I think Q-UP might be gaslighting me. It most certainly is a real video game, I played it myself. And yet it presents an entirely different vision of reality where it is the coin flipping eSport of choice. The worst part is that it nearly convinced me that such a reality is a pretty good one. Perhaps even more than half!
Here’s the strange lowdown. Q-UP is the latest game from Universal Paperclips and Babble Royale designer Frank Lantz through his family-run studio Everybody House Games. In it, you flip a coin, which the game describes as being the fairest of games because it is always a 50/50 chance that you will win. There are two teams, Q-Side, and Up-Side. Imagine you’re on Q-Side for a moment, and the coin lands Q-Side up. It does that two more times and you’ve won, a first to three type deal. That’s the game! And also it’s not the game at all.
Q-UP is coated from head to toe in the aesthetics of something like Overwatch. There are different heroes you can choose from with different skills that affect how much XP you earn, which is what the actual game is. You are trying to game the game so that you get as much XP as possible, whether you lose the coin flip or not, mixing and matching these skills so that they react with one another based on the results of the flip, or even just when the flip happens itself.
You can really rack up some XP too! I somehow managed to get over 200,000 points in one round, going up an entire rank in the game’s demo, and let me tell you, the rush I felt was unlike anything any game that Q-UP is satirizing has given me before. I truly mostly don’t care for games like Overwatch, the shooting just doesn’t appeal to me and I don’t like being called slurs by children even on a good day. But a game where I can just cut all of that out and get straight to the heart of it all, which is making number go up? That’s a thing of beauty.
You can also genuinely play this game online, seemingly with strangers or your own friends. If that’s not your bag there’s a single-player option too.
Even in just its demo, Q-UP is a fascinating deconstruction of what makes eSports works, and also where it fails. Sometimes you’ll have a match where you lose three flips in a row, and you’ll get an email from the developer apologising for getting it wrong, offering you some currency to make up for it. Other times you’ll spend 50 gold on the chance of pulling a literal whale, with the game outright telling you it’s a 0% chance. And you’ll do it multiple times anyway just to check.
Subtle, Q-UP is not, but it is genuinely fun, and somehow manages to capture that “one more game” quality that the best eSport games have. There’s no release date for it just yet, though you can give it a go yourself by checking out the demo on Steam.