As a title that was a surprise announcement from Supermassive Games that led to a release before the finale title for their ongoing Dark Pictures Anthology series, The Quarry was a game that caught a lot of fans’ attention. This time they partnered with 2K Games as their publisher and got their latest choice-based narrative horror story out in time for a Summer experience. Despite the concerns that this title might have been rushed, I would argue that this was one of their best games yet! With only a handful of issues and some neat changes, this title comes down to quite the experience.

Story

There are a lot of rumors and stories surrounding Hackett’s Quarry, yet another year has passed and another successful summer camp was held. Now that all the kids have gone home, the final day is here and the teenage counselors of the camp are packing up to head home themselves. However, due to the idiotic and romantically desperate decision of one of the teenagers, the car is unable to start and it is too late in the day to call for a tow truck.

Forced to spend one last night at the camp, their leader Chris Hackett tells the counselor group to lock themselves inside of the lodge and stay inside for the night before leaving the site hastily and abruptly. Naturally, a group of teenagers isn’t about to listen to the rules of their leader that isn’t even there, let alone they are going home in the morning.

Following this series of bad yet expected teenage choices, the worst night of their lives is about to begin. The problem is, they don’t even know that there is even any danger to worry about!

Gameplay

Here we have yet another choose-your-own-adventure horror story and so the gameplay is pretty much the same as the rest of the Supermassive collection. You have multiple characters in the story and you will have control of one character in each scene. While you have control of that character, specific dialogue moments and key actions will be handed to you to make the decision on what they do. These decisions you make will alter the ultimate path the story takes, as well as decide to who survives the night.

They also have their quick time events, so be ready for some quick thinking as the intense moments are also reliant on your ability to successfully avoid the negative outcome. However, when the quick time event is deciding whether or not to intervene with something going on, it may be better to not do anything so don’t be too quick to where you are hastily jumping in for the sake of ‘doing something.’

There are some changes that this game brings though. For your menu options, you only have single-player and two-player modes. The movie mode option, where five friends can all play the game together on the same console and each friend controls a different character, has been replaced by a more literal movie mode. At least you will be able to check out the director’s mode after you beat the game for a slightly different point of view and a series of choices to be made. Of course, it is the standard view and director’s view put together that make the two-player mode possible.

Along the way, there will be a collectible. This is the item that gives you a short vision into one of the many outcomes that are possible at some point in the story ahead of when it is revealed to you. While each of their games does this, this time they changed up the style a little bit. In The Quarry, you will be looking for Tarot cards to collect and by collecting these cards, at the end of the current chapter you will return to the narrator and she will use the cards to give you a hinted statement and the choice to see a vision. If you collect more than one card, you will have to choose which vision you want to see.

The last addition they made for this game is a life system. That’s right, if you mess up and get one of your characters killed, you will be able to take that choice or failed quick time event back and try again! There are only three lives, so make sure you use them wisely. Now, if you are someone who thinks this is a bad addition and makes the game too easy then the best part of this addition is that you can simply not use it.

Audio and Visual

The developers kept to their usual art style with this one as the game looks just as good as their previous titles do. All of the animations are clean and appear to have been done with mocap while the graphical quality alone is that perfect level of realistic without going too far into the realism. Meanwhile, the environment itself is of slightly higher quality than the characters which helps the atmosphere be as tense and spooky as each moment of this thrilling tale needs to be.

As for the audio aspect, there is a streamer mode option that will turn off some of the copyrighted music for you. There is actually quite a bit of music played in this title and it isn’t the same song over and over. Overall, the music choices helped give off the 80s slasher vibe they said they were aiming for and were a good fit. On top of that, the voice acting was just as good as the acting and animation, so definitely no complaints here.

Replayability

Given that any character can live or die by your choices and the way the whole night plays out is based on your choices, there is definitely plenty of replayability. Plus, they added a cool feature that replaced the Movie Night Mode that had one person control one character for a group of five friends to play the experience together. Instead, their movie mode is an actual movie!

When you start the game in Movie Mode, you will be able to pick between the options of everyone lives, everyone dies, director’s cut, and gorefest. It looked like some more options might be unlockable as well, but I can’t confirm that. Of course, if you don’t want to just watch the story play out, you can always play this game solo or with a friend and try out different choices yourself.

What It Could Have Done Better

Some of the choices seemed right but ultimately they didn’t do what I thought they would. Granted, that’s the name of the game with this genre, but sometimes it was obviously not what I expected. As a slight spoiler to give an example, there was one scene where I had two characters running from one of the threats and got the choice to run or go in the freezer. I thought having them hide in the freezer would be the safe option, but when I chose that only ONE of the characters when in there… I obviously wanted them both to go in there, so losing the other character because of this felt like a steal. There were a few moments like this and it is just unfortunate that there isn’t a way to make the choice-making moments a bit more clear.

Other than that, I only have the usual complaint - the controls feel a bit clunky. It seems like they tried a couple of different control styles with this game though and so I will say that if this was to see what people would prefer, it is option two. When it had more of an “over-the-shoulder” style camera rather than a “behind-the-character” style, the controls felt smoother and improved.

Verdict

The Quarry is the most enthralling story the Supermassive team has pulled off since Until Dawn! I thoroughly enjoyed the narrative experience this title brought and look forward to going through it again with a friend to see what choices they would make. Truly a great horror title that I recommend to any fan of these choice-based narrative games!

The Quarry is available now on PC via Steam, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.