QTE Horror: The Movie
Supermassive Games has carved themselves a particular path as a developer, reliably releasing interactive cinematic horror experiences with the beloved Until Dawn and their newer Dark Pictures Anthology series. Each has told its own story, contained its own characters, and often with new and improved gameplay mechanics that allow for a wealth of replayability as you attempt to make it out alive. While The Quarry succeeds in giving us another Until Dawn-like experience, it does so with some disappointingly minimalistic gameplay sections and feels far more focused on its movie-like ambitions.
While the Dark Pictures games were enjoyable, Until Dawn is still, without question, the game people constantly bring up when the developer is mentioned. The interactive horror game with Hayden Panettiere, Brett Dalton, Rami Malek, and more was a sensation when it was released back in 2015 and the benefit of platforms like Youtube and Twitch has only seen the game rise in popularity. As you navigated through its horror movie tropes, you made choices and performed QTE button presses in order to keep your band of characters alive and to dive right back in to see its story branch in new and interesting ways.
The Quarry does little to change or shake up this format and frankly, I don’t blame them. Apart from some design choices here and there, I had a very good time and will continue to do so once its delayed online mode arrives next month. The experience itself still consists of pulling off a series of QTE prompts and while The Quarry shifts away from the face buttons to favor the analog stick, there are times when it didn’t register my direction correctly and resulted in more than a few deaths, mishaps, and more. It’s not perfect, but I do find it slightly better than the random face button prompts of previous games. While not every flub will kill you, several certainly will and the deaths are even more gruesome than ever.
Apart from making dialogue choices, and the aforementioned QTE’s, the gameplay portions of moving around these characters will usually just consist of navigating them around and collecting clues. Some of these clues will play out in a podcast that plays throughout the credits as well as additional dialogue during certain moments, but there isn’t a lot of traditional gameplay here apart from the occasional moment where you can aim a gun during a controlled scene.
Until Dawn had you tracking down objects that would give you a glimpse of a possible outcome, and while that does exist here, it does so in the form of Tarot Cards. Between each chapter, you’ll return to a mysterious woman who will grade you on your overall progress and speak about the card you found, or scold you should you return to her without one. It is possible to find multiple per level, but only one card can be used to offer you a glimpse at a vision, showcasing a possible future. I have to say, she is easily the best host that Supermassive has placed into these games as her wit, and tone are brought to life with a solid performance from the actor. She’s also a solid example of how Supermassive has perfected its facial capture tech.
The Quarry places you behind the faces of nine camp counselors at a summer camp in upstate New York called Hackett's Quarry. As the camp is finishing up for the season, the counselors are packing up a vehicle to head back to their vastly different lives. It’s not long before vehicle trouble causes the crew to be stranded for the night, leading to one last party to end the summer. However, as night blankets the summer camp, the partying group soon realizes that they are not alone.
Before we are introduced to the summer camp and our central cast, a brief prologue places us in the shoes of Laura and Max, a couple that is heading to Hackett’s Quarry, albeit a day early, to serve as additional counselors. Driven off the road by believing they hit something, or someone on the highway, the pair are then warned off the camp by the local Sheriff, played by Ted Raimi. This opening sequence sets the tone well and gives us some mystery surrounding Hackett’s Quarry in some elegant ways that don’t come off as giving the whole thing away.
Once the prologue is wrapped up and the overall narrative begins, the game slows down considerably, and while there is some good character building and a lot of dialogue to introduce us to each character and their overall relationship dynamics, the next few hours are built upon placing characters in certain situations, feuds, and pairings, in order for the eventual horror elements to have something to grip on to. While these moments do give us considerable time to get to know each of the characters, the inability to skip dialogue means that replaying these opening hours several times can feel a tad tedious as you simply want to get to the good stuff.
While the summer camp angle does make for an interesting setting, The Quarry can often feel like it is retreading on some all too familiar ground. I did find the game to be vastly less mysterious than Until Dawn as the antagonistic threat placed upon the counselors was played far too early and while I was thankful for the misdirects featured in the marketing, which I’ll admit did keep me guessing for a while, I still wasn’t blown away by the overall narrative, despite the cast and their performances to be vastly better than anything Supermassive has put together so far.
After a few playthroughs of The Quarry, I noticed that depending on certain actions, some characters will always return to specific areas or always be part of some of the more important moments, that is if they are still alive. While there is a vast variety of what can happen from playthrough to playthrough, there are a lot of key sections of the narrative that feel too comfortably hardwired as some characters are locked to certain roles, locations, and arcs.
While the QTE prompts and dialogue choices can make for a compelling bit of action or engagement with the cast, I do wish there was more of a focus on refining certain gameplay moments as while you can explore for clues and enjoy the bit of banter between certain characters, the walking sections are often barren of any real danger, apart from the odd shadow moving in the distance. There was one moment when a pair of characters are walking to the radio tower and it was a very slow walk where nothing at all happened. While these moments can often build tension, there are too few moments where these walking sections provide any sort of satisfaction and feel more designed around getting the character to the next QTE or dialogue choice.
I’ll also stress that the camera is often so pulled in that it can easily cause you to miss out on certain things, or the clunky nature of a sudden camera swap, which gave me old-school Resident Evil vibes, and not for the right reasons. Thankfully, the gameplay in these moments is not tied to escaping anything or any crucial moments where your life is in danger, all that is reserved for either the QTE prompts or having to hold your breath and wait for the danger to pass.
