by Welcome to day 11 of the RPS Advent Calendar! We are going to have a great time: singing songs by the fire, kayaking in the lake, and certainly none of the camp counselors will be brutally murdered by monsters!
If you go down to The Quarry today, you’ll get a big surprise.
Alice Bee: I was a big fan of the original Supermassive “like a 2000s horror movie, but a game!” until dawn, and The Quarry is really heading in that direction again. A group of camp counselors spend one last night at Hackett’s Quarry before the summer is over, but it turns out they’re not alone. There are weird, blood-covered firecrackers stalking the woods, not to mention literal claw monsters. If you want to watch a group of teenagers awkwardly kiss each other before spending 10 hours screaming and losing limbs, then this game is for you.
Of course, you’re theoretically supposed to avoid the limb loss aspect with your choices: run left or right, take that weapon or not, that sort of thing. Your QTE earnings and decisions really add up over time. Thing is, a lot of the deaths are gore parties so over the top I wasn’t even mad. But I particularly liked The Quarry for some of the more subtle changes. It plays with teen horror tropes in a fun way, and sometimes earning a QTE is, in fact, exactly the wrong thing to do. It’s a heartbreaking popcorn fest, but it’s also smart.
Rebecca: I’m still impressed that The Quarry was kept completely secret until just three months before release. Supermassive Games isn’t known for being shy about its upcoming projects. they’ve been known, in fact, to always announce the next entry in The Dark Pictures Anthology with a trailer embedded in the previous year’s game, giving audiences 12 months or more to build hype. Additionally, details regarding the development of the anthology are often subject to leaks. So how the hell did we hear about them working on an Until Dawn sequel with David Arquette, Ted Raimi, Lin Shaye, and a dozen other like-minded people, until the game was almost out?
Every member of The Quarry’s 15-person main cast is either a horror movie legend or a rising star in Hollywood, and you have to hand it to the casting director who managed to score so many hits. If you’ve watched TV in the last decade, you’re going to spend the first two chapters exclaiming “hey, that’s -!” again and again.
Quarry has rightly been praised for its suite of accessibility options, as well as its welcoming of players unfamiliar with its genre. Supermassive is notorious for throwing a bunch of quick events at you, some of them quite punishing; but The Quarry reduces all that. Other than the navigational controls, you only need to hammer maybe two buttons throughout the game. presents virtually no challenges.
However, that doesn’t mean playing The Quarry is easy. I’m good at these games, and I still quite boned the finale the first time two of my favorite characters suffered extremely disappointing deaths. Understanding how your choices in Chapter 5 impact your options in Chapter 10 is the kind of thing that’s key to keeping the characters alive, and it’s that complex narrative design rather than those “Press X to Don’t” moments. die” that allow me to replay these game times and again.
But if you want to watch The Quarry as a miniseries and skip the part where you take responsibility for the results, that option is there too. The game includes a movie mode that sets it to autoplay while you settle in with the popcorn, and the quality of the cast makes it worth taking a step back from the action to devote your full attention to. the story at least once. . It’s a goofy creature from the 80s, but everyone gives their all and seems to be having a lot of fun.
