The Quarry Review: A Love Letter to ’80s Horror That Lives and Dies by the QTE

As in 2015’s Until Dawn, Supermassive Games’s latest casts players as an assortment of young adults who experience one harrowing, horrifying night in the wilderness. Played by Ariel Winter, Justice Smith, and Brenda Song, among others, our photogenic protagonists have just spent the summer as counselors at Hackett’s Quarry Summer Camp, whose ominously ironic slogan is “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

You could say that the flipside of that slogan applies to the player. Inaction is often a viable option here, and there are story branches that happen based on failing a quick-time event. In the end, because your button presses and decisions might violently and permanently remove a character from a story, inadvertently killing one of them will only improve your game.

With details like a video tape loading icon, The Quarry embraces an old-school ’80s horror vibe. It’s telling that, in one menu screen that tracks your decisions and how they affect the plot trajectory, each individual storyline gets its own “box art” as though it’s a separate movie altogether. The large cast and the many intersecting plot points give The Quarry a scope well beyond The Dark Pictures Anthology games, which saw Supermassive returning to this style of choose-your-own-horror adventure on a smaller scale. But where the similarly ambitious Until Dawn felt relatively seamless, The Quarry often feels as if it’s bitten off more than it can chew.

From a mechanical standpoint, the large cast does make sense. Not only does it pave the way for the characters to splinter off into amusing odd-couple pairings, but it allows the story to continue if one or several become injured, killed, or infected by a werewolf. The plot cleverly branches off apparently “wrong” decisions and missed button prompts while retaining a genuine sense of unpredictability; an apparently “correct” decision like leaving a door open for some counselors to safely slip into might inadvertently endanger another character.

Accommodating the sheer size of the cast, though, often forces you into plodding exploratory segments just so you can spend time with different counselors. In addition to killing the momentum, these interludes never feel dangerous. Though they’re meant to immerse us in the game world, the tight camera angles and sluggish controls are far more jarring and unwieldy than something like a pop-up menu of searchable objects might have been. The environments do sometimes hide crucial objects and actions, but mostly the game’s idea of interactivity outside its quick-time events and cutscene choices is about testing your willingness to wander into the empty parts of the scenery, hoping to trip over a collectible for your trouble.

But even if you speed through the more interactive segments, it’s tough not to notice how awkwardly parts of The Quarry have been stitched together. Some of this is typical of video games, where a character’s actions and attitudes don’t totally sync with your choices. One character might still be a little nasty to someone she’s ostensibly teamed up with, while any avoidable deaths draw strangely muted reactions because scenes need to also accommodate the possibility that a character lives instead. Even beyond these common hitches, the game connects several scenes with weird fade-outs, as though the connective tissue for a story choice is outright missing. Some chapters and perspective changes even end abruptly, with certain actions seeming to happen regardless of what choice you’ve supposedly made.

Perhaps worst of all, many of the game’s pivotal past events and a few of its characterizations are relegated to collectible “evidence” documents or protracted explanations by stiff character models. The ending comes suddenly, and characters who seem important because they’re played by actors like Lance Henriksen feel like little more than cameos. (A shifty cop played by Ted Raimi is the lone adult character to leave any sort of impression.) As is, The Quarry more or less does the job of setting up playable characters who you hope to keep from horrible deaths, employing a presentation that lets you feel like you’re more or less “playing” a horror movie. But it’s also tough to shake the sense that Supermassive’s rigid commitment to a high-fidelity style is actually hindering the stories that they want to tell.

This game was reviewed using a code provided by Finn Partners.