Supermassive has now made 5 of these choose-your-own-adventure type horror games, and in my opinion, the Quarry is hands down their most enjoyable one yet. I recommend it to anyone who has enjoyed any of Supermassive’s other releases in the genre. Now notice I said most enjoyable there and not best. That is because I don’t think this is technically the best game of its type that supermassive has made. I have played every one of the Dark Pictures games, I’ve played Until Dawn, and now I have played The Quarry. After spending so much time playing Supermassive’s games, it is clear to me that The Quarry has surpassed all of Supermassive’s past works in its character and story aspects, which makes it all the more disappointing that it falls down quite hard in its technical production and gameplay.

Now, the Quarry came as mostly a surprise to me. I knew we had the last release of their initial Dark Pictures season with The Devil In Me coming out this November, but when the announcement of the Quarry came out, it seemed like it was poised to be the proper follow-up to Until Dawn that none of the Dark Pictures games have been. For the most part, that’s true, but it is also a significant step back in mechanics and UI.

Let’s start with something that is more of a sticking point for me than it will be for most people because my primary gaming monitor is a super ultrawide monitor. While I understand that most games won’t be developed with that size in mind, all of the Dark Pictures games support standard ultrawide natively, and The Quarry, for some reason, doesn’t. Not only does it not support ultrawide it takes it a step further by forcing a letterbox screen on you, so my screen went from this in their previous games to that in The Quarry. I don’t understand why you would make your new game support fewer monitors than most of your previous games. I could even download a mod on day one that fixed this and made the Quarry fill my entire screen, not just the standard ultrawide size. So it seems like a reasonably easy fix, but I realize this won’t be the experience for most people.

However, something that will affect everyone is that from a gameplay perspective, The Quarry is a significant downgrade compared to Supermassive’s most recent release in the Dark pictures anthology, The House of Ashes. Don’t get me wrong, none of the games in Supermassive’s horror lineup heavily rely on gameplay. They are essentially interactive movies where players make choices here and there or walk around looking for clues, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that style of gameplay. My problem is that until The Quarry, you can see a steady increase and polish put into those mechanics. I was impressed with the gameplay in The House of Ashes and was excited to see what a larger production version of that could be, and the Quarry is just not it.

There were points in the House of ashes where you would jump between characters to make decisions simultaneously or to switch between them during a scene to gain a new perspective. In The Quarry, you play one character per scene and won’t change that character until you hit a load screen, and this usually sends you to a different group of people entirely. I remember enjoying this change in perspective in House of ashes. I was sitting there thinking like, wow, that’s cool. I was impressed, and to see that just disappear in The Quarry was a bit of a letdown.

Alright, now I do like this game so let’s move on to what makes the Quarry the best entry in Supermassive’s line, the story.

The Quarry is about a group of summer camp counselors who are forced to spend one extra night at Hackett’s Quarry summer camp, and that extra night is a real doozy. I love this setup because it gives the characters a reason to act braver or more foolhardy than they should. After all, they know this place; they have spent every day and night here for the past two months. The summer camp is their home turf, so it removes the whole why would you do that horror movie trope where people do things that make no logical sense in a dangerous situation. I always do stupid things at my own house because I’m safe here; this is my house. There is not going to be some horrible thing that’s going to kill me around this corner. I appreciate that.

Until Dawn was a great game; unfortunately, since then, all of Supermassive’s attempts at capturing that magic have mostly been misses. Lost Hope was kind of scary but had a terrible and frankly just disrespectful ending. Man of Medan was okay, but not anything to write home about. House of Ashes was an excellent game with a good story that wasn’t scary in the slightest and got hung up on possibly the worst love triangle in video games.

Now we have the Quarry. Is it scary? No, not really. One or two scenes may be a little creepy at best, but that might be why this game is so much better than those previous games. The Quarry never takes itself too seriously, and that allows supermassive to deliver a game that is funny, interesting, and a little creepy at the same time without undermining any of those aspects.

A significant factor in making the Quarry better than any of Supermassive’s previous horror games, including Until Dawn in this particular area, is that the characters are, for the most part, not complete garbage people like Supermassive like to write them to be. More often than not, it is hard to actually like one of the characters in these games. It is like Supermassive thinks everyone is either a rude frat boy or a spoiled brat. That way of writing a character might work in a horror movie where the character’s fates are predetermined, but in a game where you can save all the characters, having a horrible person’s fate tied to how good the ending is sucks.

For my money, Dylan, for instance, is the best character that supermassive has written yet. He is the perfect mix of funny, annoying, illogical, intelligent, and entertaining that holds the whole game together from an entertainment perspective. I mean, Jacob is essentially that rude frat boy character that supermassive loves, and even he is far more likable than any of the characters from House of Ashes or Man Medan. I can’t undersell how much legwork these characters do in making The Quarry better than any of the Dark Pictures games. A great story can be made unwatchable by having unlikeable characters, while good characters can carry you through a bad story.

Fortunately, Supermassive didn’t have to rely on their much better characters to pull me through The Quarry because the game’s story is good enough to stand on its own. I have been trying my best not to spoil anything, which is difficult, considering I’m reviewing a game that relies heavily on how good or bad the story is. I will continue to do that here, so rather than describe the story, I will try and explain why I think it is excellent.

