Supermassive Games hit the big time back in 2015 with the critical and financial success that was Until Dawn and now seven years later they are back with the spiritual successor titled The Quarry, which we had an opportunity to get an on-hands preview with this week.
While Supermassive Games has been putting out annual releases in the Dark Pictures Anthology series such as Man of Medan and House of Ashes, The Quarry is more in the vein of Until Dawn with a focus on classic horror movie tropes.
This starts right with the main story of the game, where a group of camp counselors at Hackett’s Quarry end up having to stay one additional night at camp after the kids leave due to what appears to be a sabotaged vehicle. They are warned to stay inside, but they instead decide to throw a big bonfire to celebrate the end of summer and it ends up turning into a night of pure hell.
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In this hands-on preview, we were given the opportunity to play through at least part of Chapter 2 and Chapter 3. Based on where we started and ended, I’m not sure if those were the complete chapters or not. This took about 45 minutes to an hour to complete, so it was only a slice of the overall game while still giving us a look at what to expect with the rest of it.
Like Supermassive’s other games, you will take control of numerous characters throughout The Quarry, with us getting to use pretty much every character for at least a short time. Some of these were more expansive sequences, like getting to walk around the woods with Abi when she was lost, while others may just have a couple of dialogue options to choose between in a conversation before moving along.
The Quarry features a fairly solid, yet not incredibly star-studded cast list that includes people like Ariel Winter, Justice Smith, and Brenda Song whom we got to play as and interact with during the preview. Even in this short preview, the actors seemed to fit in well with the game and had good chemistry with one another in their interactions. Sometimes games like this can feel a bit stilted with the dialogue, but that is far from the case here and gives me hope that the rest of the game will continue to be that way. The full game also boasts some major names like David Arquette and Lance Henriksen as well, but we did not get to hear them in our short time with the game.
During the two chapters we got to play through, there were several scenes with two or three characters, as well as a group scene where they play truth or dare around the bonfire. The game features a sort of ’80s horror movie tone with the character interactions, with it most often being comedic. You can tell there is some thought put into the characters here too, which is especially important considering not everyone may make it to the end of the story.
These different playable areas introduce some of the different gameplay mechanics as well, though there are definitely more than what we got to experience. This included walking around, interacting with objects, picking dialogue options in conversation, QTE segments, and even some gun shooting in a couple of sections.
Some of the developer’s earlier releases have felt a little dated at times with the overall walking mechanics and such, but the limited time we had with The Quarry seemed to be an upgrade to past engines used in some prior takes on the genre at least. For this preview, the QTE segments mostly revolved around the analog stick and pressing it in certain directions, which is kind of different from most QTEs that utilize the face buttons.
While there was nothing overly groundbreaking in the gameplay in comparison to some of Supermassive’s past outings gameplay-wise thus far, this was only a small fraction of the game so we can’t really judge without knowing what else is to come.
The narrative and diverging paths are really where the game is going to shine long-term, which we only got a glimpse of in this preview. For what we got to play though, I very much enjoyed the early plot and then how it really starts to ramp up near the end of Chapter 3. It was also pretty vague on what exactly is happening at Hackett’s Quarry, so I am very excited to see where the plot goes in the full game.
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Character models in The Quarry were also very impressive, with the facial expressions and such looking very realistic and helping to make it feel almost like you were watching a movie. On the flip side though, for some reason, the water in the preview at least looked bad at times, especially when someone was splashing it. It almost looked like it was unfinished, so it will be interesting to see if that was something they were still polishing or if that’s how it will look in the final product as well. Other than that though, everything looked great and captured that summer camp feel all around.
As a single-player preview of The Quarry, we were also not able to experience any of the multiplayer elements either in local or online play. This is something that has worked very well with the Dark Pictures Anthology games and it should enhance this experience even further.
Overall, The Quarry is shaping up to be a worthy spiritual successor to Until Dawn based on our preview with the game and we are excited to play more when it releases for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on June 10.
