2022 | Supermassive Games | Playstation 5
Supermassive Games has been around the block for a while, starting their rise to horror fame with, out of all things, the DLC for LittleBigPlanet. It’s not the first thing that comes to mind when you think about the journey they took after their breakout hit Until Dawn in 2015; an interactive movie experience similar to 1983’s Dragon’s Lair, where you guide characters through a cinematic adventure by pressing the prompted buttons. The added twist to this formula is that Until Dawn didn’t stop until the last character drew his or her last breath as its monsters relentlessly pursued its victims. The Playstation 4 allowed Supermassive to bring film actors into the game world with impressive likeness. And while certain animations still felt and looked awkward, it’s undeniable that they struck gold with this particular niche. While their main focus at the moment primarily seems to be the Dark Pictures Anthology, which is a series of shorter horror games, every once in a while they do release a title that is in a much larger scope than these bite size scares. The Quarry is the most recent of these large scale projects, bolstering an impressive cast and equally impressive capture technology to bring their digital forms to life in this “Choose your own adventure” styled interactive movie.
The Quarry opens up in the dead of night with two summer camp counselors lost on their way to Hackett’s Quarry. While the two bicker about where they are, they fail to notice the shape sitting in the middle of the road, causing them to swerve off the road. While one of the counselors, Max, tries to fix the car, his girlfriend, Laura, goes off to chase after something that caught her eye in the woods. However, they are not alone, as the camera pans to the perspective of a crouched shape lurking in the brushes, stalking the two. Laura panics as whispers around her intensify and she freaks out, crawling into the safety of the car after Max managed to fix it. The mud they’re standing on has different ideas about them leaving, though. Luckily a local police officer, played by none other than Ted Raimi, is there to save them.
Back on the road Max and Laura get ordered to stop at a local motel instead of driving to the summer camp in the most shady cop in the woods kind of way. Instead of listening, they make their way to Hackett’s Quarry Summer Camp and find a person trapped in the locked basement. When they manage to open up the entrance to the basement, they find that it’s deserted, outside of a bloody collar with the name Ian on it. But, as luck would have it, they are not alone after all, and Max gets brutally mauled by a creature. Laura manages to escape the basement and gets knocked out by Ted the cop after which the opening title card shows its beautiful, blood red, 80’s horror font against the backdrop of a full moon.
We cut to the end of summer and the other counselors are getting ready to pack up and leave. Here we get introduced to the fodder for this grindhouse of the evening, nine in total! Starting with Jacob, the lovesick jock whose bravado crumbles under his own insecurity, and Kaitlyn, the faux leader whose level head gets challenged by her colleagues, having a discussion about Jacob’s crush for your friendly neighborhood influencer type, Emma. Alongside the three stooges, Nick, the guarded and awkward, Ryan, the stoic wisecrack (played incredibly by Justice Smith) and Dylan, the overcompensating smartass, cracking jokes of the “gottem bro” variety at one another. The group discussing their time at camp together and cracking jokes with one another feels very much like you’re watching the start of a Friday the 13th movie. You just know that these teens’ last day of summer is going to be a rollercoaster, but instead of passively observing the mayhem, you get to pick the choices they make through A and B branches, with each choice building in some way on the last in sometimes unexpected and bloody ways. Sometimes a choice will be seemingly small, like dismissing a characters suggestion, but sometimes it means direct life or death based on whether you hide in the closet or take a risky ride across the cross beams of a cabin to avoid monsters. Things like insulting a character too much can result in that character no longer trusting your suggestions later down the line, resulting in a massive conflict of interest or death. The game eases you into this as Emma, and our resident introverted artist Abigail, drive to the rest of the group after breaking into one of the cabins to get the remainder of their luggage, while they discuss their summer crushes. In this instance Emma will simply tease Abigail, because she hadn’t confessed to Nick yet. Emma herself recently broke things off with Jacob as a summer fling, and Jacob really doesn’t agree. So he, as a normal human being, sabotages the pick-up they’re supposed to leave in to get one more night to convince Emma to go steady. Normal human beings reacting normally to normal situations.
This leaves the group stranded at the camp for one more night. And this is where the game sets its gears in motion, leaving the reins in your hands to ride out the night and keep the gang alive, or… not!
