The Quarry is another narrative horror game from Supermassive, in the same vein as previous entries but a bit closer to Until Dawn than Dark Pictures in that it’s longer, has a larger cast, and focuses on single-player rather than co-op. The game is fine at what it does, but misses some opportunities, and in particular how difficult it is to replay the game and explore other choices.
The game takes place after the final day of the summer camp called Hackett’s Quarry in upstate New York. The campers have all left but the counselors run into car troubles when they try to head home, forcing them to remain at camp one more night. The owner of the camp tells the counselors to lock themselves in the camp lodge for the night before driving off… so the kids obviously throw a party by the lake instead. However, they soon discover that they are being hunted by mysterious, horrific creatures in the woods….
As I’ve said in pretty much all of my Supermassive reviews, the chassis they’ve developed is just good. I think it’d be really hard to make a game with this system that isn’t engaging in the moment. While there are plenty of elements of good game design in The Quarry, there are also plenty of points that make the game feel like it could’ve used a bit more time in the oven.
The pacing of the game is something I really enjoyed. The first two chapters are slow, introducing the characters and setting, but once the cast starts to deal with the monsters in chapter three it just doesn’t stop. The characters never do anything that feels like it’s being done for the sake of padding the game, and there are some pretty neat set pieces, especially as the game ramps up into the finale.
Characters are where some cracks start to show. The cast is larger than each Dark Pictures entry, which is nice as it gives both us and Supermassive more toys to play with, but not all cast members are fully utilized. Some are funny with memorable moments and heart-pounding climaxes, and some just kind of wander around for a bit until the game ends. The game would’ve been much improved by pruning the cast to its essential members or, ideally, expanding the scenario to give everyone a proper chance to shine. The writing is a bit tacky, but it’s supposed to be drawing heavy inspiration from 80s slasher flicks, so I didn’t find it too hard to lean into the camp. I also thought The Quarry boasted the best overall voicework of the Supermassive games, not as much for the “regular” scenes as the screams and panic the characters put out when everything starts falling apart (with Jessie Buckley as Kate in Devil in Me being pretty much the only one who can compare.)
One caveat I want to flag, for people who will care about it, is that The Quarry is much more graphic than The Dark Pictures Anthology, particularly with respect to blood, gore, and dismemberments. Perhaps The Dark Pictures games have those moments too and I just avoided them, but that was my experience with The Quarry.
While I praised the basic structure of Supermassive’s games earlier, The Quarry also exposes an inherent tension between branching and linear plots within these games. See, it’s actually possible to be too good at The Quarry: there are some climax sequences that can be completely avoided if you’ve successfully kept the group out of certain of the dangers. Which is… boring! One of the characters I liked ended up falling into the “wander around until the game ends” group, but if I had done a bit worse, she apparently could have had a proper climax. And that’s where we run into the tension: because, in these types of stories, letting the player branch the story can reward successful play with a less interesting narrative, while completely removing variation can make gameplay feel pointless. As I’ve said before, I understand how creating lots of branches requires an exponentially large amount of resources to develop—but there should be more leeway to do so in the climaxes at the end of the game, since they don’t need to tie into any future scenes.
There are also some places where it felt like Supermassive had ideas for the scenario that they began to implement, but then cut midway through. For instance, the owner of the camp requires that all campers and counselors turn in their phones at the beginning of the summer, so that they can experience nature without being distracted by technology. Easy fix to the cell phone problem in modern-day horror stories, right? Except the group gets their phones back at the beginning of the game. Except the phones are dead, since they’ve been locked in a drawer all summer! Except the counselors get a chance to charge their phones. Except they only charge them up to quarter full… and in the end, the phones are waived away with “no service” and the partially-charged battery never comes up. Despite the amount of time the game spends on the phones in the first act, they never come back, and this is just one example.
On the flip side, one plot element that I thought was really clever was the fact that the monsters can “infect” the counselors. This is great, because in most other games each cast member just has a binary status of alive or dead. By adding a third “infected” status the game is able to introduce a punishment short of death that directly adds tension and complexity to later scenes.
