The Quarry is the spiritual successor to 2015's
Until Dawn, with both games featuring a very similar format, though featuring stand alone stories. It comes from
Supermassive Games who in recent years have put out smaller games of a similar style, such as
The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan and
The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope. Knowing how unlikely I was to replay the game I waited until this was on sale at a reduced price. My initial impressions were high, but this felt a little too familiar, while the choice of horror movie monster was one of my personal least favourite types.
Two teenagers, Max (Skyler Gisondo) and Laura (Siobhan Williams) are on their way to 'Hackett's Quarry', having volunteered to be camp counsellors at the summer camp that takes place there every year. After a car accident, they are warned by the local sheriff, Travis Hackett (a standout performance from Ted Raimi - Intruder, The Evil Dead) to spend the night at a local motel rather than head to the quarry. Distrustful of the creepy officer, the two decide to press on, this turning out to be a bad idea as Max is attacked by some sort of creature once arriving at the quarry, while Laura is shot by the sheriff who appears there soon afterwards.
Two months later and it is the last day of summer camp. With the children all having gone home, the counsellors are preparing to leave, but one of them, Jacob (Zach Tinker), wanting one last night of fun, with the hopes of winning back Emma (Halston Sage) whom he had a summer fling with, sabotages their van. The camp owner, Chris Hackett (David Arquette - Scream) warns the teens to spend the night in the lodge, and that he will be back in the morning to help them leave. Of course, as soon as Chris leaves, the teens head out, determined to party, not realising that there is something deadly lurking in the woods...
The game takes place over ten chapters and takes the form of a third person adventure game. This isn't a game of action, instead it plays out almost like an interactive movie. Over the course of the game you take control of each of the nine counsellors at various points, and by your actions they either make it to the end of the game, or die along the way. In my playthrough I managed to have two of the nine characters die, the death of one seeming to negatively affect other characters storylines, more on that later. Outside of choosing dialogue options, there are exploration moments where you get to walk around relatively linear locations, it is here where you can find clues to reveal more of the backstory going on, as well as find hidden tarot cards which come into play in the sections in-between chapters. Even when cutscenes are occuring you have to pay attention, as there are quick time event moments which can affect the fate of characters. Someone running through the woods for instance can trip over a tree root should you not do the QTE in time. I have to say, I found these moments a Hell of a lot easier than in previous Supermassive Games, I only failed once over the course of the eight and a half hours, and that was only due to me not paying attention, not that it was a hard one to do. Cheekily you don't always want to succeed at these, as being successful can sometimes lead to negative outcomes, such as a button mashing moment where you are trying to wrestle a rifle away from someone.
In between chapters you are taken to a place outside of the game world, it is here you interact with the fortune teller (Grace Zabriskie - The Grudge), this character provides cryptic clues as to what is going on, as well as provides you with the choice to see future events based on the various tarot cards you have collected. All the actors used in the game appear to have been motion captured, and much like the other games of this type, all characters in the game heavily resemble the real life actors playing them. The graphics are impressive, especially with regards to the faces, at some points, if I squinted my eyes a bit, you could mistake the ingame characters for actual people. There were a fair few actors I recognised, including Lance Henriksen (Aliens) and Lin Shaye (Insidious), though those later two were almost in blink and you miss it roles.
Now for the moments I didn't enjoy as much, namely the type of antagonist the teens were up against. A spoiler for Until Dawn, but the enemy there were wendigos (I believe), and rather than do something different here, without getting into large spoilers, this time around it is another pack of monstrous creatures you are trying to survive against. It felt like a missed trick, and began to feel like the only substantial difference was the location change from a snowy mountain to a forest. I wish there had been a more interesting enemy as the one chosen is by far my least favourite movie monster. Another issue, which may sound bizarre is the lack of nudity. I'm not complaining that there should have been more for perverse reasons, it's just there is a very good reason for why characters may find themselves with no clothes, yet bizarrely all the characters who end up in this situation are always still wearing underwear, despite even announcing that they are naked. When you are specifically shown a character's clothes all ripping off only for them to later on be shown still wearing underwear made zero sense and became quite distracting. I understand that the actors lending their likeness to the characters would not want to be shown nude, but I felt there could have been a better way around this, such as camera angles which left stuff off camera, or even a blurring effect. I'm not talking nudity for nudity's sake, there is a clear cut (and non-sexual) reason why characters might have found themselves without clothing.
Now I don't know if it was down to some bad choices, but out of the nine characters here there were at least a couple who barely had anything to do in the game. I fear that one of the characters who did die during my playthrough may have brought more story beats to those others, as without naming them, I can think of at least two characters that just seemed to be bumbling around the woods all night without anything horror like really happening to them. A common complaint with these types of games is the ending, this one seemed to end rather abruptly with the only resolution taking the form of basic text epilogues for each character (living or dead), and then the meat of the ending taking the form of a podcast that plays out over the end credits. I would have liked to see the survivors coming together and showing some type of regret over those who didn't make it.
I enjoyed my time with The Quarry, it looked fantastic, and the acting was all to a high standard. Personally, I really wished they had gone with a different type of story. Having the heroes up against a group of monsters felt too similar to Until Dawn, while in general this seemed a lot easier to succeed at the button prompts, which themselves few and far between. Much like Supermassive Games' other games, I don't think this is something I could see myself returning to for a long time.
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