While the overall gameplay can suffer and often be the less engaging aspect of The Quarry, the cast that makes up this game is a solid bunch of talented actors that play into their respective roles remarkably well. There are a few moments where their behavior won’t exactly match what they are going through, such as discussing their own personal drama less than an hour after seeing their companion butchered right in front of them. This can cause some tonal issues that happens a bit more than I’d like, but it’s nothing that flat-out ruins a scene.
As for the talent, there are certainly some standouts. Brenda Song, as Kaitlyn was my clear favorite, with strong performances from Siobhan Williams as Laura, Justice Smith as Ryan, Miles Robbins as Dylan, and Ted Raimi as Sheriff Travis. Their performances were also heightened by vastly better character models than really anyone else, especially Halston Sage’s Emma who had extremely weird mouth animations that made her character model come off as wildly inconsistent to the rest of the cast. However, during a scene with her video recording herself in the woods, her character model was fine, if not fantastic.
Other notable names also include Ariel Winter as Abigail and Evan Evagora as Nick, but I felt these two got the short end of the stick when it came to being written even remotely interesting. While you do have the likes of Lance Henriksen, David Arquette, and Lin Shaye to add to the cast, their minimal presence here felt more like celebrity baiting than leading to anything substantial, especially as Arquette is attached to the Scream franchise and feels right at home in an experience like this.
Upon completing the game, you’ll unlock the Death Rewind feature, something that was a bonus for anyone who purchased the deluxe edition. This feature gives you three lives over the course of a single playthrough. This can allow you to save someone from a gruesome death, but the feature is oddly temperamental as while you can sometimes see a jump back only a few minutes, one use of it sent me almost 3 hours back. Thankfully, my auto save was still at the time of its use so I ended up just letting them die again than replay all that progress. Supermassive is aware of this problem and has said to be making tweaks to improve this but no mention as to what that would look like.
While online co-op has been delayed to next month, due to moving the game’s servers out of Ukraine, there is still some decent mode variety here to keep you more than occupied. While you have the traditional mode where you’ll play the game out as normal, you can let that controller sit on the coffee table and take in the experience via its Movie Mode. This mode, while skipping out on a few things to keep it more streamlined, allows you to select from a run where everyone either survives, dies, or through customizing their personalities in order to have an unpredictable outcome.
The Quarry also features a wealth of accessibility features that can certainly improve the experience if you are not fast to jump on a certain QTE or have trouble making certain dialogue choices and need a bit of extra time. You can also select to never fail certain moments, hold down buttons instead of mashing them, colorblind settings, an aim assist during the shooting encounters, or how simple each QTE is performed. I do wish there were more settings to make walking around or aiming the flashlight easier, as I found both experiences to be clunky at best, but overall, there are more than enough settings to help some players enjoy the game in far more comfortable ways.
The Quarry is another title that unfortunately does not take advantage of Smart Delivery or a free upgrade to its next-gen counterparts. There is a $10 difference between the last-gen and current that doesn’t feel really valid as while the Series X/S and PS5 versions are better looking, I’m not sure if them being priced at $70USD is justified. Frankly, I am not a fan of the $70USD price structure for PS5 published games or the third-party publishers that also have this pricing structure as paying $89.99CAD is a lot for an 8-hour game, despite its replayability.
While The Quarry is a damn good-looking title with a few moments of some character models not achieving the quality of others, I had a few glitches and visual issues throughout my multiple playthroughs. First, any scene that took place with splashing water was downright bad. The water effects in this game are splotchy, comprised of nothing but artifacts and completely took me out of the scene. Thankfully, there are only a few moments that feature water but each and every one of them are laughably bad.
I also had weird hazing around characters’ hair when any light would make contact with them. I’ve seen this across all platforms and it can certainly stand out, except for the interrogation scene, which oddly had a lot of light but their hair was almost pristine. Lastly, some characters couldn’t look others in the eye. No matter what, Max would not look Laura in the eye during the prologue and would either be staring at her chest or her neck, and he wasn’t the only one where this happened. Apart from one instance where the game froze, the rest of my experience was fairly decent and trouble-free.
The Quarry, in a lot of ways, feels like a huge step forward for Supermassive, but also a step back as it can feel far too similar to Until Dawn in more ways than one. I do prefer it to any of the Dark Pictures games, but I still believe Until Dawn to be the better game as it felt more fresh and unique than the retreading that The Quarry does here in both story and gameplay. While the narrative branches out in far more interesting ways to make the replayability better than Until Dawn, some moments feel far too hardwired to make additional playthroughs feel wildly different as some characters are locked to be alongside you if they are alive. I don’t feel the extra $10 is entirely justified and depending on your eagerness to replay it over and over again, it can feel a tad steep for the 8 hours it takes to roll credits. Still, despite my issues or nitpicks, The Quarry does set out what it aims to do and is an engaging and entertaining time with a solid cast of actors to lead towards their gory and bloody death.
Developer - Supermassive Games. Publisher - 2K Games. Released - June 10th, 2022. Available On - Xbox One/Series X/S, PlayStation 4/5, Microsoft Windows. Rated - (M) Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Mild Sexual Themes, Strong Language. Platform Reviewed - Xbox Series X. Review Access - The Quarry (Series X) was purchased by the reviewer.