Just when you think there's no room for shooters to innovate, here's one where your health is literally your framerate

Just when you think there are no worlds left for the first-person shooter to conquer, some mad lad goes and makes one where your health is literally your framerate. Spotted by PCGN, FPS Quest is an upcoming FPS that's all about, uh, your FPS. That is to say, it's an FPS where the framerate you experience is directly tied to the damage you take. Peppered with bullet holes? Enjoy a crisp 10 frames-a-second, no matter your monitor and GPU.

Which is all quite amusing, I reckon, but I think the part that most piques my interest is the game's upgrade system. There are new guns that do more damage and churn out more shots per second, sure, but it looks like the meat of the game's upgrades revolve around finding new and exciting ways to break the whole thing.

Want more frames, and thereby more health? Try swapping out your 3D-modelled gun for a 2D sprite, try hacking apart the level geometry, try futzing with the whole thing so much you eventually break the game.

It genuinely seems quite clever. For instance, one of the upgrades visible in the game's promo bumpf amps up your frames by 10 fps. How? By yanking out all the columns in the game's map, effectively obliterating most—perhaps all—of your available cover.

It sounds like you can eventually screw with the game so much that the whole thing becomes downright broken: "remove too much, and the world becomes more dangerous, confusing, or outright absurd." It reminds me a little of Double Fine's Hack 'n' Slash—the old adventure game that lets you literally mess around with the game's code to solve—or obviate—its puzzles.

Of course, Hack 'n' Slash didn't quite live up to the promise of its premise—you were really just altering variables rather than getting truly down and dirty with the game's inner workings. I understand why: it'd probably be too complex—and too prone to completely breaking—to give players too much access. Perhaps FPS Quest will strike a happy balance?