Genre defining games
Until Dawn was a massive hit game from Supermassive Games -studio. They also made hit games like Man Of Medan, Little Hope, House Of Ashes and a VR game Until Dawn: Rush Of Blood, which I have played all of them. They have mastered the genre of cinematic horror games, for sure since they can release games every couple of years. Now, they newest title The Quarry have hit the shelves. Can it top their previous games? Well, we gonna find that out.
Cinematic survival horror
First of all, I knew very little about The Quarry. It was a purposeful decision, since I wanted to go almost blindly into the gameplay and get an authentic experience. The Quarry tells a story of nine teenager counselors stranded at Hackett’s Quarry on the last day of summer camp. Soon, they realise they have to survive horrific night. That’s about all I can tell about the story for not spoiling anyone.
The cast is very good: David Arquette (“Scream” franchise), Ariel Winter (“Modern Family”), Justice Smith (“Jurassic World”), Brenda Song (“Dollface”), Lance Henriksen (“Aliens”), Lin Shaye (“Insidious” franchise), Ted Raimi (“Creepshow”). I think they cast was great and their acting skills were on point.
Gameplay, controls, graphics and difficulty
The gameplay and controls are very much alike the other Supermassive Games titles; it’s rather simple. While the characters have a conversation, player have to make choices, bewteen two option. Usually the options are polar opposite of each other. The other gameplay mechanic is timed prompts that usually appear when characters have to make something quickly, like running in a forest and dodging barnches and tree roots. The final mehcaninc is holding breath while hiding and releasing the command when the danger is over. There is also a free movement and player will controls one character at a time, which also allow to collect hidden tarot cards, which can show player some not-yet-happened outomes. The gameplay was simple, but still I did fail couple of times nor I found all the tarot cards.
Graphically The Quarry looks nice and next-gen, even though some of the characters’ mouths looked and moved funnily, and the lip-sync was sometimes off. It was the only graphical aspect that did look like a downgrade from previous games. One noticeable thing; the game looked really dark. I had to change the settings few times to get the brightness into acceptable stage.
I wouldn’t say The Quarry is a difficult game per se, but it was difficult to keep my characters alive. Sometimes I wasn’t sure what some choices will produce. For example, one occasion I thought I could make a choice for two characters, but the choice I made was only for one characters and the other one died because of that. There were alot of choices which outcome I couldn’t see, I though I was making a innocent choice, but in the end my character end up dying or I killed someone by accident. So, the difficultiness lies of playing the game many times so you know all the outcomes so you can keep your characters alive until the very end. The Quarry had 186 different endings so there is alot to play with.
The final cut
I did enjoy The Quarry. My ending was bad because I killed almost every single character, but the secret lies of playing the game multiple times. The Quarry is another amazing title from Supermassive Games which will keep players busy for some time. It can be played on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and PC.
(Review copy kindly provided by the publisher)
SCORE:
One More Level 