The Quarry from Supermassive Games is a horror game that feels like a 1980s slasher flick. It’s a spiritual successor to Until Dawn and is essentially an interactive movie where you watch a series of cut-scenes and make decisions for each character, with the possibility of everyone or no-one surviving the story. Like Until Dawn there are plenty of choices and story paths, with a reported 186 potential endings to the game.

The game follows a group of camp councillors at the end of camp, when all the children have gone home. After their van breaks down the councillors are forced to spend one more night at the site, with many protests from the owner Mr Hackett (played by David Arquette). They ignore the warnings to stay inside and instead have a final night party, and end up stumbling into a full-on horror story with monsters in the woods as well as hunters who seem to be looking for them.

The story is broken into ten chapters, as well as a prologue and an epilogue. After the creepy opening there’s a couple of chapters just getting to know the characters with hints of what’s about to come. You get to mould the characters through the interactions and really get to know who they are. There are also some choices you make that can affect you later in the game, massively, even if you don’t see it at first. One of the best things about the game is seeing how something pays off a few hours after you make the initial decision.

All of the characters are completely likeable, which makes it hit that much harder when you make a bad choice and one of them dies. There’s not always a lot of warning for what can kill you and some of them are really shocking. Going for a playthrough where no-one dies can be a bit of a challenge, especially if you make one mistake and someone dies meaning you have to replay a few hours before you get back there. It’s also fun to go the other way and see how many mistakes you can make and how quickly you can kill them off. There’s a lot of replay value in the game to find the different paths you can take.

Just like in Until Dawn, The Quarry has an all-star cast. Featuring Ted Raimi, Ariel Winter, Justice Smith, and David Arquette, just to name a few. Graphically the game is brilliant. Apart from a few awkward moments everything looks great. The setting of the summer camp looks incredible and it’s very easy to become fully immersed in the story.

When you finish it the first time, it gives you the option to go back and play again with the ability to rewind (up to 3 times) when someone dies, to give you a better chance at surviving. You also have the option to start the game again from any of the chapters, to make a different choice at a certain point without having to mimic your previous playthrough. Sadly, the collectibles don’t carry over to the next playthrough so it’s not possible to get them all at the same time. Maybe a patch will fix that at some point.

Frustratingly there are a few choices you make that don’t have as big of an impact as you’d think they would. When you play the game again and make completely different choices sometimes it leads to the same outcome. And then at other points you can do something subtly different and it changes everything. There’s a moment early on when Emma asks for Abi to take the scene route, if you do then in the next scene she is nicer to Emma, and if you don’t she’s a little spiteful about it. Stuff like that is absolutely great, it would just be nicer for all the decisions to have a fuller impact.

Another thing that makes replaying the game feel very off-putting is that you can’t skip any of the dialogue or scenes, even ones that you don’t really have any input into, so they will be the same every time. It would also be nice if you could run a little quicker during some of the walking sections. When you just want to see how a choice impacts the story, you want to get back to that point as quickly as possible. Saying that, it’s completely understandable why there isn’t an option to speed things up. You could easily miss out on things. Thankfully, it doesn’t get tedious, even when going through the same scenes as you can look for the slight differences from last time when you say something slightly different.

The Quarry is another excellent game from Supermassive Games. It’s a throwback to the slasher era, with plenty of throwbacks and references. The characters are excellent and it’s easy to become completely absorbed in it. While there are some irritations, the strengths completely outweigh them, and the second one playthrough ends you’ll want to start another one straight away.

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