite as strong in its options as I would like, the storyline definitely does have significant divergence points, and your choices very clearly do affect the story (the lack of this being one of my biggest problems with Subsurface). As a whole, this is an excellent story about trust, survival, risk, and intervention, and it is one that is truly thought-provoking.

While Quarantine Circular’s character-swapping narrative and short length both hold this back somewhat, overall this is an excellent, well-told story that feels extremely relevant right now, and it fixes the biggest flaw I had with the game’s predecessor. Those looking for a superb bite-size narrative experience would do well to give this game a try.

tl;dr – Quarantine Circular is a Graphic Adventure game about an interrogation of an alien life form in the midst of a global pandemic. This game’s well-told story makes it well worth playing despite its short length and the confusion caused by its character-swapping narrative.

Grade: B+

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