In Fall 2016, I arrived at the College of Charleston for grad school and was coming off some bad times. I had no friends, and I was eager to make some. I found my way to the Quidditch team, which was exactly the large group of cool nerds that I had been looking for, but still couldn’t quite call any of them my friends. However, on Halloween weekend that year, I decided to cast a broad invitation to people to come to my apartment and try out this game I had been wanting to play that I needed a group for. That game was Until Dawn.
That night, our group was formed and I met a few people who would go on to become the closest friends I’ve ever had. I want to stress how incredibly important Until Dawn is to me, because I want the weight of this statement to come through - The Quarry is, finally, a worthy successor to Until Dawn.
The Quarry features a cast better than any of Supermassive’s previous games, and it feels much more cohesive than the casts of the three Dark Pictures games. I think the difference in tone between those games and this are the dynamic between a group of close friends trying to survive a B-horror movie versus a group of reluctant strangers trying to survive a self-serious horror movie. The Quarry features Ariel Winter of Modern Family, David Arquette of the Scream franchise, Grace Zabriskie of Twin Peaks, Lance Henrikson of Aliens and Terminator, and of course Brenda Song of The Social Network and The Suite Life of Zack and Cody. This incredible cast pulls out all the stops with great facial and body motion capture and realistic face physics that far outdo the quality of Supermassive’s previous games.
The Quarry sets up a similar premise to Until Dawn - you’re given a selection of CW-attractive 18 year olds in the summer before they head off to college (or not), and your job is to keep them all alive until the next morning. This time, however, the game’s UI is built for couch co-op. My partner and I chose the couch co-op option and I streamed the game to her over Discord, inputting her decisions for her characters. This is a great and easy way to play the game with a group without buying multiple copies of it.
With Until Dawn, the way most people played was to divvy up characters between players to make decisions and to pass the controller around when someone’s character came up. In The Quarry, Supermassive cuts out the middleman and has you assign each character to a real life player in your group and prompts you to hand the controller to that person when their character comes up again.
There isn’t too much I can say about the story without spoiling it, and the story is the entire game, really, so I’ll try to keep to generalities. Your teens are 18 years old and packing up after 2 months being counselors at Hackett’s Quarry Summer Camp. It’s that turbulent time in your life where everything is changing and innocence is coming to an end. There’s of course some of that hot CW-level drama that I know you’re craving, and lots of deep relationships and friendships will be formed and/or tested throughout the night.
There’s a separate storyline happening featuring a playable character named Laura, who’s life is turned upside down after swerving off the road to avoid a ghost on her way to Hackett’s Quarry. The multiple storylines provide some relief without breaking up too much of the story, and Laura, played by the fantastic Siobhan Williams, holds up the weight of her own storyline with grace.
The decisions that you make throughout the game feel like they both have immediate repercussions and have you questioning for the rest of the game whether what you did back then is still affecting what’s happening now. It’s even more fun when a decision your partner made on one of their characters seems to have negative repercussions on your own character, and accusations begin to fly about who’s to blame.
The Quarry is designed to turn players against each other while having them stay on task to cooperate and try to keep everyone alive, and it balances this difficult line well. For instance, there was a segment where we had to choose to take a wrench or hammer. My partner was nervous about this decision even leading into the final hours of the game, wondering how and why it mattered that we had chosen the wrench and if it had been to blame for the deaths of some of our compatriots. This was of course followed by a thorough roasting of my choices that got 4 characters killed, which was well earned.
I am issuing a public apology here: Max dying was my fault, and I was wrong to doubt you Kristen, O Great Knower of All Things.. Regardless, all of our decisions felt like they had weight, whether they were active ones like yanking a gun away or shooting someone, or just choosing to go up or down a set of stairs. I began a 2nd run with my friends from college last night, and I’ve already seen things playing out differently.
In between chapters, you’ll be greeted by Grace Zebriskie as Eliza, the witch who acts as a narrator and 4th wall-breaking host similar to the psychiatrist in Until Dawn. She turns in what I believe is the best performance in the game and definitely one of the best of the year, guiding the players through the story and reading the tarot cards they find to show them glimpses of the future that only make decisions more confusing. She’s scary, warm, welcoming, and threatening all at once and holds the story together for its 9.5 hour runtime.
Overall, the Quarry does exactly what it sets out to do. The characters control much better than in Until Dawn, the graphics are impressive, and it ran extremely smoothly on ultra settings at 60 FPS on my RTX 2060 Super with no frame stutters. Besides a few audio desyncs, I had no bugs to speak of. My partner and I genuinely wanted to keep these kids alive through the night and felt real disappointment and guilt when we didn’t, questioning our decisions anywhere from a few seconds ago to hours ago.
The third act gets a little messy and drags a bit in chapters 7-9, but outside of that it’s the exact tone, gameplay, and most importantly vibes that fans have wanted from Supermassive that the Dark Pictures Anthology and Hidden Agenda just didn’t deliver. There were a few segments where I felt a little like I had been trapped and neither decision would save me, and whether it was earned or not the feeling of a loss of control is never fun in these kinds of games. I will admit I became a bit irked when a single decision killed two of our remaining characters at once with just half an hour left in the game.
I believe the loss of the newness factor also makes The Quarry a tad less exciting than Until Dawn, which was a totally new idea at the time, but factoring all that in it’s still an amazing experience that you and your friends are going to love. I do not recommend trying it solo, as the story and even interface aren’t built for it. This is a co-op game through and through, and ironically one of the jolliest in years.
