The DeanBeat: The Amazing Tropics of Horror in The Quarry

Supermassive Games’s The Quarry is another one of those awesome interactive movie horror games that drives you crazy with choices while trying to make the right decisions to save a group of teens at a summer camp.

The creators have come a long way in the last seven years with five horror titles since 2015’s Until Dawn. I tended to like The Quarry, which was released by 2K and almost feels like a remake of 2015’s Until Dawn, because that title was my favorite game of that year.

This time, the Supermassive Games team stole an institution of its own, as The Quarry’s summer camp environment with a lodge full of teenagers is not so different from its original interactive horror game Until Dawn. That way, The Quarry is kind of a repeat of Until Dawn.

The Tot Dawn formula

In the 2015 story, eight young adult friends are trapped on a remote mountain getaway after finding a killer loose between them. Your job as a player is to make quick life-or-death decisions and save as much of it as possible as dawn approaches.

But the multiple games that followed the successful Until Dawn to The Quarry were much more than just horror stories. These were morality games, where you had to make decisions about who to save and who to let die. You had to pay attention to the relationships between characters, like whether they should fall in love or not. It made you feel like you were playing god.

At least until you lost a character for no other reason than you turned right when you should have turned left. You need to compress the controls or move the controller quickly left or right to make the right decision to save your character.

The thing that becomes difficult to predict in these games is the theory of the “Butterfly Effect”, or the chaos theory idea that proposes a small change in a system’s initial states, can result in large variations in a later state have. The name was created by Edward Lorenz, and it comes from an example where the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can cause subtle changes weeks later that affect the path of a hurricane.

In the series, your smallest and biggest decisions can affect the outcome of the evening and who is going to survive. With the Dark Pictures Anthology, Supermassive has added a whimsical and complacent narrator who tells you what you did wrong or gives you a hint on how to do better. Despite those tips, seemingly insignificant choices still mean the difference between survival and death. After playing five different games over seven years, some players may be forgiven for getting tired of the formula, as fresh as it was in the beginning.

As sophisticated as it is with as many outcomes as possible, you can not master your fate because you are in control of dumb teenagers who are going to make the worst decisions ever, giving you regular no-win options between two terrible paths.

Editor’s note: This story has treats.

The abomination, the abomination

Fortunately, The Quarry has benefited from all the improvements. The mechanics and design have evolved enough to the point where they fade into the background, and then the quality of the story and the interaction of the characters come to the fore, much like when you watch a horror movie.

We have a well-known narrator in the form of The Hag of Hackett’s Quarry, a ghostly woman who is a fortune teller and Tarot card reader. You must find Tarot cards as you explore The Quarry to return to the woman between chapters and get a premonition of what might happen later in the story.

It helps you survive, and so does a new mechanic. If one of your characters dies, you can use a “death rewind” that rewinds the game to the beginning of the chapter and then gives you the chance to make different decisions and save the character. You get three of these and it saves you from having to start the whole game over if your goal is to save everyone in the game.

Nine teens serve as counselors at the summer camp at Hackett’s Quarry. But in the prologue, we see why two of those counselors go missing as they arrive at camp on the night of a full moon. The Hag – named Eliza Vorez – (voice played by Grace Zabriskie) makes her appearance in a haunted old circus setting and tells you she will be your guide.

The first chapter moves quickly forward to the end of the summer camp, when the remaining counselors are about to leave. One of them wants a chance to save a relationship and sabotages the room so they stay one more night. The camp owner, Chris Hackett, scares without explanation about this and warns them to lock themselves inside while fleeing.

The teens (who Rachel Kaser aptly remarked is played by 20-something actors) don’t seem to be so scared about this freak out, and it’s our first clue that it’s a horror game where people are unaware of their impending death. Instead, they start preparing for a big go-away party. Yes, it’s a herd, as our spectators / players know that they’ll all die at this party in some glory of glory. We get a glimpse of doom with some human hunters and strange creatures moving at night.

Then the teens start teaming up and go to the forest and campsite to get party supplies. This is where we see how the relationships develop between characters like the insecure Nick (Evan Evagora) and the overly timid Abi (Ariel Winter). As they dug into each other, I ate over every turn I made that could potentially lead to death and disintegration. All their talk of possible “bears in the woods” predicts disaster. And of course, the trumpeting moment comes as creatures strike.

