SO. i played this game essentially release week, and ive had a lot of thoughts since then. especially after the attention and love it garnered! i didnt use grouvee when i played this but im sure if i did, you would have got one hell of a review! but here we are! almost 2 years later! finally sharing my opinions on this.... game.

i was beyond excited about this release june 2022. it came out two days before my birthday, and given my love for the interactive drama genre, and horror, it felt truly like a birthday gift for me! i bought a physical copy the day after release and played it in one sitting with a friend on the 12th. now... i am an until dawn devotee. i LOVE that game. (see pfp). but ive learnt from previous experiences with the dark pictures anthology games to stop comparing it to every choice based horror i play, because i will always be left disappointed. with the release of man of medan, i hated it. and then i replayed it a year later, looking at it as its own game rather than a comparison to its predecessor, and thoroughly enjoyed it. until dawn worked so well for a multitude of reasons, for example how fleshed out the characters were, with relatable arcs and memorable individuality's. or how it was truly revolutionary for 2015, and managed to do something entirely different. supermassive had TIME to make the quarry something special. and i mean YEARS. and somehow yet again, we were presented with a predictable story, one-dimensional characters and jarring animation.

to begin with, the game opens on a full moon. for a game where u know there's going to be a non-anthropoid threat, this immediately makes you think of werewolves right? so now a huge element of the game has been stripped of its mystery and suspense within the first few minutes. later on when the group realise they are gonna be stuck at camp for another night due to jacobs antics, chris blows up at them about just staying locked up inside all night and being careful. so as a viewer im thinking... okay so he knows about the werewolves. why does he know about that? is he a werewolf? okay yes he is. wonderful. were about an hour into the game.

another thing to add is this game HATES to just let tension build. everything has to be a joke to these people. i understand keeping an element of comedy at times, but the fact it felt like no one was taking anything seriously really detracted from the tense atmosphere it was otherwise trying to create? like the game was contradicting itself. this humour works if its maybe one or two characters who have that quirky trait where they are just cruising through arguably the most traumatic night of their life. but when its every single character, it becomes grating and makes the majority of them dislikeable. its okay to be vulnerable and show fear, you're not going to lose me as a viewer by giving your characters emotional depth.

it has minimal replayability, due to the fact 90% of your choices don't even matter. you cant skip cutscenes, so if you're a trophy hunter like myself you have to slog through all the boring dialogue again. the story is all over the place, tying together super loosely for an extremely disappointing and rushed ending.

overall, this game was a huge huge let down for me. i understand that it garnered a lot of new fans of the interactive drama genre, and that's always nice, but if you loved this game i am telling u... IT GETS BETTER. there's an extensive world of games out there which did everything you liked about the quarry, but so much more seamlessly. some i would recommend include: until dawn (obviously), detroit: become human, man of medan, life is strange and oxenfree. granted, not all of these are horror, but they are some great plays if you are interested! there's more dark pictures anthology games out there that i didn't enjoy as much so they're not listed, but you can look into that too!!! there's also heavy rain which i have yet to play myself, but i see it deemed as a bit of a cult classic in the genre. anyways, this is my first time writing a longer review like this! im not a fantastic writer and my opinion actually should not matter to you at all xD if you enjoyed this game that's totally okay and im just glad somebody did! sorry if this kinda sucked! but thanks for reading :3

The Quarry, much like the movies it takes so much inspiration from, was some good simple fun. Games like this are at their best imo when you can get a couple or more people to play through them together as a sort of interactive movie night. A big part of the experience is judging the characters for their actions and also talking over the choices you can control.

The story is actually a step above many of those aforementioned movies that I've seen in terms of coherency, but ultimately less exciting. It takes a bit longer than I would have liked to really get rolling and by the time the credits came around I didn't feel much other than underwhelmed. That could be a result of the choices I made I suppose, but the lack of a basic skip cutscene/dialogue feature makes replaying to choose other paths an unattractive prospect when so much of the game is cutscenes.

That said, the presentation of this game is very fun! Exploration, when possible, is rewarded with little clues and notes that can help the player start to put together what's going on before the big reveals in the story's later hours. I like the way each chapter is bookended with these odd sequences where the old lady gives you tarot readings (sort of, anyway) based on which cards you managed to find. It gives each chapter a sense of closure and also put a small amount of pressure on me because I didn't want to disappoint her, lol.