The Quarry manages to, after all these years, harness the things that made Until Dawn a classic and replicate that feeling almost perfectly. Besides a few story hiccups in the last act, these characters and performances are going to keep you and your friends eyes glued to the screen all night long.
That night, our group was formed and I met a few people who would go on to become the closest friends I’ve ever had. I want to stress how incredibly important Until Dawn is to me, because I want the weight of this statement to come through - The Quarry is, finally, a worthy successor to Until Dawn.
The Quarry features a cast better than any of Supermassive’s previous games, and it feels much more cohesive than the casts of the three Dark Pictures games. I think the difference in tone between those games and this are the dynamic between a group of close friends trying to survive a B-horror movie versus a group of reluctant strangers trying to survive a self-serious horror movie. The Quarry features Ariel Winter of Modern Family, David Arquette of the Scream franchise, Grace Zabriskie of Twin Peaks, Lance Henrikson of Aliens and Terminator, and of course Brenda Song of The Social Network and The Suite Life of Zack and Cody. This incredible cast pulls out all the stops with great facial and body motion capture and realistic face physics that far outdo the quality of Supermassive’s previous games.
The Quarry sets up a similar premise to Until Dawn - you’re given a selection of CW-attractive 18 year olds in the summer before they head off to college (or not), and your job is to keep them all alive until the next morning. This time, however, the game’s UI is built for couch co-op. My partner and I chose the couch co-op option and I streamed the game to her over Discord, inputting her decisions for her characters. This is a great and easy way to play the game with a group without buying multiple copies of it.
With Until Dawn, the way most people played was to divvy up characters between players to make decisions and to pass the controller around when someone’s character came up. In The Quarry, Supermassive cuts out the middleman and has you assign each character to a real life player in your group and prompts you to hand the controller to that person when their character comes up again.
There isn’t too much I can say about the story without spoiling it, and the story is the entire game, really, so I’ll try to keep to generalities. Your teens are 18 years old and packing up after 2 months being counselors at Hackett’s Quarry Summer Camp. It’s that turbulent time in your life where everything is changing and innocence is coming to an end. There’s of course some of that hot CW-level drama that I know you’re craving, and lots of deep relationships and friendships will be formed and/or tested throughout the night.
There’s a separate storyline happening featuring a playable character named Laura, who’s life is turned upside down after swerving off the road to avoid a ghost on her way to Hackett’s Quarry. The multiple storylines provide some relief without breaking up too much of the story, and Laura, played by the fantastic Siobhan Williams, holds up the weight of her own storyline with grace.
The decisions that you make throughout the game feel like they both have immediate repercussions and have you questioning for the rest of the game whether what you did back then is still affecting what’s happening now. It’s even more fun when a decision your partner made on one of their characters seems to have negative repercussions on your own character, and accusations begin to fly about who’s to blame.
The Quarry is designed to turn players against each other while having them stay on task to cooperate and try to keep everyone alive, and it balances this difficult line well. For instance, there was a segment where we had to choose to take a wrench or hammer. My partner was nervous about this decision even leading into the final hours of the game, wondering how and why it mattered that we had chosen the wrench and if it had been to blame for the deaths of some of our compatriots. This was of course followed by a thorough roasting of my choices that got 4 characters killed, which was well earned.
I am issuing a public apology here: Max dying was my fault, and I was wrong to doubt you Kristen, O Great Knower of All Things.. Regardless, all of our decisions felt like they had weight, whether they were active ones like yanking a gun away or shooting someone, or just choosing to go up or down a set of stairs. I began a 2nd run with my friends from college last night, and I’ve already seen things playing out differently.
In between chapters, you’ll be greeted by Grace Zebriskie as Eliza, the witch who acts as a narrator and 4th wall-breaking host similar to the psychiatrist in Until Dawn. She turns in what I believe is the best performance in the game and definitely one of the best of the year, guiding the players through the story and reading the tarot cards they find to show them glimpses of the future that only make decisions more confusing. She’s scary, warm, welcoming, and threatening all at once and holds the story together for its 9.5 hour runtime.
Overall, the Quarry does exactly what it sets out to do. The characters control much better than in Until Dawn, the graphics are impressive, and it ran extremely smoothly on ultra settings at 60 FPS on my RTX 2060 Super with no frame stutters. Besides a few audio desyncs, I had no bugs to speak of. My partner and I genuinely wanted to keep these kids alive through the night and felt real disappointment and guilt when we didn’t, questioning our decisions anywhere from a few seconds ago to hours ago.
The third act gets a little messy and drags a bit in chapters 7-9, but outside of that it’s the exact tone, gameplay, and most importantly vibes that fans have wanted from Supermassive that the Dark Pictures Anthology and Hidden Agenda just didn’t deliver. There were a few segments where I felt a little like I had been trapped and neither decision would save me, and whether it was earned or not the feeling of a loss of control is never fun in these kinds of games. I will admit I became a bit irked when a single decision killed two of our remaining characters at once with just half an hour left in the game.
I believe the loss of the newness factor also makes The Quarry a tad less exciting than Until Dawn, which was a totally new idea at the time, but factoring all that in it’s still an amazing experience that you and your friends are going to love. I do not recommend trying it solo, as the story and even interface aren’t built for it. This is a co-op game through and through, and ironically one of the jolliest in years.
The Quarry manages to, after all these years, harness the things that made Until Dawn a classic and replicate that feeling almost perfectly. Besides a few story hiccups in the last act, these characters and performances are going to keep you and your friends eyes glued to the screen all night long.