Supermassive Games has made a name for themselves in the industry as the ones who make campy interactive-horror-drama games. Each game they release forces you into delicate scenarios in which you must make life-or-death decisions that may or may not lead to a character’s horrific demise. They weren’t the first ones to attempt this genre though. I remember the first of these types I played was Heavy Rain back on the Playstation 3. Heavy Rain, although not a horror and instead more of a heavy drama, still had you making some ghastly choices. These would sometimes have you instantly slamming the pause button and returning to the main menu or even shutting down your console in a panic and restarting in an attempt to retract your actions because you’re screaming at yourself, “Why the hell did I just do that?!”. Until Dawn debuted in 2015 and was about a group of young friends reuniting together at some creepy old winter lodge, only to be stalked by some mysterious killer and possibly supernatural monsters. After a few years of whatever the hell the Dark Pictures Anthology is, they released The Quarry, in 2022, which is about a group of young counselor friends being stalked by some mysterious killers and possibly supernatural monsters, but this time at a summer camp.
The game functions almost the same way as Until Dawn, albeit with a few small improvements. The QTEs are much easier to not fuck up this time around as you just have to point the control stick in the general direction it tells you to rather than hitting the correct prompted button in a rush. Additionally, if you accidentally get one of these poor kids killed by making the wrong choice you have the option to be forgiven and have the chance to undo the damage up to three times. You switch from one counselor to the next and stroll at a sometimes painfully slow pace, searching around for collectables like tarot cards and taking pics on your phones for evidence to try to piece together this unraveling mystery. While the leisurely walking around can feel stilted, no level ever seems like it drags on for too long either. Tension is built through the branching paths and the choices you make will potentially jeopardize relationships and character fates.
As awkward as some of the dialogue in The Quarry can be, I suppose that is part of the charm. Some parts do genuinely feel like realistic conversations between teenagers with all the abrupt pauses, retracting and over-explaining. The game is packed with teen-cliches which are very much typical of the horror-genre. The dialogue will sometimes lean heavily on these tropes. Despite the impressive animation, sometimes the facial expressions appear a bit unsettling. Particularly the stereotypical narcissistic hot-girl Emma, who has a mouth for Honeycomb and you can never get a read on if she’s surprised, terrified, completely aloof or just trying to think up her next Tik-Tok dance. Some of the over-the-top reactions can sometimes feel tacky, as if the writers are pushing too hard to get a reaction out of the player. A lot of the characters are ‘what you see is what you get’ and don’t evolve much with the story or deviate from their hackneyed role but we do have a few outliers. I thought Dylan, the comic-relief, was an insufferable prick for the first few chapters and figured was going to be grating the whole time, but as the story progressed he actually started to grow on me and even became slightly endearing. We have some characters played by popular actors (Lance Henrikson or David Arquette) who sadly get an accumulative ten-minutes of screen time at best, then are quickly sidelined. Let’s not forget our loveable everyman Ryan- He’s supposed to be the voice of reason but his delivery is like he’s competing with David Blaine on how to narrate a sleeping-aid podcast. It’s like they cast a human-sized glass of water in the role of the “mysterious brooding guy”. In moments of crisis, he reacts with all the enthusiasm as someone who just found out their favorite brand of cereal got discontinued. Given how little I cared for a majority of the cast, I still found it fairly easy to save them all on my first and only play-through. I swear, I only cheated once.
Okay, brace yourself. (SPOILER ALERT!) …
I’ve got a few bones to pick with this game. It was stupidly easy to pick up on the fact that the dumb hicks, who are presumably chasing you around the woods, were actually hunting down a much larger threat and weren’t out to harm you in the first place. I trusted them from the very beginning. The cop from the prologue chapter was way too deliberately sketchy from the get-go that he was obviously going to have some sort of redemptive quality later on. I think the idea of having werewolves as the antagonists, spreading their curse throughout the full-moon night was fitting but the designs of the creatures were uninspired. There were many plot conveniences littered throughout. The level of threat would vary depending on the situation you’re in. It felt like in some chapters the werewolves would be truly terrifying feral beasts, capable of moving at lightning speeds and able to claw your head clean off like a dollar store mannequin. Then, in other chapters, they felt more like a mild annoyance; like a mosquito that’s been buzzing around the campfire for too long. The Gypsy lady, who is essentially the parallel to the psychiatrist character in Until Dawn, will show up during every chapter break to tell you some vague cryptic shit about “Beware which path you choose” or “Things aren’t always what they seem”. Some of the major decisions that you will make, you can’t always rely on your wits and just ‘use your common sense’ because the outcome is arbitrary; doing exactly what you did previously to save one character will lead to another getting their torso turned into a spaghetti filled piñata. Luckily, you get that three-strikes rule that I mentioned. There was one moment where you can choose to help the dumb-jock character escape captivity by deciding the correct order of six circuit breakers to not cook him to perfection or release the werewolf in an adjacent cage. How in the Sam-Hell was I supposed to know which ones to switch without looking it up on Youtube?
Regardless of all this, I was entertained for at least one playthrough. Fans of slasher cliches will be quickly engrossed with The Quarry. If you liked Until Dawn, then you’ll enjoy this one all the same. You’re fully aware it’s not a gourmet meal but that’s not what you ordered anyway. You’re not here for world-class dialogue or character development; you’re here for the chaos, the jump-scares and to help keep these douchebags alive. It contains all the cliches of a typical Hollywood slasher but it works. It’s the kind of game you enjoy on a lazy weekend. A sweet blend of absurd and bloody-delight that is hard to resist. When the full moon rises, survival is just the beginning.
Press X to not die,
Mikhail
Verdict: 7.5/10