Alone in the forest, just you and your friends, twigs cracking beneath your boots, the smell of the campfire joining the whiff of booze, and then a gurgling scream cuts through your clumsy attempt to get it on with your best mate. It’s either an average Saturday night or you’ve found yourself in a teen slasher. That beautiful and extraordinary day Supermassive Games stabbed us right in the bread basket with Until Dawn was a day never to be forgotten and always to be worshipped. A teen slasher movie gamerized to perfection. It was scary, engaging, brimming with choice and sloshing over with nasty consequences like blood out of a bucket. Hell yes. It’s now seven years later and holy slaughterhouse, Batwoman, Supermassive Games have done it again. The Quarry. Bow down, horror fans, or maybe just grab a knife from the kitchen, because glorious death is coming for you again.
Much like its predecessor, The Quarry is a narrative game where you make choices and have some degree of control over the direction of the plot. Or, more precisely, your actions will decide who lives and who dies. True to its genre tropes you’re trying to make it through the night alive. This is a spoiler-free review so I won’t be going into any narrative specifics here but the general idea is stranded teens, idiotic behaviour, something nasty. And we’re back to Saturday night again.
There is a whole group of unfortunate teens to take care of. These are generally the normal and comfortable archetypes such as a jock, a joker, a geek, and a mean girl but there is also a hint of progressiveness within some of their characterisations. The roles are all well-acted and I admit I grew to love them all even despite some questionable personality quirks. As a group, they bounce off each other really well with both complementary and clashing chemistry. There’s certainly nothing particularly outstanding or even memorable about any of the characters, but they fulfil the function of entertaining fodder very well. What you will remember, however, is what you make them do. There are a huge amount of branching paths, consequential events and eventual endings. Much like Until Dawn’s Butterfly Effect something small you do very early on can have a huge effect much later. Sometimes you’ll dodge metaphorical bullets without even knowing but other times you’ll make a choice and have an “oh feck” moment when you instantly realise you’ve pointed that gun at yourself.
Helping you get started with the game’s various systems is a collection of Fallout Vault Boy style cartoon videos which will kick in each time you need to grip something new. They are short, funny and very helpful, guiding you towards making the most of what the game is offering. Here you will learn about the importance of pathways, gathering clues and evidence and how to manage control systems like breathing, or rather holding your breath when it could very well get you killed. Speaking of which, this particular system is much easier in The Quarry than it was in Until Dawn. Previously you had to keep the controller still which was an easy task to screw up. Now you just need to hold down a button until the danger has passed which will be indicated on screen. QTE’s are similarly pared down to pressing the same button each time and pushing the stick in the indicated direction. Being the type to often foul up QTE’s with my astonishingly slow reaction time and rubbish coordination, I’m not going to complain. Accessibility in the main menu can make things even easier (or harder if you wish) with options such as auto-aim, auto-completion of QTEs or longer decision timers.
If you do lose a character, all is not necessarily lost. Supermassive Games have introduced the Death Rewind feature. This will unlock on your second playthrough or if you bought the deluxe version you’ll have access to it straight away. You are given 3 lives, that’s 3 chances to reverse someone’s horrible death. If you choose to use one of your lives the game will take you back to the point where you have the chance to save them. In one scenario, the game took me back to the moment I’d made my very last decision, but in rewinding for another character the game whisked me all the way back to a scene thirty-ish minutes before. Not ideal but apparently there is a patch on the way that will give adequate warnings.
While you’re trying very hard not to die (or the opposite) you are strongly encouraged to engage with and explore your surroundings. There’s plenty to find including clues to working out exactly what’s going on and evidence that will help back up your story. I would have liked to see just a little more depth to the evidence collecting such as more opportunities to take photos and perhaps more acknowledgement from the characters that they really need to find things to explain what’s happened because who the heck is going to believe them otherwise? There are a few moments when the characters completely underreact to their situation. They sometimes joke they are in a movie but they also sometimes act like it too. The most unbelievably terrifying thing can happen and the reaction is “oh well, gotta escape” which is fair enough but where is the hysterical crying and brown trousers?
Another collectable you’ll be tasked with finding is the tarot cards. These work in a similar way to the totems from Until Dawn and give you a glimpse of a possible future. They also link into some interesting interludes. I managed to find a fair amount of them first time through but there was still a lot that eluded me despite the fact that I was reasonably thorough in my environmental searching. Some of these doobries are very well hidden and there’s a lot of replay value in the tarot card system itself.
The game runs at around ten hours give or take and it feels well-paced with no one character arc feeling out of place, too long or cut short. All the way through right to the very end the choices you’ve dismissed are intriguing enough that a second playthrough is almost a must. Couch co-op may very well scratch that second itch or there’s also a movie mode where you can program in your desired outcomes or direction and the game will take you through automatically. It’s certainly nice to just take a moment to sit back and watch. The animations are gorgeous. It’s a beautiful game.
VERDICT
After the greatness of Until Dawn it was hard to envision a game of similar ilk being that good again. The Dark Pictures Anthology has certainly done its best to live up to its big daddy and although these games have had some success and are all pretty decent in their own right, none of them have quite captured that original amalgamation of narrative, gameplay and horror. But finally, after many long years, mummy’s home. The Quarry is an exceptional narrative horror that stands proudly beside its predecessor.
-S.J. Hollis