The Quarry is a thrilling experience from start to finish that any fan of Supermassive’s other horror games will immediately adore. If this is your first foray into their games, The Quarry is an excellent jumping-in point before diving into their other games. Standout performances, fantastic writing, and horrifying visuals are sure to delight all fans of horror.
The Quarry is not only Supermassive Games’ best game since Until Dawn, but it’s also their most replayable game. Each playthrough consistently hits the 8-hour mark, The Quarry is fast-paced, exciting with every new reveal, and violently horrifying. Boasting the best performance capture and actor performances to date, Supermassive has been able to weave a story that kept me engaged on every level, even if some of the QTEs got a bit ham-fisted.
*Story Spoilers Hereafter*
Following the same story beats as classic ‘80s horror flicks, The Quarry follows a group of camp counselors through the night as they fight to stay alive. While early on The Quarry would have you believe that this is a classic “Most Dangerous Game” scenario, with backwoods hunters hunting these camp counselors, it quickly becomes clear that there’s more to these hunters than meet the eye. Supermassive Games has had the opportunity to play with a menagerie of classic horror monsters; from vampires to wendigos. But finally, they’ve tackled some of my favorite creatures with The Quarry: werewolves.
Telling a good werewolf story contained in a single night is very difficult without characters you care about. Luckily, The Quarry features some of the best characters and character arcs among all of Supermassive’s library. Brenda Song’s Kaitlyn and Siobhan Williams’ Laura are two standouts that immediately made an impression on me and easily made the case to keep them alive as long as possible. Justice Smith’s Ryan and Halston Sage’s Emma were also two standouts that brought complex performances and nuances to their characters, even though I found their characters initially unlikeable.
But that’s what I found with every character throughout my initial playthrough of The Quarry; every character seems puddle-deep in terms of character motivation when first meeting them, but Supermassive has done an incredible job giving each character an amazing arc throughout the story. Even the villains of the game, the Hacketts, feel like by-the-book villains when you first meet them but quickly become complex and nuanced the more time you encounter them. My initial playthrough gave me the impression that the Hacketts were love-less killing machines, even if they were initially attempting to protect the camp counselors. However, upon subsequent playthroughs, it becomes clear that they’re simply a group of people who found themselves in an upsetting circumstance.
But let’s jump back to the creatures at hand: the werewolves. Throwing werewolves into a game dedicated to making swift choices is such a fantastic idea, as it creates tension for every moment you encounter one that I haven’t felt with past Supermassive games. While your initial reaction to seeing a werewolf may be to kill it, understanding that your friend or a character you love has become this abomination has you second-guessing whether you want to kill it or not. This leads to some crazy scenarios our characters find themselves in, and some truly difficult decisions to make to keep everyone alive. The werewolves themselves are violent and wonderfully crafted creatures and deliver some of the most violent deaths I’ve seen in a Supermassive game.
QTEs do make a return throughout much of The Quarry, even though they’ve been scaled back tremendously from their previous games. I never felt like I had to perform a QTE for the simplest of actions, however, they were still present for the action-packed scenes when trying to escape a pursuer. The one type of QTE that I dreaded was the awful “Press X to Hold Breath” trigger, asking the player to hold a certain button to hold a character’s breath and release it when the timing was correct for the character to make their escape. This QTE was confusing, and the game never makes it clear when you’re supposed to release the button. There were a few scenes where you can control a shotgun, which often felt chaotic and difficult to aim correctly; but this felt appropriate for the moments it came into play, as they were almost always chaotic in and of themselves.
My initial playthrough came to a close with only two of the main camp counselors dead: Kaitlyn and Jacob. While I know in hindsight what I could have done to save Jacob, Kaitlyn’s death in my original playthrough was perhaps the most ridiculous death I’ve encountered in any of Supermassive’s games. I’m glad it occurred within the last 15-20 minutes of the game, otherwise, I would have been annoyed by how she died throughout the rest of the game. Luckily 3 deaths can be rewound throughout each playthrough of the game, allowing players to easily go back and choose a different path to take to save their favorite characters. Unfortunately, I had already burned through one of those saves earlier in the game to save Kaitlyn, and the game would have made me jump to a point in the game nearly 6 hours earlier. Safe to say I liked Kaitlyn, but not enough to replay 6 hours in that playthrough.
The Quarry is a thrilling experience from start to finish that any fan of Supermassive’s other horror games will immediately adore. If this is your first foray into their games, The Quarry is an excellent jumping-in point before diving into their other games. Standout performances, fantastic writing, and horrifying visuals are sure to delight all fans of horror.
