FPS Quest turns the perpetual battle for a good frame-rate into an emergent shadow war between rival geeks

I’m a bit tantalised by FPS Quest, but I do worry that it has already defanged its most interesting ideas. Developed by Farlight Games Industry, it’s a dungeon crawler in which your frame-rate “is your health”, with mistakes and damage causing slowness and stuttering.

To regain health/frame-rate, you must do what you do when running any game on a potato PC – fiddle with the settings like you’re bargaining with an especially recalcitrant devil. This extends from lowering the quality of wall textures and characters, to plucking out whole pieces of environment. The more you do this, of course, the stranger the world becomes and the harder it is to navigate. The killer line from the Steam page: “optimizing is risky”. You’ll also have to keep a lid on a simulation of your PC’s temperature, and there are faux-prototype off-map areas to explore via noclip-style abilities.

It’s a metafictional melange in the spirit of The Stanley Parable and Pony Island. The developers have woven a story around the ‘give me performance or give me death’ gimmick that engages some familiar philosophical disputation about authorial intent and reception.

You are a random player who has installed a weird mod. The mod’s developers are one of the story’s factions – they’re keen to monetise their creation. They’re opposed by OutofBounds, “enemies of monetization and difficulty, guiding you with shortcuts and secrets”. Both groups are at odds with the Custodians, “defenders of the original developer’s vision, opponents of glitches and cheats”. And then there are a couple of in-game AI personalities, the Null Process, “a broken AI that only wants you to stop progressing so it can rest”, and the Dungeon Lord, “an overenthusiastic, paternalistic, and clumsily offensive AI who tries to ‘help’ by removing obstacles”.

You’ll connect with these nebulous third parties mostly or exclusively through how you play, rather than by way of dialogue or text. There are unlockable “scripts” that seemingly affect your standing with the factions. One of these is a “dynamic bullet time” feature whereby you speed and slow the game using your mousewheel.

There is scope for more chinstroking beyond the intrigues detailed on that Steam page. If you literally make a bug a feature, is it still a bug? What counts as a ‘real’ glitch or technical error in a game that is ‘designed to be broken’? What counts as genuinely unfinished in a game that models the unfinished? We end up in this bizarre position of tethering authenticity to the absence of intention. Now, imagine if DICE suddenly applied all these brainy convolutions to the writing of Battlefield 6.

Again, though, I’m not sure FPS Quest has full confidence in its own concept. The narrative metaphor may prove to be set dressing for a regular fantasy action experience with progression elements, and a novel way of presenting secret areas. The developers already seem disinclined to push it too far, or take it too seriously. Death takes the form of an MS-DOS bluescreen with the text “the game will now close to prevent further humiliation” – more Borderlands than Barthes, for my onions.

The devs also qualify that they’re only simulating FPS drops within the simulation, not actually altering your PC frame rate, because “playing at low real FPS is uncomfortable and nauseating. That’s why the game simulates a low-FPS world and turns it into gameplay: a fun challenge, just like other games turn unfun or boring real-life tasks into playable mechanics.” I understand the caution here, but… I do often like it when games make me feel uncomfortable, and now I know in advance that FPS Quest won’t challenge me too much. Anyway, this is out: at some point. Thanks to PCGN for passing it on.