The Quarry – Review

Supermassive Games has been working hard on the narrative-driven games that are part of The Dark Pictures Anthology. So far, we’ve played through Man of Medan, Little Hope, and House of Ashes. We quite enjoyed playing through these games, but sadly, all of them contained a massive number of bugs that detracted from the fun to be had. Now, a new game by the same studio is being published by 2K Games, and we were quite curious to see if this one was breaking new ground. As a whole, we were treated to a very similar experience as in the aforementioned games, albeit with a few extra layers of polish. For The Quarry, we traveled down to Hackett’s Quarry summer camp, which had serious slasher horror movie vibes.

Story

The Quarry immediately throws you in the thick of it. You’ll start the game with Laura and Max, who are heading towards Hackett’s Quarry as summer camp counselors. Sadly, it immediately becomes clear that their trip will be cut short when they end up in the woods, which is seemingly filled with an ominous presence. This feeling is further enhanced when they are told to turn back by a strange police officer who also turns up out of the blue.

Fast forward a few weeks, and you’ll get to meet the other camp counselors as they are packing up to leave the camp. Jacob, however, decides to make sure nobody can leave, as he has a crush on Emma, and by trying to win some time he wishes to grow even closer to her. Chris Hackett is extremely freaked out when he learns that the counselors can’t leave, as he really wanted them gone before it got dark. As there is no other solution than to let them stay, he makes the group of young adults promise they’ll stay indoors until the next morning. It quickly becomes clear that the immature group has no intention of doing that, and before they know it, they find themselves wrapped up in a seemingly supernatural situation.

As the game revolves around making choices, the story branches towards the choices you have made during prior events. Every choice you make has consequences, and this will constantly shape the story. The only thing that remains a constant in the game is that nearly every character in-game is quite unlikable. Even if you make choices that make the characters a bit more appealing, they mess it up a few moments later by giving snarky and mean remarks during pre-scripted dialogues.

Graphics

The Quarry’s graphical prowess is very impressive. The game boasts very realistic-looking graphics, and at times it was a bit scary to see how lifelike some of the characters actually looked. In the pause menu, you’ll always see the face of the character you’re currently controlling, and the eyes, facial textures, and other small details are amazingly done. Only the mouth movements and the staw-like hair took back from the otherwise very realistic experience. The environments are also very pretty to look at, even though most assets in the world of The Quarry are static. The latter makes it slightly easier to create something photorealistic. That being said, we did encounter the occasional janky movement of characters, as well as some contortionist poses that made us slightly uncomfortable. The latter often happened when we were adjusting our camera, which then also causes the active character to turn their head.

Sound

We were quite impressed with The Quarry’s sound design. Not only is the voice acting handled by a very experienced cast, but the music is also of top-notch quality. You’ll get treated to proper summer camp vibes during many of the game’s scenes to then eventually hear the somewhat sinister music kick in. As mentioned before, the game has an experienced cast backing things up. You’ll hear acting performances by David Arquette, Ted Raimi, Ariel Winter, Justice Smith, and many more. The cinematic quality of this project was very high.

Gameplay

The Quarry is a narrative-driven Survival Horror game in which your choices have consequences. Throughout the game, you’ll have to make choices as to how you wish to react during certain conversations, but also when it comes to which areas you wish to explore. The game also features some basic combat sequences which are more than often resolved by performing several QTE sequences successfully. Messing up in a game such as this may cause one (or all) of your characters to meet their demise.

When it comes to the overall gameplay, there isn’t that much to tell. As stated above, you’ll have to make choices, and these alter the flow of the story, as well as the ending of the game. You may do your best to save all your characters, but you may also do your best to try and get the character you hate the most killed. Of course, you can also get everyone killed if that is what you’re aiming for. The game even has a mode in which you can just press play and see the game’s story play out while everyone gets brutally murdered.

Outside of the choice-making segments, you’re also able to explore the different areas of the camp and its direct surroundings. Here you may find clues or unlock several other conversational options. These clues may in turn unlock more content, but even if you don’t find every possible item, you can still easily play through the game. The game itself only is around eight hours long, but this felt more than long enough for a title such as this. Dragging things out would have made the game lose its charm. That being said, The Quarry does have a very unlikeable cast of characters. Every step of the way, the characters did behave like proper douchebags, and this sometimes made it hard for us to care if they lived or died. We reckon this was purposely done in case you accidentally get a character killed.

One big issue we had with this game was the fact that some choices were somewhat obscure. Sometimes you would be given two choices, and even if you picked choice A, it would eventually still be the same result as picking choice B. We sometimes picked an option where one character would help another one, to then see the game not help that character. This did cause some annoyances, as we then often regretted the choice we made.

Conclusion

The Quarry is a great narrative-driven experience and it feels a lot more polished than Supermassive Games’ other projects for The Dark Pictures Anthology games. We very much enjoyed the atmosphere of this title, as well as its graphical prowess and sound design. We sometimes disliked the characters we were supposed to guide to safety, as well as some minor issues with the choice-making progress, but this game is still very much worth it if you’re looking for a great survival horror experience that revolves mainly around its story.

Ibuki

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Aspiring ninja.

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