The Quarry is everything we’ve come to expect from Supermassive’s delicious brand of gory horror. There’s supernatural tracking, life-or-death decisions, fast-paced events, and tons of gory deaths, all wrapped up in jaw-droppingly realistic graphical fidelity that sometimes you forget it’s a game. Its characters – traditionally so irritating that it’s hard to find the will to keep them alive – are surprisingly endearing here, even though half of them are soaked in blood for most of the game and look like post-prom Carrie. The world you’re exploring — an all-American summer camp that’s totally ripped from an ’80s killer — is what you’d expect. Combined with a great script and natural voice acting, The Quarry may be Supermassive’s greatest game yet.
If you’ve been involved in any of Supermassive’s previous adventures, The Quarry’s formula is unlikely to surprise you, as it hardly deviates from the established template. I suspect this will delight some and disappoint others – after all, this template is an aging one – but I have a lifelong love of cheesy teen horror and it still works for me.
You follow a group of young people, and your story cycles through each of their viewpoints, making choices – where to go, what to say, what to pick up; the usual stuff – and hope they live to regret it. You soon discover that they are not alone, and so embark on the difficult task of keeping everyone alive long enough to see the sun rise.
Of all the Supermassive horror stories, this one is my favorite.It’s not the scariest – I might play a lot of horror, but I still scream a lot of, and I don’t think I’m jumping or screaming while playing this – but the story is so engaging and so different that I’m not entirely sure where it’s going. Aside from the long, tedious spells in police station jails, it’s also generally well-paced, giving you plenty of time to get over the action-packed sequences without tarnishing them, although there are some unfortunate cuts that Quickly de-escalate the tensions that have been carefully built over the past ten minutes or so.
and it looks Astonishing. I know, I know – looks aren’t everything, especially when it comes to video games – but it’s unusually beautiful. I don’t think many games can match its ability to capture the smooth peaks and rugged valleys of The Quarry’s human skin, not to mention the micro-expressions it renders in such fine detail. I took over 300 screenshots in a single game, obsessed with its photography, depth of focus, and amazing use of light and shadow.
Perhaps most interesting of all, The Quarry – ostensibly separate from the Dark Anthology series but sharing much of its DNA – includes a new feature called Death Rewind, which gives you three opportunities to intervene and jump back in when a character dies Help them survive by making different choices. It’s a great – if polarizing – feature if possible. Let’s face it; part of the appeal of Until Dawn is that once a character dies, they die, and we’ve all gone through the rough patch of what happens if you’re briefly distracted by your phone and miss key QTEs.
In The Quarry, however, you can jump in and make different choices to save a beloved character. Sometimes you only go back a few minutes or so, and other times, you might lose half an hour. one more time? Once, right at the end, it will take away all your progress.
imagine. Imagine you spend ten hours making choices, navigating paths, reaching QTE, and trying to (almost) keep your entire cast alive, where you’re near the end, you can smell it, but – because a look Seemingly inconsequential decisions you made eight hours ago – you find yourself pulled out of Chapter 10 and stuffed back into Chapter 1. No, this is not a short visit. No, there’s no way to skip anything to get you back there.To get to Chapter 10, you must replay all
Oh anger. Raging indignation. In the end fell into extreme disappointment. I’ve been enjoying every moment this game has given me so far. The only reason I even have Rewinds left at the end of the game is because I’m totally immersed in the action – so focused on unraveling the mystery – that I paid close attention and didn’t miss the QTE. I knew the rewind might have knocked me back a little – the previous rewind had knocked me back half an hour or so – but it never occurred to me that I’d be knocked back to the bloody start game.
We’ve since been told that the team is “actively working on” specific instances of this issue and “preventing it from happening” after the game launches, possibly even turning off the death rewind option for this particular sequence, or at least giving you a proper head start. But this will be added via a “post-release update”, but there is no hard timescale and no exact plans to confirm a fix. What’s more, it was too late for me – until then, a glorious bloody adventure had been completely screwed up.
There are also some ongoing technical issues. A couple of times I’ve had issues with the audio being out of sync so the sound is a second or two ahead of the action on the screen, and while it works fine on a PC with all settings maxed out, my QTE prompts are usually when I use It’s the keyboard prompt controller; not fair, folks.
The Quarry will be one of my favorite games of the year…but for now, it’s hard to feel anything but disappointment.
That said, the QTEs are rarely burdensome – I’m only prompted to move my left stick and mash the A a few times; no QTEs involving any other buttons – although the Bioshock-style tutorial videos are meant to convey the new system and A charming way of controlling the controls, but they’re not always clear; it took me a few (failed) attempts to get used to the “hold breath” mechanic, and shooting – anyone, any weapon, any time – felt slow and clumsy. Thankfully, there’s an effective set of accessibility tools to help anyone struggling with these mechanisms, you can opt for longer input times, and even make sure they’re done automatically when needed.
Like its siblings, The Quarry tries to balance its (undeniably brilliant) cinematic camera angles with your desire to explore. For all the surrealism of the actors’ facial expressions, lip-syncing, and dialogue, nothing is more important to you than being bumbling in a dark cabin to remind you in-game. This has been my biggest suspense in the Dark Anthology title, and I’m afraid it hasn’t been quelled in Supermassive’s latest adventure.
If it weren’t for the utterly injustice rewind at the end of my playthrough, The Quarry – with its stunning visuals, wonderful voice acting, brilliant soundtrack, and engaging plotline – would be One of my favorite games by far, this is one of the best horror games in a while. For now, though, it’s hard to feel anything but disappointment for a game that took all my time and energy and dumped them without warning. Killing a character is one thing. Another is to kill the enthusiasm of players.