The Quarry Preview | A Promising Final Day of Summer Camp

Supermassive Games is yet again taking us on another vacation of a lifetime with The Quarry, the latest entry in their ever-growing catalogue of interactive drama horror games following Until Dawn and their Dark Pictures Anthology. Not only did they make us have a look around on what to expect for this upcoming title, but they were kind enough to let us experience a hands-on preview of the actual game.

As someone who has played the studio’s other games, I wanna say The Quarry looks rather promising based on my demo of it.

What made me say this is because it seems that Supermassive Games is going back to the cabin-in-the-woods-style slasher formula, just like what they did from Until Dawn. All while adding its own identity to the equation, using the tropes of characters that make up the classic slasher flick that some of us are familiar with. You can definitely tell the inspiration behind this game being set in a summer camp during the 80s, with teenagers being left alone in the middle of nowhere; you don’t have to be a movie buff to know what movie I’m referring to. Despite the uncanny resemblance to its inspiration, with my little time from the preview build, it managed to meld each trope wonderfully, giving the feel of freshness to it, which is a bummer as I got yeeted out of the game when things were starting to get interesting.

I can’t give a solid impression of the pacing of the story yet, since the preview build plunged me into the middle of things, but compared to Until Dawn or any Dark Pictures entries (which gives you the feeling of watching a full-length movie) The Quarry felt like I was watching a series instead of a movie with each character having their own agenda. This shifting perspective felt like each character has their own episode, although rest assured, the drama won’t take away the suspense from the game, but instead may become a conflict when you make your choices during the actual gameplay as your choices during dialogues yield consequences, as always.

I just have to say, some dialogue choices still frustrated me, since just like the previous games, some of these choices yield the opposite of your desired outcome; as if that scenario has a definite path to it. Still, it’s too early to conclude that this is the case for the whole game as they already promised there would be a lot of branching outcomes for each character.

Speaking of the gameplay, if you’ve played the previous entries, then you already know how to play this game; except for the QTEs that I think are an improvement from what we got on The Dark Pictures entries. But I suggest that they change or improve that joystick icon since it greatly resembles the circle button, and since I used a PS controller, there was a bit of confusion that occurred. It’s still early, so I think they have time to improve it.

Another thing that I want them to improve is the brightness of the game as I can barely see the place when navigating dark areas, despite having the settings at full brightness. Being a preview build, it wouldn’t be fair to talk about the current technical aspect of the game, but the character rendering looks promising, which is why I hope that we won’t get any awkward expressions from the final build.

As much as I want to share other details about the preview build, I can’t risk giving away information that may spoil you. Instead, all I could say is there are lots of stuff to look forward to with The Quarry. It may have leaned towards the style of Until Dawn, tying together character tropes from the 80s slasher flick, but it somehow felt fresh. So count me in as one of those excited for the full release.