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.