The 3D version of the characters was pretty fantastic, as every digital human comes close to surpassing the “uncanny valley”, or the long-held idea that the more animators try to create realistic human faces, the more disturbing they become to viewers . Supermassive has also made improvements in navigating through the 3D space, though I would not say it is perfect yet.

In my first throughplay I had some controller “malfunctions” where I really meant to go left when I wanted to go right. This led to some bad outcomes for my characters. I also accidentally breathed at a point when I was supposed to hold my breath, which resulted in a decapitation.

What you will like

What the game came down to for me was whether or not I liked the characters. Kaitlyn Ka (voice played by Brenda Song) had a nice and humorous relationship with Dylan (Miles Robbins). And they grew from unpleasant teenagers to survivors as the night progressed. Kaitlyn turned a few troops on their head by being the one who was an expert shotgun shooter, and I liked that.

Laura was one of the most interesting characters of all, because she was clearly “the fool” in the first Tarot card you get, and did all the stupid things that sparked the whole tragic affair. She goes missing in the prologue, but returns later in the game as a badass, a hunter who is armed and has a pirate patch over a missing eye. Somehow, during the time she’s been missing, she’s evolving from a big victim to a vengeful Lara Croft chasing the bad stuff. The background we fill in shows us how Laura, and not her boyfriend, can save the day. And she includes one of the most unexpected alliances in the game.

I also thought Ryan was a nerdy character who came into his own. And you like to see some bows for these characters, even if it does not save them in the end. I had a ridiculous self-conscious moment in the game – you will encounter a lot, like when the teens refer to themselves in a horror movie – when someone says “Your fucker” to Ryan, and he replies in the not-so-on witty way, “You’re a fucker.”

I was most irritated with the self-centered couple who were not a couple, Jacob (Zach Tinker) and Emma (Halston Sage). It was the bickering characters who most “deserved” to be killed because they were so unpleasant and self-absorbed – another herd of horror. It was hard not to have a phone during the two months of camp, but on her last night, she almost certainly condemned herself by finding her phone and streaming her last night. But the game especially turned the tropics on its head with Emma, ​​who showed she could survive and outsmart her pursuer just when you thought she was going to be toast.

What I was trying to achieve my divine control of the game was to put together the characters that could have a nurturing moment under the frenzy of teen hormonal anger.

All of this made me all the more emotional when I rescued or lost characters, and it prompted me to play again with the hope of a better outcome. This is the best thing about the Supermassive games (just like the Quantic Dream games): they are so replayable.

What you will not like

I encountered many moments when I thought the situation had way too much blood, and then in the next scene I saw even more blood. These are the moments when you remember that this is not a fine Shakespeare play, but rather a campy horror game.

I certainly did not like it when I lost some characters. And it often seemed completely too random. You can lose Nick if you do not actually realize that it is Nick who has been transformed into something else. I consider this very unfair.

But what drove me crazy was a situation where I was supposed to free a character from a cage and at the same time keep a predator caged in an adjacent cell. I had to choose between a bunch of doors which door to power with electricity. And I lost three of my lives and spent my “death rewinds” to get the right combination of doorways. I was quite steamed about that kind of random death. I mean, I’m ready to lose a character over some selfless sacrifice, but I do not want to lose one because I pressed the wrong damn button.

I also found some moments unbelievable, like when a character loses a hand and acts like it’s just a flesh wound. I also think Constance (Lin Shaye) was a wonderful villain matriarch and it was a crime that she had so little airtime.

Closure

You can deduce that the guys are the dumbest and the women smart. But I liked how the characters had unexpected characteristics, even though they were embedded in a story with a bunch of troupes. Supermassive surprises you so much with outcomes you do not expect.

I would rate this game a four out of five. Although I love the formula that Supermassive created, I do not think they have perfected it completely yet. But just as they are approaching the terrible valley, they are also approaching the perfect abomination.

I played the game on the computer. 2K games gave me a code to play for the purpose of the review.