If you go in knowing what to expect regarding the tone and the gameplay experience, you'll probably have a good time with this one!

I can't totally explain why I keep playing this studio's games as I mostly don't like almost any of them, but I've played everything in the Dark Pictures Anthology except Devil in Me (well I watched Little Hope on YouTube, which is good since I doubt I could've finished it). I liked Until Dawn but everything else has just felt "okay" at best. For the most part, I just find them kind of goofy fun. In fairness, I think that's a bit of the point. This isn't a "so unintentionally silly it's funny" type of thing, as this game especially is recreating a B-horror movie, a genre known for its emergent silliness despite the blood and death everywhere. But I also just don't ultimately like them that much as games, despite appreciating some of the things they do.

So on the positive side, I think for these pure narrative games, this studio really does go above and beyond. The variability of outcomes from your individual decisions and story paths feels much more real and natural than it does in a lot of other narrative branch games and like there was more effort put into it in that regard. For instance, I believe any combination of characters can die; there's no scripted deaths or characters who always die together or anything, which can't be said for most games with a similar decision-based structure. That's pretty impressive in itself and does provide more interesting "gameplay" to a game that is otherwise basically pure narrative (aside from brief walking around and QTEs). I personally tend toward a "always choose the most batshit option" and it keeps things a bit more interesting, even if not everyone survives it.

Further, the visuals are mostly incredibly impressive. Though this is a couple years old at this point, this is still one of the better looking games I've played...at least until something moves. The animation, especially with the character faces remains in the uncanny valley much of the time. Still, I appreciated the general aesthetic of the game otherwise and the moonlit forest looked great for the atmosphere the game was going for.

But the rest of the game I just didn't really enjoy. The story (and its horror elements) is the main appeal of the game, but it mostly fell flat for me. I didn't find myself attached to the characters and mostly found them either dull or a little annoying. While in an 80's slasher, that's not the biggest deal given you know the bulk of them are going to die and aren't necessarily supposed to be that likeable. But in the context of a game like this where presumably you're supposed to want to care about them and try to keep them alive, it didn't work well for me. I don't want to spoil too much where the horror goes since that's a mystery the game belabors quite a bit, but I felt like it definitely built up way too much only to fall kind of flat with contrived mysteriousness that might've worked better in a 1.5 hour flick than in an 8-hour game.

The writing in general was was all over the placec. I laughed pretty hard when I was playing this on stream and my friend said "wow, the first game written entirely by AI" because it really feels that way sometimes. The conversations vary between "why are they still talking about this? The last 5 lines have not moved the conversation in a meaningful way" and "who the hell talks like this?" This isn't helped by the uneven acting rendered only even more awkward by the uncanny animations. It was actually kind of hilarious how much it did not seem like Justice Smith cared. Like, I know this man can act, he just didn't here. I have to think he had a rock-solid contract that ensured he'd be paid even if he read his lines with all the enthusiasm and emotion of someone reading a real estate contract aloud.

That said, on an ambivalently positive note, like I said, I did find the game somewhat funny at times, which I think is partially intentional. After all, choosing to adapt a narrative of this style and genre signals right away that it's not supposed to be a super serious and cerebral experience. Humor is of course subjective but while much of the humor didn't land on the first level, there was a second layer of "that was so dumb it's funny." I also enjoyed playing the game on stream with friends and poking fun at its goofiness.

Writing this all out feels pretty negative. I really didn't hate the game or regret playing it. And I do think a lot of my issues are more "it's just not for me." I can see how it works for a lot of people. And while I don't like most of their games I've played, I think this or House of Ashes is a (somewhat distant) second to Until Dawn for me. While it's comfortably not a 3-star game for me, I probably liked it better than many other games I've given 2 stars. I think it's partially just that the length drones on too long. The longer length works better for a video game and so we can grow to know and care more about the wider cast of characters, but I think a lot of the contrivances of the genre just don't work as well for me over such a longer story than the hour and a half flicks this is imitating.

I've liked Supermassive's games since I first played Until Dawn, which quickly became one of my favorite games. This is actually a step up from Until Dawn in my opinion. I really enjoyed the story, characters and mystery.

