For many people, a steady level of performance–no framerate dips or slowdown–is an important part of any video game. But what if it was the most important part of a game, such that if your performance tanked, you’d die? That’s the elevator pitch for FPS Quest, an upcoming first-person shooter that looks wild.
FPS Quest starts off as a fantasy RPG with skeletons and knights in armor. But after getting their ass kicked one too many times, the game’s protagonist installs some mods that them decidedly non-fantasy weapons like a pistol, an assault rifle, and a shotgun. The game within the game wasn’t built to handle these mods, however, so from there, things start to break, and FPS Quest becomes all about playing through a game that is falling apart while also trying to avoid a crash, which will kill you.
The game’s Steam store page describes what sounds like a roguelike shooter in which you go on different runs through “prebuilt but recombined levels” that get more corrupted and glitchy as you progress. To keep the game from crashing, you can do things like lower the in-game graphics, use in-game mods to remove geometry, and escape out of bounds into unfinished or leftover bits of the game world. It’s a trippy but cool idea for a game that has me very intrigued.
One thing the game’s developers make clear on Steam is that FPS Quest doesn’t actually run at a lower framerate, which can cause problems and make people feel sick. Instead, it simulates playing a game at a low FPS. That’s good to know. FPS Quest doesn’t have a release date yet, but I’ve already added it to my wishlist and can’t wait to play.
