The Quarry Review — A Killer Summercamp

If you’re a fan of slasher flicks, teen horror movies, and 80s and 90s horror icons, you’d be hard-pressed to find anything more suitable and fitting than Supermassive Games’ The Quarry in your gaming library, delivering all the gore, screams, and sinister villains that go with the genre, while throwing you into the mix as you participate in how the whole ordeal plays out.

For those who may not know, The Quarry is the spiritual successor of sorts to Until Dawn, Supermassive Games’ playable horror-movie, which lets you partake in a Cabin in the Woods-esque scenario, making life or death choices, exploring, and even directing how dialogue plays out. The Quarry follows the same set-up, but has added in a whole lot more ‘game’ into the experience, allowing you to do all the above, along with some guided shooting, running, and other flight-or-fight moments. Of course, these games are all about the story and the repercussions of your decisions, and in that regard, it thrives.

The story itself follows nine young camp counselors who must survive a night at Hackett’s Quarry in Upstate New York while being hunted by bloodthirsty locals and a creature much more sinister. There’s the usual roster of naive teens, helpful law enforcement, and suspicious locals, and while it hits many of the beats fans of the genre will know, it does a great job to flip some expectations, along with the fact that the game can play out in a lot of different ways.

186 endings, to be exact. No, that’s not a typo: one-hundred-and-eighty-six. Every choice you make, characters you manage to keep alive, and the dialogue decisions you make will steer the outcome of the game, which provides a lot of replayability. Of course, with over 180 endings available, these can range from drastic changes, such as characters being alive or dead, to slight permutations, such as an additional line of dialogue or item change. Seeing the same scene with and without one of the main characters (who kicked the bucket early in one of our playthroughs) was great to experience though, and showed how certain scenes will play out different with or without certain characters.

The Quarry is essentially The Avengers of horror history’s who’s-who

Supermassive Games’ love for horror classics is clearly present throughout all their games, but The Quarry pays homage to the best of the best, with the cast featuring a host of well-known actors celebrated for their roles in horror movies. Not only do you get David Arquette (Scream), Grace Zabriskie Child’s Play, The Grudge) and Lin Shaye from The Conjuring franchise, but Lance Henriksen (Alien vs Predator, Aliens) and Ted Raimi (The Evil Dead) also play notable roles. The voice work is great, and the improvement in motion capture technology in recent years really allows each actors’ input to be showcased.

Misery loves company

While The Quarry doesn’t have any traditional multiplayer per se, the fact that Supermassive Games even included a cooperative experience is a huge plus. In the game’s couch co-op mode, you and up to seven friends can experience the horror together. Each player is assigned to play as one or more counselors, with one controller passed around the group each time a different counselor becomes the current playable character. Whether you decide to work together or suddenly swerve the story in a new direction is up to you. It’s an incredibly fun addition that turns a solo horror experience into a hilarious game of ‘let’s see who can keep their character alive the longest’, which makes for a fantastic evening with friends.

While Supermassive Games has been slowly improving and enhancing their own little niche in the gaming world: the narrative-story-driven horror genre, The Quarry is the best of the bunch and the perfect nod to the teen-slasher/supernatural horror milieu of yesteryear. The larger cast, gorgeous visuals, scarier setting, and slightly tongue-in-cheek atmosphere of the game sets it up to be another classic.

The Quarry is available on Xbox Series X, PS5, Xbox One, PS4, and PC.

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