"I promise you a thousand years voyage guided by compassion."
 
Finished this DLC a few days after the release, wasn't sure what thoughts to put down but now I do. Nothing like From Soft releasing quality difficult content and the usual crowd of people who complain about the difficulty will always be there while mostly other people who had been waiting for said content will enjoy (me). I had been waiting for this DLC content for so long and the announcement when it got announced was so memorable because I was playing games with one of my best friends and he told me that Elden ring posted something and there it was, the announcement for the DLC.

All the bosses in the DLC were amazing, aside from like 2-3 I disliked (Yes, I'm looking at your Gaius and Sunflower) but the lore and story context of those bosses are really really good. Miyazaki saying this DLC size was the size of limgrave makes me laugh because its utterly amazing they reached deep in their bag and created a whole another game. It reminds me a mix of Dark Souls 1 and 2 map creativity where everything is just connected together really smoothly. FromSofts ability to make you fully immersed into an atmosphere is one of the best ever as always, I spent so much more time exploring than almost fighting the bosses because of how extensively wide the map is. I've seen a lot of complaints for the difficult spike but it's very doable, I have always done everything solo for From Soft games most of the time and I did it for this DLC, its possible and I believe people should just stop complaining and just do it. Too many times has From Soft has released a DLC just for people to complain about difficulty.

Final Boss, Bayle, Messmer and Rellana were definitely my favorite fights from this DLC especially the final boss which tested my everything, it felt like a genuine challenge, FromSoft challenging the player to its utmost skill limit, defeating a god and it actually felt like that. Defeating that final boss solo had my hands shaking because of how difficult that final boss really is and only a few games have made me feel that type of way before. Also, I really loved all the lore in this DLC, the most fantasy stuff without going into spoiler territory.

Thank you From Soft and I'm excited on what they plan to do next. I will definitely be there.

It would’ve been nice for them to try and not copy Until Dawn almost beat for beat, twists and all, but The Quarry does manage to be a more polished experience with lovely graphics, smoother gameplay and a better cast.

Some excellent performances, favourites including Ted Raimi, Lin Shaye and Skyler Gisondo. And also Grace Zabriskie is amazing as usual, wonderful and terrifying as Eliza the fortune teller - she is probably way too good for shit like this. I feel like some of the other cast - notably David Arquette, Lance Henriksen and, to some extent, Justice Smith - are given too little to do and sometimes feel like wasted opportunity.

All in all, I found the characters to be generally more likeable than in Until Dawn, even the annoying ones, and so it was always a bummer to lose some of them to horrific deaths all because I didn’t intuit something like ‘going in that direction leads to certain death.’

Regardless of how “good” an ending you get, it always feels incredibly anti-climactic in how it just sort of stops and gives you a lazy freeze frame montage of “this character survived by staying hidden” or “this person got killed because you made a stupid choice” - I would’ve liked even just a cutscenes of some survivors relishing the fact they made it to sunrise and having a big group hug or something; what do they do with their lives after, does anyone get together? I guess the problem with these types of choose your own adventure games is that the writing becomes compromised by the need for all possibilities of outcome, leaving no room for a completed character arc.

And also the ‘evidence’ you collect to build your case as to what actually happened could have been a terrific way to do collectibles but it feels wasted as it only seems to affect some details in the long-ass credit sequence. Again, I would’ve loved even just a cutscene of the evidence having some kind of cool payoff - big courtroom drama bonus level!

While I appreciated that The Quarry is rather goofier than Until Dawn, and dare I say funny in places, it certainly could have done with being scary. Their formula is yet to be perfected, but Supermassive are on the right lines with this one, at least more so than any of those Dark Pictures.