I have been trying to finish The Quarry for ages now. At the beginning of the year, when I first picked it up, I thought maybe it was the many PC optimization issues keeping me from loving Supermassive’s latest work. Other than the ending of The Dark Pictures: Little Hope, I’ve consistently loved all their games that I’ve played up to this point.
Yet when I picked up the game again to play on my Series S, something else became readily apparent – it’s not tech issues holding The Quarry back, but a sheer, overwhelming lack of motivation for me to care about what happens. It’s not a lack of focus in design or some absent gameplay feature holding The Quarry back – if anything, it’s its dogged obsession with multiple protagonists holds it back. A compromise wasn’t made when it desperately needed to be, demonstrating why The Dark Pictures’ latest, The Devil In Me, runs circles around The Quarry’s big-budget ambitions.
The Quarry aims to be a spiritual successor to Supermassive’s first major hit – the PS4 exclusive Until Dawn. Just like its predecessor, it’s a choice-driven slasher flick where anyone can live or die based on your actions. Deaths can result from QTE failures and poor decision-making, whereas surviving takes genre savviness and thinking ahead – plus, in a few instances, a little trial-and-error. Unlike a Telltale game, you’re expected to live with the consequences of your actions, for good or ill.
This is all well and good, but The Quarry presents a fundamental problem with this formula that even its troubled peer New Tales From The Borderlands avoided – too many heroes with too little reason to care. I’m not exaggerating either, as The Quarry has (*deep breath*) Laura, Max, Abby, Dylan, Emma, Jacob, Kaitlyn, Nick, and Ryan all as playable characters that you’re supposed to embody, root for (or root for being murdered). Crucially, all of them can die without breaking the plot.
To The Quarry’s credit, everyone gets their chance in the spotlight, with a lengthy runtime and elaborate, sprawling plot that interweaves seemingly disconnected elements into a cohesive whole. There are, if you count every permutation possible, 186 different endings that can be experienced. There’s just one problem, I found – The Quarry never made me care for anyone other than Laura and Max.
A crucial aspect in Laura and Max’s favor is due to them being our introduction to the world. It’s their car crash and run-in with a werewolf (and said werewolf’s creepy sheriff brother) that starts off the whole journey. In a typical horror story, they’d be the fodder characters to die in the opening to set the stakes, but they’re not. If anything, Laura is essentially the Ellen Ripley of The Quarry.
You only find this out after a good few hours of teenage camp counselors whining at each other, flirting awkwardly, and generally acting like a bunch of prats. Any of the atmosphere established by the start of The Quarry is lost by the time you reach the counselors, and it takes so long for them to get in danger that you’d think what happens between those crucial moments would flesh them out better as characters. Except it doesn’t, not for most of them.
Ryan has some interesting setup as a kid who’s hoping to make something of himself and who’s friends with the camp’s owner, Chris Hackett. Emma defies the “catty slut” stereotype by only really being a jerk to her ex. Nick is so bland that you actually have a fair bit of say over whether he’s a jerk or sweet. Everyone else is fairly set in stone as whiny, irritable, and equally irritating.
It’s not for a lack of solid performances either – part of what got me personally excited was Brenda Song being part of the cast, yet her character, Kaitlyn, is one of the most hanger-on second-fiddle characters in the game. Mostly she just tosses around useless snark, and in one crucial set-piece, displays incompetence with a gun – the one useful skill she’s supposed to have.
It’s also not a problem of the characters being written too youthfully or what an older writer thinks young adults sound like. The problem is that they fundamentally don’t build into interesting characters who make compelling choices until you’re so far in that honestly you’re just finishing the game out of a sunk-cost fallacy or to see what happens next with Laura and Max.
These two are lovers with legitimate chemistry, an understandable central conflict, and who actually move the plot forward most often with their actions. They’re the real stars here, and they’re not who we were sold in the trailers. Worse still, they’re not the people we spend nearly the majority of our time with.
And the solution to all this is ironically incredibly simple – we only should’ve had two characters to play as: Laura and Ryan. Max is better as a foil to Laura, and everyone else is effectively a foil to Ryan out of the remaining camp counselors. Having Laura be the protector and redeemer of her boyfriend caught up in the werewolf curse would’ve given us a badass female heroine, while Ryan coming into his own as a leader would’ve been far more engaging. Plus, that would mean we’d have a big budget AAA adventure game starring a well-rounded woman and a refreshingly stereotype-free portrayal of a gay black man.
Instead, to get to the two of them, you have to wade through so much teenage banality that when bodies start hitting the floor, it’s hard to care. To be fair, Until Dawn had the same amount of playable leads, but crucially, they’re all tied into the inciting incident, each have direct links to the main antagonist, and they don’t just spend all their time being incredibly inept. A certain level of human error is key to horror, but not to the point you’re wondering why you just spent the last two hours getting to know a bunch of forgettable nobodies filling up the runtime.
The Quarry has an incredible cast, brilliant visual presentation, a stacked cast, some of the best accessibility options to date, and noble ambitions for interactive fiction. It’s a real shame that’s all in service to a game that could’ve been half as long, with far less complexity in execution leading to a more engaging tale. At least for that, we’ve got The Dark Pictures Anthology. Hopefully next time Supermassive goes, err, massive in scale, they’ll keep it laser focused on characters worth caring about.