The good:

• Accessible, it's easier than other Supermassive games and I really like that. It's just easy enough so that it's not boring but you also won't fail if you aren't that quick to react. Choices also make more sense which means it's easier to have all characters survive on a blind playthrough rather than having some deaths being unpredictable.
• Music, the music is so good in the game and plays at just the right moments.
• Visuals, the game looks great on the PS5.
• Story and characters

The bad:

• Facial animations, some facial animations look really bad and I'm not sure how they got accepted.
• Lots of continuity errors, there's a long list of them on the wiki and I noticed many of them when replaying the game.
• You can't find all collectibles in one playthrough, it shouldn't be based on whether you go left or right in a stroll through the forest in one of the game's first chapters.
• Dialogue choices rarely make any difference

The best Supermassive has delivered so far is Until Dawn and House of Ashes. The Quarry is an improvement in some areas over those and a disappointment in other places.

The quality of the character models and facial capture is taken to another level here. Everyone looks great. The performance of the actress that plays Laura shows off how much nuance in facial expressions this tech can capture realistically. Brenda Song's character model is so realistic that it just feels like I'm just staring at the real Brenda Song at times. While the faces look good, the limb movements can often look pretty bad and stiff. Also, some effects such as water splashing can look pretty bad too.

The cast is great. The writing gives them more depth than I have seen Supermassive give to any of their characters in previous games. I found myself moved by moments between characters in a way that Supermassive's previous games never pulled off. But this deeper look into the characters came at a cost. There's often scenes of characters taking their time walking and getting to know each other when they are in a life-or-death situation with people depending on them. I would watch these scenes, which are amusing to be fair, feeling annoyed that they aren't rushing as fast as possible. The scenes feel out of place.

The story is a retread of what they've already done in Until Dawn and even House of Ashes retreads this territory a bit too. I wish they had brought something fresh to the table. It's mostly handled well still. There are great moments that feel they came naturally out of the choices I made. The ending feels anti-climactic, and I wish there was some sort of epilogue of the characters, who spent majority of the game split up, come back together. The game just abruptly ends. They spent so much time building characters and relationships, but they deliver a payoff to most of them. Rolling credits felt so unsatisfying that I had to look up to see if there was a "true ending" that I could get by making different choices. There isn't one. In fact, I had gotten the "good ending", so this is the best the game had to offer. Also, there's some bullshit choices in the final chapter of this game where the options I was given were unclear leading to the death of a couple of my characters. I replayed that chapter three times to get the version that saves these characters which just further exposed how bullshit the choices were.

The QTEs this time around are much easier to a fault. I don't think I ever missed a QTE. All of them are either, tap "A" as fast as you can, hold "A" until you are out of danger, or move the left thumbstick in the direction it tells you to. The thumbstick ones give you plenty of time to get ready and react. This is nice, but there was a nerve-wracking tension that came from being asked to suddenly push a random button that worked really well in these games. It's part of what made the finale to House of Ashes so great. The moments where it asks you to tap "A" quickly are the only moments that come close to this.

To get the negatives out of the way, the things that keep me from rating it higher would be:

• The tedious and drawn-out podcast ending; genuinely, who thought that was the way to go?
• The weird and abrupt halt to the Ryan romance plotline, where you can build up a relationship with Dylan or Kaitlyn (especially Dylan) and then suddenly no matter what your choices he says "maybe neither" in favour of having a weird flirtation with Laura, who already has a boyfriend serving as her entire motivation.
• Shooting could be a little janky at times, though it only caused me issues once; almost at the end, in the final confrontation in the cabin, Kaitlyn ended up dying because the game didn't register that I shot the werewolf even though I did. Wasn't a huge deal because I have the Deluxe Edition so I used a rewind, but for someone who doesn't have that available on first playthrough it could be super frustrating.
• Some characters didn't get enough screentime, particularly Nick.
• The werewolves just looked like the wendigo from Until Dawn. No idea if that was a budget/reusing assets thing or what, but there's no way they didn't notice they were essentially using identical models. I want to see actual werewolves, damnit.

That said, I actually really enjoyed this. I connected with the characters much more in this than Until Dawn, where my strongest feelings towards any protagonist were "they're fine" ranging to "vague annoyance". I felt genuinely invested in keeping my favourites alive - hell, I actually had favourites! - and that made it so much more tense and high-stakes. The graphics are gorgeous, the story was fun and campy, and the soundtrack was enjoyable.