Quarantine Zone: The Last Check Delivers Intense Checkpoint Drama, Strategy, and Dark Humor

If you have scrolled through TikTok or YouTube Shorts over the past year, chances are you have seen clips of a gritty, high-stakes checkpoint simulator that looks like Papers, Please had a terrifying baby with The Last of Us. That game is Quarantine Zone: The Last Check, and after racking up a staggering 1.3 million wishlists and over 2 million demo plays, it is finally out in the wild.

Developed by Brigada Games and published by the chaotic minds at Devolver Digital, Quarantine Zone puts you in the boots of a government agent manning a critical entry point during a zombie outbreak. Your job sounds simple on paper. Screen survivors, manage resources, and keep the infection out. But as anyone who has played the demo knows, simplicity goes out the window the moment you have to decide between letting a desperate family through or saving your last ration of fuel for the defense turrets.

The Checkpoint Is Open

The premise of Quarantine Zone is immediately gripping because it blends the mundane with the horrifying. You are an administrator at the end of the world. The full release, which dropped today on Steam and Xbox Game Pass PC, expands significantly on the demo that took the internet by storm.

You are not just stamping passports here. You are the first and last line of defense. The game gives you a suite of tools to determine if the person standing in front of you is a frightened refugee or a ticking biological time bomb. You have got a new portable X-ray to scan internal organs for signs of infection (or contraband, because people are still smuggling things even during the apocalypse). You have a metiascope to check pupils for dilation, and you can even drag suspicious individuals to the lab to examine unknown symptoms.

It creates a gameplay loop that is incredibly tense. Every person who walks up to your booth is a puzzle wrapped in a moral dilemma. Do you trust the guy who says his cough is just a cold? Do you waste valuable testing supplies on a child? Every decision in has weight, and the consequences usually involve zombies breaking down your gates.

Tools of the Trade (and That Hammer)

One of the funniest and most disturbing additions to Quarantine Zone is the promotion you get. You are technically a doctor now, or at least you have the tools of one. The game hands you a large medical reflex hammer, and let me tell you, the power trip is real.

While it is meant to test reflexes, the internet has already figured out that a heavy hammer in a survival game has other uses. It brings a weirdly dark sense of humor to the experience. You are there trying to save humanity, but sometimes you are just a guy with a hammer trying to figure out if the person in front of you is going to try to eat your face.

This blend of serious simulation and slight absurdity is very on-brand for Devolver Digital. The game doesn’t shy away from the grim reality of its setting, but it gives you enough mechanical freedom to make your own fun, even if that fun involves questionable medical practices.

More Than Just Stamping Passports

What sets Quarantine Zone apart from other admin simulators is that you are not stuck in your booth the whole time. When things go south (and they will go south), you have to defend your post.

The combat offers a nice variety of approaches. You can keep your distance and use armed drones to pick off the infected from safety, or you can draw your sidearm and get messy. The developers have also added a mechanic where you can trap zombies in cages and feed them corpses. It sounds gruesome because it is, but the government pays you for captured zombies. In a world where resources are scarce, selling a few ghouls might be the difference between upgrading your defenses or getting overrun on Day 10.

Managing the Apocalypse

The new base management interface in Quarantine Zone is where the long-term strategy comes into play. You are viewing things from a bird’s eye perspective, juggling food, fuel, and the structural integrity of your checkpoint. It adds a layer of RTS (Real-Time Strategy) anxiety to the mix.

You have to upgrade your defenses, manage the morale of your team, and ensure you have enough supplies to make it through the night. The full release of Quarantine Zone includes a ton of improvements to this system, making the base building feel much more robust than it did in the demo. You are constantly balancing the micro-management of screening individuals with the macro-management of keeping your entire operation from collapsing.

Is It Worth the Entry Fee?

If you are a fan of stressful management games or just want to see what all the TikTok hype is about, Quarantine Zone is absolutely worth a look. It is currently $19.99 on Steam with a 10% launch discount, and it is also available on Xbox Game Pass PC if you are already a subscriber.

The game manages to capture that specific “just one more day” feeling that makes titles like Stardew Valley or Civilization so addictive, but replaces the farming and diplomacy with autopsies and drone strikes. It is stressful, it is messy, and thanks to that medical hammer, it is surprisingly funny.

So go ahead and get checked. Just hope the agent at the Quarantine Zone gate is having a good day.