The Quarry sees a group of teens or 20-somethings. I don’t think they make the characters’ ages very clear, but I would guess they are probably around 18. They end up stuck at Hacketts Summer camp for one extra night due to car trouble. That is the setup, and while it isn’t as exciting as waking up in a crashed bus in a mysterious and spooky town or soldiers from differing sides of a war falling into an undiscovered ancient city and getting attacked by cave-dwelling monsters, it is far more relatable. How many of you have had car problems that completely derailed your plans? I would wager a lot. How many of you have woken up in a strange ghost town in the middle of the night? Maybe some people have, but not most.

A frantic and nervous camp leader tells the counselors to stay inside the lodge for the entire night because some hunters and animals come out as soon as camp is due to end, so it is not safe. However, these are unsupervised teens in a summer camp with no supervision, so that doesn’t happen; from there, things go wrong. This setup might not seem so different from your Friday the 13ths or other retro slasher movies, but that is intentional. The Quarry is a clear ode to those movies with its share of goring deaths, camp romances, and screaming teens, but it is able to put its own spin on the classics to make them feel fresh and exciting rather than derivative and dull.

The big bad, in this case, is also far more interesting, to me at least, than just your regular everyday maniac in the woods that really hate attractive teens who like camping. They have a far more interesting back story and a real justification for everything they do, and by the end, I was like, you know what, I understand what is going on here, why everyone is doing what they are doing, and I get it. In a ghost story, for instance, if the ghost’s back story is. They were murdered in this house, so now they take their vengeance out on anyone that lives here. I’m like, okay, kind of a dick-move ghost. I have nothing to do with that; get out of here. But in The Quarry, everything makes sense, and I enjoy that in a story. When I can sympathize with an antagonist, I find it easier to get invested in a story and care about the ending. In The Quarry, I was able to do that.

I have now spent over 25 hours on the Quarry, and in that time, I have completed the game multiple times, and I got to say, every playthrough was a drastically different experience. I would get new scenes, various combinations of people, and new obstacles and challenges. I mean, more than once, I was like, that can happen? No way. Of course, that experience would lessen if I continued to play more and sought out different outcomes. But I think there are still plenty of scenes left that I haven’t experienced in The Quarry, which makes me excited to play it again or show it to a friend or family member.

Now, if there is one negative thing about the story, it is that the ending is a little lackluster. The ending sequence is just a clip of every character and how they lived or died, which is disappointing. I would have loved to see an ending scene with the campers leaving or evening talking to each other, but you don’t even get that. The second you complete the final chapter, that’s it. No, this is what happened to this person or that person, nothing. Just this person lived because of this, or they died because of this and then credits. You do get a rather entertaining sound bite that plays over the ending credits from an in-game podcast called Bizarre yet Bonafide, where the two hosts discuss clues and evidence you found during your playthrough, which I liked. Still, it didn’t give me the closure I was looking for at the end.

Now I want to touch on a few things that I don’t think make or break the game but are interesting and worth mentioning. First, The Quarry introduces movie mode to Supermassive’s games. This mode allows you to put down your controller and watch as the game plays out without needing to do anything other than sit back and enjoy the experience. Movie mode comes with four options. Everyone dies, everyone lives, gorefest, which features only the most brutal deaths possible, and directors cut. The director’s cut is probably the most interesting as you select a couple of options for each councilor that will dictate how they react to certain things, such as Jacob being calm under pressure or frantic while making decisions. These choices will then affect the decisions they make. It is an excellent little system and would be a home-run idea if not for a few small things. Number one, I had multiple points in movie mode where the characters would repeat what they had just said from a different angle, like I was in the matrix or something. Initially, I thought maybe they were repeating themselves, but as it kept happening, I realized this was just a bug in movie mode. This repetition isn’t a huge deal. Still, it can be a little annoying and reminds you that you are watching a video game.

What was far worse than them repeating themselves was that movie mode just cuts out all the walking bits of gameplay. The characters jump from collectible to collectible until they move on in the story, so if you went into The Quarry and decided to start with movie mode first, you’d be left saying, wait what? How did we get here? What is going on? This was very distracting and lowered the amount of enjoyment I had using movie mode. During the game’s prologue, the character Laura looks around Hackett’s lodge but can walk over to her boyfriend, who is in a car waiting to leave. He asks her if she is ready to go, and she is immediately 100 feet from the car. It is incredibly jarring and completely takes you out of the scene. I would have liked to see some work done to create transitions between these spots to make the game flow better in movie mode. I understand what is happening, but it still considerably lessens the experience movie mode can give the player.

Now I have heard streamer mode be discussed a little bit online, and for my 2 cents, it is an excellent inclusion to the game. If we lived in a perfect world, game companies and content creators wouldn’t have to deal with this, but I have played through the game with both the licensed and the copyright-free music, and I think both are equal. They both do a great job, which you prefer will mostly come down to which songs you like more, but I think its inclusion is a great solution to a complex problem.