While the game format is solid as ever, the mechanics are not quite as polished. Rather than using buttons, QTEs just require flicking the joystick in a specific direction, which is just way too easy. I don’t think I failed a single QTE in the game (other than the first one, when I didn’t understand the UI). Obviously QTEs are straightforward, but they’re supposed to be tuned so that you succeed most but not all of them.
There is a basic shooting mechanic where you need to aim and shoot in a time limit (which The Dark Pictures Anthology also has), but in most instances you start off aiming at the target, so it’s barely even an issue. Because The Quarry is single-player, choices only have time limits when relevant, which is nice when you want to consider the decision.
The final mechanic is “don’t breathe,” which replaces the heartbeat segments from The Dark Pictures Anthology. For these segments, all you need to do is press and hold A to hold your breath, and then release when the coast is clear. I like the idea of this mechanic, but not the implementation. The heartbeat mechanic in Dark Pictures is almost like a rhythm game, so the connection to the horror genre is not particularly apparent. “Don’t breathe” is mechanically simple, but instead requires you to judge when your character is safe to flee. This is much more tense and immersive… in theory. The issue is that bright red fog appears on the screen while the monster is searching, so all you need to do is hold the button until the fog disappears, which makes the mechanic trivial in nearly all respects. (Also, in a lot of cases you can succeed by just holding your breath until the end.) If you had to actually watch the scene and make the call for yourself, I think the mechanic would’ve been much more compelling.
However, for all of the compliments and criticisms of The Quarry I’ve given so far, I think its greatest fault by far is how hostile it is to repeated playthroughs. One of the fun parts of a branching story is getting to see the various ways that the events can play out, but The Quarry seems to actively oppose that. There’s no scene select, only chapter select, and only after beating the game—meaning after selecting the chapter, you’re stuck back in a “normal” playthrough and can’t jump to another chapter (until you beat the game again); chapter select is never permanently unlocked.
There’s no fast-forward mechanic, so you need to sit through the full runtime of every scene and interaction. As I’ve said in my review of The Dark Pictures Anthology, Supermassive games are less “branching” narratives and more “variating” stories, which means that a lot is the same from run to run. When you make a decision each choice may have thirty seconds of unique dialogue but then return to the same central path. So when replaying, the ratio of old to new content is skewed heavily towards the former, with no way to bypass or shorten it. Plus, many of the choices don’t seem to change anything (other than that thirty-second period of dialogue), making the choice feel pointless. Additionally, unlike The Dark Pictures Anthology, each decision is a pure binary choice without a third “stay silent” option, making it feel like there are fewer options to explore. While The Dark Pictures Anthology isn’t much different in terms of most choices not having a major immediate impact, the choices feel much better there because of the trait and relationship systems that aren’t in The Quarry. In The Dark Pictures, each choice affects your character’s traits and often affects a relationship. Traits and relationships don’t affect much (especially in co-op), but it’s still something definitive you can point to that was changed by making one choice over another. In The Quarry, there’s nothing. Many times it feels like it literally doesn’t matter, even in the moment. Sometimes a message pops up telling you that the relationship between characters has changed, but because these don’t tie into any other mechanic they doesn’t compare to the fully-fledged relationship screen in The Dark Pictures Anthology.
But wait, there’s more. The Quarry has plenty of collectibles, divided into clues, evidence, and tarot cards (which serve as premonitions). The issue is that they don’t carry over from run to run, and so must be re-collected each playthrough if you care about them. Each chapter has multiple tarot cards, but you can only view one premonition per chapter, so you can never have all unlocked at once, since progress resets each playthrough. Because of the way some choices are structured, it’s impossible to get all collectibles in one file. Some clues are “linked,” meaning that after finding the initial clue, you can find supplemental information. But if you find the later clues, you don’t get to see the information unless you found the initial clue. So if you want the full clue on your replay you need to re-collect each individual piece.
There’s just isn’t a single element of the game that’s conducive to multiple playthroughs, despite the fact that this is a sub-genre that begs for replays. The Quarry is fun, and provides a solid experience with a bit more volume and depth than The Dark Pictures Anthology entries, but could have been great if only there had been a bit more plot development and more replay-friendly game systems. It’s a nice little pick-up if you’re already into Supermassive, but a stronger entry is probably a better starting point if you’re not sure.
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