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.