Horror review of The Quarry – between the film and the game

We talked about the most anticipated game of the month quite recently in our first impressions of the game, so I’ll just remind you that this is another “interactive film” from the British studio Supermassive Games, the authors of the cult horror Until Dawn. and the slightly controversial Dark Pictures Anthology series. After those first hours, my main concern was that Quarry was too similar to Until Dawn, not only in design but also in story. At the time, I was hoping for a major turning point that would take away the impression that I was playing more or less the same thing again. And I really experienced this “revolution”, although in a different form than I imagined.

• Platform: PC (peer review), PS4, PS5, X1, XSX | S
• Publication date: 10. 6. 2022
• Producer: Supermassive Games (England)
• Genre: interactive movie
• Czech location: Not
• Multiplayer: Yes
• Data to download: 50 GB
• Game time: 9+ hours
• Price: 1499 CZK (couples)

Horror Night

A group of young caregivers from a summer camp decide to spend one more night after the children leave at the end of the summer, before they too leave the camp. After all, this is a camp in the Hackett Quarry, an idyllic location with a beautiful lake in the middle of dense forests. Perfect for a good campfire and one last love flight before returning to normal. But a bunch of teenagers have no idea that the hunting season begins tonight and that the forests around the quarry will become brutally bloodthirsty. The main question here is what is more dangerous a strange animal in the dark, its ruthless hunters or the ghostly spirit of a legendary witch.

At least in the first hours, the story is in the style of a completely traditional “teen killer”, where you first try to pack the desired double of your character so that the spark of love turns into adrenaline when it gets dark and life begins. I have to say that while a lot of the dialogue is well written and the acting is usually really top notch, the acting really got me hooked until it started to get stiff and I rather suffered from the opening “dating” passages. But once history hits the gas, it hardly slows down.

Once history hits the gas, it barely slows down.

Fans of the genre and the studio’s games are well aware of what mechanics awaits them: sometimes you walk through the environment in a third person, but more often you watch movie clips, and then either choose one of two options (run or hide, accept or reject an offer, etc.). etc.) or you have to press a certain combination of buttons to jump into the abyss, hold your breath, etc. The plot forces you to turn all the characters in turn and everyone can die. Occasionally you will find tarot cards that the fortune teller will explain to you between chapters of the story as a preview of a possible future. New is a layer of mechanics that offers ease, from being able to rewind a character’s death back to its cause, to automatically successfully completing all interactions. If you wish, you can literally play the game like a nine-hour movie.

Heroes and cowards

Every story is only as good as its characters. I must admit, it took me a while to find my favorites – maybe because everyone deals with dates initially, and not with anything else. However, in the end, I clearly found my favorite and really looked forward to each playthrough with this character. By far the best thing about Career is that when he decides to create a really exciting scene (I don’t know how to say “badass” in Czech), he does it with such energy, scenography and orchestral acting that it is really powerful experience. I dare to say that the “main character” of the story from this side is as severe as, for example, in “The Bloody Bride”. Every second scene with her was rougher and better than the previous one. The second half of the game as a whole is much better than the first, and to my great joy, the seemingly predictable plot was finally a surprise.

The second half of the game is generally much better than the first.

But whether this character will really become your “main character” is, of course, up to you to decide: after all, you can really let anyone die and the game adapts to this – the ending of the story offers almost 200 variations. One of the funniest ways to experience this game, quite possibly with a partner or a whole bunch of friends, is where you hand over the controller to individual character playthroughs and passionately discuss together what decisions to make in each situation. You can make each playable character more or less a hero or a coward, a survivor or a corpse.

The film experience is greatly aided by the strong design, led by amazing models and (facial) animation of the characters, which look absolutely realistic in the right lighting. On the contrary, it’s a little unfortunate that there are a bunch of technical bugs and work in progress, including the sometimes rough sequence of some scenes – it looks like the game has survived another month of debugging. On my PC (i7-9700F, 16GB DDR4, RTX 2070 Super) in 4K resolution with high (not ultra) detail settings, I only get 45 fps consistently.