The opening act to The Quarry is largely set in stone, but from this point onward the game can change drastically from moment to moment with split second decisions determining the outcome of that particular scene. Alongside the A and B choices there’s also the return of the Quick Time Events, albeit in a somewhat simplified form. Until Dawn had you sit on the edge of your seat trying to steer characters through their perils with a large variety of button prompts that left predictability washed up on an abandoned beach, forgotten. However, The Quarry, as an answer to the needs of the fanbase, opted for a more simplistic control scheme as the default setting, with the left analog serving as your QTE stick and the X button being primarily used as a mashing prompt. While this puts more emphasis on the choices made in the game, it makes the interaction with action sequences feel a tad lackluster. However, the decisions you make also have surprising influence on the game in ways I didn’t expect. Remember that door Emma and Abigail kicked in to get their stuff? If you don’t kick that in, later on the group is caught in the open by one of the monsters. That was a surprising, yet very satisfying, detail to see (alongside a chainsaw brought to you by Groovy Tool co.) and makes it feel like the choices you make have weight. Which is something that Supermassive has become increasingly proficient at over the course of Until Dawn and The Dark Pictures. The Evil Dead reference in the previous example is just a nice bonus. Overall The Quarry in its default settings feel more like a choose your own adventure book, rather than a full on game, and this can be taken both as a criticism and as a strong point. On the one hand you’re much less invested from controller to screen, but this gives the screen so much time to shine.
The Quarry is a monstrous collaborative effort to blend film, visual effects and video games together in this astonishingly beautiful game. The environments, lighting and characters look absolutely incredible. You can tell that Supermassive has been growing in this particular niche and it translates to some gorgeous shot compositions riddled through this game. However, characters are a bit of hit and miss at times. While characters remain idle, they look almost photorealistic, to a point where one shot of a hunter looking past the barrel of a rifle had me completely fooled for a good few seconds. When in motion, especially when talking, certain animations look a tad overexaggerated, to almost a cartoonish degree. You know how somebody looks when sarcastically over-articulating the thing you hadn’t heard for the fourth time? Imagine that, but with even more mouth movement. There was also a weird thing that happened during the walking segments where a character’s neck would nearly reverse on its axis, causing me to keep an exorcist on speed dial. Just in case!
Overall though, the presentation of this game is astonishing. Scenes are lighted in in ways that add so much vibrancy to each shot and tension in the darker locations. The veil between actor and in-game character is rail thin, making performances feel incredibly lively. Well, with the exception of Ryan, but Justice Smith just has a wonderful way of deadpanning every sentence that comes out of his mouth.
The Quarry, much like Until Dawn, carries its love for the horror genre on its sleeve. There are references to many of the horror classics like Friday the 13th and Evil Dead scattered throughout this summer camp meatgrinder, with a few twists and turns of its own. While the game never delivers on genre defining moments, it holds its tension beautifully through the subversion of tropes into a compelling enough story to keep you invested to the end. The characters are, naturally, extensions of these tropes. Like the jock, the nerd, the virgin and so on. Basically, you can take that list from Cabin in the Woods and copy and paste it one on one onto this cast, but they still carry themselves with a certain flair of their own. Personal favorites include Kaitlyn’s tendency to be extra sassy, Ryan’s flat sarcasm lightening the mood and any time Ted Raimi is on screen. I have to give credit to the beautiful amount of misdirection that permeates throughout. While I was aware of the nature of the monster, I was constantly second guessing which characters were the good guys and which weren’t. And even when figuring this out it still leaves revelations in a very comfortable grey area.
The story is the center point of this game and the gameplay does take a bit of a backseat to it. Out of all the Supermassive games I’ve played, this is also the most stable one. Usually some divine force will interfere causing me to lose several characters due to botched input prompts or a certain rhythm game, from a certain game, featuring a certain boat that barely worked, now replaced with an “Hold X to hold breath” mechanic. However, The Quarry is surprisingly robust as I only encountered one questionable moment where the gun was aimed at something, but didn’t register the hit. There was also a wildly funny glitch at the end of the game, where Laura’s hair would change from shot to shot, or simply retreat into the back of her head. While the default settings make the gameplay feel rather barebones, there are a large amount of accessibility options to toy around with to make the playthrough cater to your wants and needs.
The Quarry bolsters an impressive amount of possibilities to explore. With this entry featuring an incredible amount of branching paths to lean into, and this adds a ton of reasons for a revisit during spooky season. It’s an impressive addition to the Supermassive halls of horror and a tribute to the classics. The characters are somewhat hit or miss, but the beauty of this game is that whether they make it to the finish line is ultimately up to you!
Necronomicon Ex Mortis/10
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