There's nothing worse than a stuttering frame rate. Whether you can't afford a modern graphics card because AI tech bros are hoarding them in data centers, that big new release isn't quite optimized, or you're just trying to play Crysis in the year of our lord 2026, poor performance is infuriating. However, it's something you may have to suffer through while playing FPS Quest, a meta game which uses your frame rate as your health bar. If you want to survive, you'll have to break the game itself and stutter to victory.

Read the full story on PCGamesN: This new FPS game uses your frame rate as your health bar, so I'll brb after I've bought a 240Hz monitor

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.

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