It’s been seven years since Until Dawn, Supermassive Games’ breakthrough horror play, which came after a few years of making LittleBigPlanet DLC. It was far better than anyone bet on, including Sony and Supermassive themselves. We embraced the horror movie schlock it had to offer, and a recognizable cast with just a touch of over-acting, some gory deaths, and a few surprises kept things fresh. It proved difficult to follow-up, though Supermassive’s own commitment to playing with new technologies and ideas – VR, group voting games – were to blame more than a lack of ability.
The Quarry has been sold as a spiritual successor to Until Dawn. The chronological follow-up, The Dark Pictures Anthology, has a different tone, with very different stories. Other developers haven’t picked up the Until Dawn ball and ran with it, likely fearing the combination of required high-quality graphics and animation, expensive mo-cap from at least somewhat-known actors, combined with horror gameplay some find off-putting and a lack of straight action to appeal to a wide audience. These are, simply, not cheap games to make, and not ones that are going to get their cash back easily.
It is fascinating, then, to see how close this game lands to its predecessor, and how things have changed since. Make no mistake, this is an improved Until Dawn in all but name, setting, and a graphical upgrade. Everyone in it is hot, horny, and an a-hole. They’re all positive they’re the best but indescribably bad at everything. They don’t recognize their friend’s voices in dark forests at night, they trip over at the worst possible time, they play truth or dare, and they get really mad about kissing. I cannot get enough of these little gits and will watch with glee as they suffer over the rest of the run time when the full game releases.
The Quarry cast is less recognizable than Until Dawn’s fairly impressive list of TV stars, though you’ll likely know a name or two from somewhere. The drastic leap forward in graphics quality – believe me, Until Dawn doesn’t look as nice as you remember it – is as impressive as the little touches made. There are some great accessibility options, including a straight movie mode where you set personalities for normally controllable characters and watch it all go wrong. While this wasn’t playable in our short, 45 minute demo from chapters two and three, it’ll prove a hit with the majority of that Until Dawn audience that simply enjoyed watching it.
Our crew of late-teen, anxiety-laden, hormone-leaking protagonists are a future-shifted version of all the classic tropes – the promiscuous girl is some sort of influencer, the competent girl is good with a gun and likes taking pictures on her smartphone, the foreign student is an Australian guy flirting with the nerdy one… it goes on. The aesthetics of everything from the menu and VHS filter options to their clothing, acting, dialogue, and named locations such as ‘North Kill’ is a lovely mix of Friday the 13th through Scream. It’s not quite Cabin in the Woods, but what is?
Gameplay itself is a little less positive. It isn’t bad, but there are a lot of choose-the-options and quicktime events, not so much third-person wandering. Until Dawn certainly felt like it had more, and games like Detroit: Become Human do too. Detroit is probably the biggest competitor The Quarry faces, in terms of games that are purely about the decisions you make and the consequences they cause for the characters, while still being major triple-A productions. This preview demo didn’t convince me that The Quarry has the complexity to stand up to that, but with such a different style, goal, and setting, it does have its own unique appeal.
As for the impact of your decision making, the illusion of endlessly branching paths continues to be difficult to maintain. The Quarry, and its obvious inspirations like the various Telltale games, live in a horrible half-way house where they don’t want to just be a visual novel with a distinct start and end, gameplay inbetween or not. Similarly, however, they simply cannot feature endless amounts of variable content – in the same way a traditional game level has to have walls to stop you getting out somewhere, the plot of The Quarry must move onwards at some point.
Again, Detroit did a good job with this – each scene would give you a breakdown at the end showing your path and various options you could have taken. It made replaying a part of the challenge, if you wanted. Similarly, visual novels that use choice as a major part of the gameplay – The Nonary Games series, for example – also make it a major part of the story. The Quarry’s Souls-like ‘PATH CHOSEN’ message and collectible UI for major choices feel a touch behind.
That said, many of the little decisions do lead to fairly different scenes. It usually loops around to the same thing – whether you have a snog in the forest or talk about your childhood doesn’t stop the monster showing up – but they reveal some interesting things about the characters. It was actually rather fun coming into the preview build with relatively little knowledge, only a two minute ‘what happened so far’ video from the publisher, and discovering which characters felt what about each other.
I wouldn’t ever encourage someone to replay one section of the game three times over to see how things change, and the game clearly isn’t built to support that. It does destroy that illusion that anything could happen next, making it clear which conflicts are necessary and deliberate, which relationships are inevitable. What impact the normal small messages – ‘x will remember this’, ‘y is getting tired of you’, ‘z doesn’t trust you’ – have, if any, wasn’t yet clear.
All that said, The Quarry does a great job of setting up a mystery, giving me characters I care about (even if I don’t care for them) and having believable dialogue and situations, within the context of it all being a horror movie send-up. I hope the three way conflict – our protagonists, some hick-looking hunters, and the monsters – doesn’t resolve predictably. With a game that so clearly understands what it’s creating a homage to, and does such a good job of it, it’s fair to hope it will nail that landing. I’m curious enough that what was a passing ‘maybe’ has jumped to something I’m actually looking forward to in the games-light summer coming up.
The combination of it all – a lovely indie soundtrack, a batch of arrogant teenagers in trouble, a doubtlessly wacky story – works as well as it always does. Bits of it are brilliant, the bits that aren’t are competent, and I’m always a sucker for a game that has a specific thing it wants to be the best at and succeeds. The Quarry is on track for that.
Written by Ben Barrett on behalf of GLHF.
