At the GDC in San Francisco, we tried out Quell, a new device designed for the fitness and well-being of gamers.
The pandemic and the pounds we’ve put on due to Covid don’t exactly make us a leading voice in the fitness industry. We used to do Muay Thai and weight training three times a week, but now we have the energy of a sub-brand battery pack, and we are as motivated as a Serie A team in the 2022/2023 Scudetto race.
Nonetheless, during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, we went into a hotel room, sat on a bed, and watched someone else sweat it out over a new invention that combines gaming and fitness.
Then don’t say that we wouldn’t do everything for our readers. (Disclaimer: We played first person for five minutes, but didn’t want to contribute to the general stench of a conference full of gamers, so we waved the white flag at the first sign of sweat).
Quell, the gadget to keep fit —
Quell is a new gadget that uses motion sensors and resistance bands to detect your movements and introduce them into a range of video games, training you as you play. The game we’ve seen in action, Shardfall, is the first of many, set in a post-apocalyptic world where you run on the spot to move with a first-person view, punch evil robots, parry their blows and jump to dodge them.
The device is easy to set up, with an adjustable belt that fits around your waist, resistance bands that attach to the core harness, and Wii nunchuck-style motion controllers attached to the ends of the bands. You could have a similar experience with VR, but Quell promises more intensity and above all does not force you to use a heavy headset during exercise sessions. Ring Fit is another competitor, but Nintendo’s device only supports a list of exercises, where Shardfall throws waves of robots at you to face in complete freedom.
The idea is that you can still do squats, resistance exercises, push-ups, and running, but you’re so immersed in the experience that you don’t even realize you’re doing them. Fitness is a consequence of the game rather than the game itself. It’s the same reason we’ve always liked Muay Thai: it’s brutal, but you’re too busy thinking about how not to get kicked in the head to care.
Exercises are no longer boring —
It’s an elegant solution to the fitness problem for anyone who finds exercise boring, but the project didn’t start that way: Shardfall is the culmination of years of iteration. Speaking with Quell CEO Cameron Brookhouse, we couldn’t help but laugh when he told us that the first prototype was a punching bag with your phone inside. Thankfully, we’ve all had a moment where we wanted to punch our phone, but it only took a little testing to figure out the weaknesses of this idea.
“The early days, when we were literally putting it together with welding and sewing machines in my living room, we had more than a few explosions and sparks all over the room,” laughs Brookhouse. “Now, of course, we are working with a professional insurance company, so there has been a rigorous QC and we know that [il dispositivo] it can handle much higher loads than we would expect it to be subjected to.”
And the device looks sturdy, indeed. It wears easily, but conveys all the power you unleash on the screen: if you put more intensity into a punch to hit an enemy, you will also feel it in the game. The only issues we had were with some faster combinations, which didn’t see the game registering all shots promptly, but in that sense there’s still time to sort things out ahead of the year-end release.
What’s the reward? —
Between fights, the game reminded us of a first-person Sonic, where you run full speed ahead when you hit the right cadence, changing direction with the triggers on the controllers. It’s all designed to give you a full-body, high-intensity workout, pacing between slow and fast to get your heart rate up and down as needed. In itself, in terms of gameplay, we are talking about a sort of roguelite, the basic genre is still a high-intensity workout.
The reward for all of this – beyond returning to pre-Covid form, of course – are cosmetics, new enemies and new biomes to explore: keep going through the game, and receive ever more flashy gauntlets, the flashiness of which will it gives back a sense of how much progress you’ve managed to make over time.
Quell has not only gaming experts behind it, but there are also people from the fitness world who are working on it: the person who demoisted us at GDC for Shardfall was Maia Gummer, the fitness lead of Quell, who hails from a background in space physiology, where he helped train astronauts to work and live in low-gravity environments.
A refreshing experience —
It was refreshing to see something like Quell at a conference full of startups busy chasing after some trend. NFTs, blockchains and all sorts of gimmicks – it was all here at GDC. Booth after booth full of bespectacled spokespersons selling smoke to anyone willing to hear them speak.
Finding this little hotel room away from all that chaos, filled with people who believe in the thing they’re creating, was like ending up in an oasis in the middle of the desert. Whether it will be a hit or not remains to be seen, but the Collector’s Edition of Quell is now available for pre-order on the official website if you’re interested.
Written by Kirk McKeand for GLHF
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