1. I have long thought that short stories were the ideal medium for speculative fiction but games like Bithell's Quarantine Circular are making me reconsider this opinion. The what if questions the genre is so good at offering typically don't require too much exposition so I feel like it's best to dig right in and get to it. Shot stories do that. Games do that and make you a part of the story.
2. Quarantine Circular is not too involved in terms of plot. Everyone on earth is dying of a new kind of disease. An alien, dubbed Gabriel by an AI translator program, has been captured by the team of people who are responsible for fighting this disease. Gabriel, as it so happens, claims to have a cure for the disease. As the player, you are tasked w/ trying to figure out if Gabriel's visit is opportune or if maybe him showing up is just a little too much of a coincidence.
3. This has pretty nice graphics but you really only need the text. Your only real way interact is to chose your spoken responses to any given bit of dialog.
4. There are six characters in the story and you play as all of them. Most of the characters are fairly sympathetic and so I generally found a choice of something like what I would actually say. However, this is one character who I found unpalatable so playing as her was a bit frustrating.
5. So back to speculative fiction and why this game does the genre so well: the questions here are fairly straightforward but highly intertwined: What if our current medical treatments fail? How will society react when faced w/ an obvious and imminent threat of extinction? How will we treat extraterrestrials who come upon us in such times of stress?
6. These are all presented w/in the framework of a few conversations that also manage to paint a portrait of a wide universe of civilizations beyond that of humans on earth. This comes w/ a host of questions in its own right but I will spare you another list.
7. What games and Quarantine Circular in particular add to this genre is perspective. You are not along for the ride in struggling w/ these new problems, you are actually dealing w/ them yourself. It is a more sympathetic standpoint. If you pass judgement, you are forced to pass judgement on yourself.
8. This reliance on perspective makes switching characters for each scene make a ton of sense. Breaking the rules seems appealing when you are on bottom of the org chart but much less so when you are in charge. I even found some sympathy for the one character I didn't much like when I felt the weight that was exclusively resting on her.
9. The central choices in Quarantine Circular almost all revolve around how you treat the alien, Gabriel. He has a compelling offer for the humans, one that can save them all. It is also possible he's lying and leaving him to his devices will lead to disaster. I suspect most people will lean towards helping him out, at least initially, and I think the game guides you a little bit in that direction through its dialog choices.
10. If I have a problem w/ this game is it does not really do a good job of
instilling any kind of doubt what the alien Gabriel's real purpose is.
If you don't doubt your choice, the ending, whatever it is, is
either going to feel either obvious or abrupt.
11. Quarantine Circular absolutely demands repeat playthroughs. For starters, the first time through, it might not end how you want. After that, it is just interesting to see what other outcomes you might find and play w/ some of the less consequential dialog choices. On your first few times through, it maintains the feeling that every choice aside from the most obviously superfluous ones matters. After that, you can skip through scene by scene and rather quickly go through all the branching outcomes.
12. I did find that even w/ the limited choices of dialog, that I wanted to and was able to roll play each character a bit. The grimmest outcome came about when I tried to play everyone as lawful good. Let that be a lesson to you, kiddos, break the law as much as possible.
13. You are probably not seeing the story presented by Quarantine Circular for the first time--a suspicious stranger from outer-space offering to save Earth--but I think this will be the first time you'll have seen it from quite this angle. I cannot speak for its eventual longevity in the public eye but it did seem to draw a great deal of attention from game journalists so, for now, this has the makings of becoming a landmark of speculative fiction. You don't want to miss out regardless.
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