The Quarry, released earlier this year, is an interactive drama horror game developed by Supermassive Games and published by 2K. Envisioned as a spiritual successor to Supermassive’s 2015 game Until Dawn, The Quarry maintains the same choose-your-own-adventure gameplay while swapping out the setting for a summer camp after all the campers have gone home for the season. This time around, the cast includes the likes of Brenda Song, Ariel Winter, Justice Smith, David Arquette, and Ted Raimi trying to survive the night from the supernatural creatures hunting them.
Let me start by saying that I loved Until Dawn. My wife and I made a tradition of playing it every winter, trying to achieve various endings and different degrees of character survival. We always make sure our first playthrough of games like or even Detroit: Become Human are organic, waiting until subsequent plays to try to manufacture certain scenarios or endings. That being said, although I tried to judge The Quarry on its own merits, the two titles are so close to identical in terms of gameplay and style that it was almost impossible not to compare them. I will detail the most egregious of these differences in the coming paragraphs.
The summer-camp setting is perfect for this style of throwback horror adventure, immediately invoking such ’80s horror stalwarts as Friday the 13th and Sleepaway Camp. It also sprinkles in some Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Cabin in the Woods, especially in the later parts of the game. The developers did a great job setting the atmosphere early and often, making sure that even when the characters feel or act safe, you can never really relax because you know exactly what is lurking just off screen, never really sure when it’s time to show itself. At least on your first playthrough, that is.
The characters also play these parts as if they were pulled directly from the films that inspired the game. Lovestruck teens unwittingly put themselves and others at risk with dimwitted plans and brain-scratching decisions, and once you set aside your own critical thinking skills, their inability to act rationally really helps with the immersion. I mean, someone has to read from the Necronomicon or complete the Lament Configuration, right?
Even with this picture-perfect horror setting in place, though, there are times when The Quarry seems intent on holding your hand or forcing you down linear sections bookended by back-to-back cut scenes. There was more than one instance when a cut scene completed and the game gave control back to the player only long enough to walk down a hall or up a staircase for a new cut scene to start—as if your gameplay section only existed to make the two scenes seem shorter. This seems to be a trend I’m noticing more in modern games. Maybe there’s something behind the scenes being accomplished this way, but it has always been frustrating to me. Especially when I scour this barren hallway for way longer than necessary looking for collectables before proceeding through the doorway at the end that will start the new cut scene.
Supermassive seemed like it wanted to mix things up ever so slightly with the quick-time events this time around, but the result felt simultaneously easier and less forgiving. It wasn’t until my fourth or fifth button-prompt QTE that I realized that all the actual prompts had been the same for every QTE, right down to the buttons I needed to press. The Quarry also seems to lean on the trope of needing to fail or not engage in a QTE to get the desired result. There are a few instances of this in Until Dawn and other games—famously in Shenmue II—where you need to “fail” a QTE to succeed, and revealing yourself or attacking will actually lead to a bad outcome for one or more characters. But The Quarry has quite a few, seemingly all of which would have led to a character death. In fact, one in the later part of the game changed the entire ending, leading to many deaths. I wouldn’t say this is 100 percent a bad thing, and it makes the player really think about what action to take, but with how unforgiving the outcomes tend to be, you would hope for more instances of clear-cut decisions.
Speaking of unforgiving outcomes, my entire first playthrough ended very anticlimactically. As I said earlier, we play games like this organically our first time through, so part of my disappointment in how our first go ended rests on my shoulders. But when this ending and the series of events that transpired can be traced back to a single, seemingly innocuous decision, it feels like more of a flaw in the way the story is playing out rather than my in-game decision-making—especially when this ending locked us out of an entire subplot and rather abruptly ended the game with several questions left unanswered. This may be an effort to try to manipulate you into multiple replays to try to right what you did wrong, it left such a bitter taste, especially at the end of the game, that it was hard to find the motivation to start over.
One final gripe I have is that a tonal shift that takes place in the later part of the game with a specific character feels unearned. It feels like the developers wanted to give the game a more definitive protagonist, like a Ripley or a Sarah Connor, and rather than trying to introduce a new character, they simply changed one who was already there—almost giving them entirely new motivations and abilities that felt forced. If this is true and they wanted to give the player a character to latch on to, they could’ve have kept things in the genre and tried to create a more Nancy Thompson–type “final girl.”
Ultimately, The Quarry is still an above-average game, even though it falls a little short of the bar set by its predecessor. Until Dawn casts a pretty large shadow, but The Quarry does stand out after a few other Supermassive releases (namely the Dark Pictures Anthology). If you’re looking for a fun, spooky game that won’t require more than a few gaming sessions to complete—possibly as few as one if you have the free time to devote to it—you could do a lot worse than The Quarry. But maybe try to grab it on sale, borrow it from someone who already has it, or rent it (if that even exists anymore), that way you won’t feel cheated if you don’t immediately go back for seconds or thirds after paying full price like some of us.
The Quarry is available on Steam, PlayStation 4 and 5, and Microsoft Xbox One and Series S/X, but as of this writing has yet to be Steam Deck verified.
*Originally posted on Twin Cities Geek on October 18th 2022*