It's genuinely impressive how far technology has come. We've gone from small development teams being able to make something that looks like it belongs on the NES to small development teams creating genuinely impressive and modern titles. Unreal Engine 5 seems like it is going to contribute to that with a really amazing set of options. In theory, Quantum Error is an interesting showcase of what a small team can pull off with UE5. In practice, it ends up being too ambitious for its own good and offers very little beyond visuals.

Quantum Error is set in the distant future. You play as Jacob Thomas, a firefighter with a tragic past. You and your team are sent to the Monad Quantum Research Lab to put out a sudden blaze and rescue the lab employees. Of course, your team finds itself trapped inside the lab and under attack by soldiers. Before long, you're encountering everything from undead horrors to alien creatures, and you're venturing from the depths of the facility to the deepest reaches of outer space.

Quantum Error's story is mostly incoherent. It's ambitious and goes through multiple time jumps, flashbacks, flashbacks inside time jumps, a weirdly convoluted and slow-paced narrative, and various attempts at horror. The problem is that it just doesn't work. The actual storytelling feels like someone's student film project, with lots of attempts at artistic visuals that feel kind of toothless or comical. Characters barely have personalities, events are poorly explained, and I'd be hard-pressed to tell you what happened besides Bad Thing and Monsters. I've certainly seen worse stories, but Quantum Error is one of the worst-told stories I've encountered in a full-budget game.

The big gameplay mechanic in Quantum Error is firefighting. Since you play as a firefighter, you have access to a variety of different firefighting tools and rescue techniques. Some are straightforward. A fire ax can let you bust through walls. A saw can carve holes in walls to let out air and prevent a backdraft when opening a door. The Jaws of Life can be used to force open doors or clamp down pipes to shut off fire spigots. You even need to wear a respirator to keep yourself breathing in unhealthy environments, which adds a time limit to some exploration.

In addition, you sometimes need to actually act as a firefighter. Sealed doors can't just be opened. You need to feel them to see if there's a risk of an explosion when opening the door, and if there is, you need to find a way to vent the flames so you can pry it open. Sometimes, you need to drag injured people to safety and perform CPR. You'll also need to use fire extinguishers and hoses to put out flames to access areas that you couldn't reach before. To its credit, the game goes all-in on trying to include various elements of being a firefighter and give it some sense of actual weight.

In theory, that all sounds cool, but in practice, it feels bad. The various tools feel really janky and awkward. The ax can sometimes break down walls and doors, and it tends to leave edges that are annoying and can catch you as you go through. Saws can only be used at very specific places, and it isn't always clear where. Dragging someone to safety involves walking backward, so you can't see where you're going unless you turn around, which involves dragging your NPC body in a way that looks ridiculous. Even CPR is weird, since the game asks you to blow into your PS5's microphone — something that I haven't seen since the days of the Nintendo Wii.

If you hoped the combat might be better, you'd be wrong. The weapons are clunky and weightless, lacking even the most basic feedback and generally feeling awful to use. Half of the time, it can be difficult to tell if you're hitting something because there's no sense of feedback to damage. You can unload shots into an enemy, and they won't so much as flinch until they fall over dead. Even when you get better weapons, they feel so incredibly awkward that they're no fun to use. You're more likely to see an enemy's arm fall off while they charge at you than you are to feel like you hit them.

Enemy AI is awful and frequently veers between being dumb and detecting you through walls. Quantum Error has a stealth mechanic that I couldn't get to work; the enemies always seemed to see me no matter how stealthy I was, and if I turned on my flashlight, they would often see me through the walls. It made the early parts of the game especially frustrating because what the game wanted from me was not really what I could end up doing, and I would just hide behind a wall using my fire ax on anything that came around a corner. There are some cool ideas in the title. Using your firefighting gear to break through walls to sneak behind enemies is a neat concept, but it's so poorly executed that it never feels good.

Even if you ignore the general bad design, the game is full of many baffling gameplay design choices. I can't figure out how any of them got past the basic design phase. Want to open a chest? You have to swap to a pry bar to do it every time. Want to check your map? Find a randomly located map terminal. Swapping weapons is absurdly slow and finicky. Health pick-ups need to be used except in certain battles, where they inexplicably don't. Checkpoints are inconsistent and can be far apart, and you can't save and quit and expect to return to where you were. The list goes on and on and on.

The level design isn't great, either. It tries to give the impression of a wider open area, but much of the time, you're stuck going in a linear path. Occasionally, there's a side path where you can find a mod to upgrade a weapon, resources to improve your stats, or color changes for gear. Various tools can open new paths, but it doesn't add much to the game since what you need to open a path is positioned directly next to the path.

I'm hard-pressed to think of anything positive to say about the gameplay. In theory, I like the idea of combining a firefighting simulator with a spooky underground base, but the result is that neither ends up feeling fun or satisfying. The game tries to be so many things, and none of them feel polished or fun. If anything, it feels incredibly amateur in a way I'd expect from a $15 indie title, not a $60 full-fledged game.

Quantum Error lacks some of the most basic features that should be present in a video game, such as subtitles. While we were told subtitles should be added at some point in the future, it doesn't change the fact that they are not there now, and the audio mixing is so bad that I couldn't hear half of the dialogue in the game. It is honestly the only game I can remember in recent memory without subtitles.

On top of that, Quantum Error is incredibly buggy. I ran into a lot of large and small bugs, several of which were game-breaking. I lost all of my game progress when, after dying, I ended up respawning in a bizarre, sealed room filled with glitchy environmental objects. After about 15 seconds, my character suddenly start taking damage and dying. Respawning put me back in that room with no way out, and the lack of a manual save meant that I was hard-locked. This could've been an impressive horror moment if it were intentional.

To some degree, Quantum Error looks impressive. If nothing else, it's a nice showcase of how the Unreal Engine 5 can do lots of lighting and fog effects. Unfortunately, it's very much a game that looks great in screenshots. While it has some visually impressive movements, the character models look clumsy, the environments look repetitive, the enemy design is lackluster, and the use of lighting and fog makes it tough to tell if you're in an area filled with dangerous smoke or regular dust. The voice acting is incredibly low quality, and while one or two of the actors are trying really hard, the others sound like they wandered in off the street.

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.

Score: 4.0/10