Quell kicked my bum harder than Ring Fit, but is there space for a new gaming fitness obsession?
Here comes a new challenger.
During Lockdown, the only thing more scarce than flour was Switch fitness game Ring Fit Adventure. It was the perfect thing at the perfect time: a game that provided a home workout in a period when you had to stay home. Strap the controller to you, grab the oversized resistance wheel thing, and get moving. Everyone wanted one, and the desire for it lingered long after Lockdown. Today, Ring Fit has sold more than 15m units - it's one of the most successful games on Switch. Nintendo sensed there was a market and Ring Fit proved it. And it's not just Nintendo: companies like Peloton, with its uber-expensive exercise bike and integrated workout platform, have shown people will pay significant amounts of money to gamify their fitness needs, and it's into this exact space a new challenger has arrived.
It's called Quell and it's currently £190, and I tried it this week and I really liked it. The topline thing you need to know is that it delivers a punishing workout. It's more intense than Ring Fit; after a short demo plus a 20-minute regular session, I was dripping sweat freely on the rug in Quell's smallish London office. There was no air conditioning - enough said. That's not to say Ring Fit can't be intense but it's generally a calmer experience. Quell is designed to push it up a notch.
The second thing to know is that Quell feels more actively gamey than Ring Fit, which I was quite surprised about. It's built with roguelike principles in mind, so you try to see how far you can get in the game but also build and customise a loadout as you go. Do you want this power or that one? That kind of thing. And then between runs, you equip the items you earned, affecting your power and statistics, adding a layer of role-playing game progression to the mix. "Real fitness. Real gaming," is the company's motto, so you get a sense of the areas it's trying to push on.
Let me rewind a bit. Let's talk about the equipment and what you get for £190, because there are some important distinctions to make. Quell's Impact package - the standard pack - comes with two gun-grip-shaped controllers that are a bit like the Wii's nunchuck, but better, and they connect to a smallish sensor you slot in a neoprene belt around your midriff, which in turn connects wirelessly to a dongle plugged into your PC. Yes, you need to connect it to a PC in order to play - I'll come back to that. I found this all comfortable to wear although the controllers do get sweaty and a bit slippery the more you workout.
The other very important part of the set-up are the resistance straps, which connect to the back of the belt and then to your wrists, around your thumb joint. These, as the name suggests, provide pushing and punching resistance, which is one of the key things about the Quell fitness routine, and the bands are interchangeable should you want to toughen the workout up. I had it on the easiest resistance and was struggling to keep any punching form by the end, so good luck if you do.
I'm talking a lot about punching because currently, Quell is based heavily around boxing - that's the fundamentals of the workout here. The guiding principle is high interval impact training, so bursts of intense exercise with cooldown activity in between - typically jogging from place to place in the game. It's a bit like an endless runner in these sections, as you use the trigger buttons on the controller to steer yourself and collect as many glowing blobs as you can. The more you get, the better your reward. Occasionally, you leap in the air with your arms up to signal a jump, or squat to signal a slide, or sprint to signal a sprint. Then, you come to a clearing where you fight.
You face two or three enemies in a row, each with slightly different tactics and approaches that you need to study a bit in order to overcome. Think Punch-Out!!, sort of. For instance, some enemies sprout spikes on one side of their body, so if you jab or hook that side of the body, you'll take damage. Some enemies will block attacks, so you'll have to watch where they've left uncovered and attack it. If they block high: uppercut. Some enemies require ducks and jumps. Other enemies require punch-matching in a rhythm action way - uppercut now, hook now, jab now. And some enemies simply require a frenzied attack to pulverise them as quickly as possible. I was good at this; defence wasn't my strong suit (you get given individual scores).
Fighting, then, is an alive and varied thing. It's not like in Ring Fit where you select an exercise to repeat in order to defeat enemies in front of you, turn-based Pokémon style. It's more real-time, like an action game where you're learning basic attack and defence patterns, and looking for openings. There's a bit of magic you can perform too, by holding a face button and pushing both hands out in front of you, and though I only used a heal spell, it saved my life a few times. If you do happen to die - get knocked down - you restart where you were with a slight penalty. It's no big deal.
What I play of Shardfall, the game, I like, but it's currently the only game available for Quell. There's a lot of it I haven't seen, and clearly there's an experience here that will sustain many hours of play, but it's still only one game. Apparently three games are in development for next year, and there are updates coming and what sound like smaller additional social experiences - it's a connected ecosystem with other players - but none of that is yet to materialise.
To return to another earlier point: Quell requires a PC to play. It's not a standalone device and is unlikely to be one for the foreseeable future because that's a very expensive proposition. Not everyone has a PC near their TV, which is something I find misleading about the Quell promotional material, but in the company's defence, as a group of the founders and employees explain to me, the system requirements are designed to be low enough for Shardfall to run on laptops - old ones, even. There are even explorations to see whether it can run on phones. Consoles, too, are being explored. "It's on the roadmap," co-founder and CEO Cam Brookhouse tells me, though it doesn't sound like they've had conversations with the platform holders yet.
Quell also requires an internet connection and a monthly £5 subscription in order to play, which isn't great - particularly after paying £190 for the Quell package in the first place. The subscription ostensibly enables fitness stat tracking and connectivity features with other players - leaderboards and things - but since you don't have a choice but to pay for it, it's not really an added value proposition. It's there, really, to make up for slim to nonexistent margins on hardware. The system currently sells for £190 with an RRP of £300, though it's never been sold at that top price. "We are so early days that the pricing side of this is experimental," Brookhouse adds, "so who knows if we'll ever sell it at the full £300 retail price."
As for the subscription: it's not going to go up. At least, not in the near term. "There are no plans to increase the subscription price in the near term and if that did happen over the long term, it would be because people were getting a ton more for their money," Brookhouse says. "It would come in tandem with improvements to the offering, not just like, 'Hey, pay more for the same thing.'"
I have reservations then. It's quite expensive, it's not immediately TV plug-and-play friendly in the way Ring Fit is, assuming of course you have a Switch, and the company is relatively new and untested. But I am also filled with a sense of excitement for Quell. This is a start-up tech company, to a degree, but it has a nice buzz around it. There have been teething issues that you'll read about in some customer reviews - a few supplier issues, some resistance band issues, some software issues, some sensor issues (it has trouble recognising my sprint on a couple of occasions) - but in all of those cases the problems are known and have either been fixed or are being fixed. They're watching, they're listening, and if needed, replacements have been sent out. But the replacement rate itself is less than one percent. "It's extremely, extremely low," says Brookhouse.
It's the beginning of the journey for Quell - it's only been on full release since May, though you may have seen it on Kickstarter before that (it's changed since then). Most kinks have been ironed out although some remain, and there are more experiences to deliver - more variety. It would be nice not to have to punch-punch-punch furiously every time you play, though I expect it will get you quite fit if you do. In other words, as enjoyable as it already is, there's some potential left to fulfil. Whether it will or not, I don't know, but the team is eager and it's hard not to be in some way infected by its optimism. Sales are apparently good and "we're extremely well capitalised", says Brookhouse, so the future looks bright.
I would like to play it again. My muscles ache pleasantly from the 20-minute-something workout a few days ago and I feel that roguelike urge to do better a second time. There's a long way to go for Quell to grow from 10,000 players to 15 million, like Ring Fit, but the chase has begun.