The Quarry released in June of this year, and I had a very nice time with it. The game did a commendable job recreating the atmosphere of a classic 80s slasher flick, with a cast of lovable (and loathable) idiots to guide through the horrors of the night. A lot of emphasis during the marketing and general hype building up to the release surrounded its choices, which see the player positioned as a director of sorts, making the characters react to events in whatever way entertains them the most. You can try and keep everyone alive and make choices to further that goal, or you might be in it for the kills, so you deliberately place the gang in increasingly perilous situations and watch the madness unfold from there. The game was promised to be a choose-your-own-adventure horror movie, and it achieves those ends for the most part.However, upon playing it more than once, some of the tensest moments in the game turned out to be little more than smoke and mirrors. Regularly, The Quarry presents the illusion of choice, in an attempt to hide its general linearity, and replays reveal a lack of depth one might initially assume of the game upon a first encounter. The reason for this is obvious. Developer Supermassive Games is only one modestly sized studio, and they only have so much time and resources they can commit to a game of this scale. One could argue that the scope of a hypothetical ideal version of this game is impossibly large, so it’s easy to see why The Quarry ended up the way that it did. I wonder if perhaps the reason the game feels underwhelming in this regard is a consequence of marketing overselling the game’s complexity, rather than it being an active flaw with the game, but it can still be easy to sense a certain element of missed potential here.

That being said, I still love The Quarry quite a bit, and it’s not necessarily in spite of the criticisms I levelled above. I love it for the same reason that made Until Dawn, one of Supermassive’s previous releases, possess such staying power in my mind seven years later.Ultimately, the two games are in part, mechanically, about one important thing: agency. The purpose of these games is to give the player a sense that they are influencing the trajectory of the game through the actions they take and the choices they make (rhyme intended lol). However, in that respect I would argue both games are somewhat lacking. As I mentioned before, once you play these games once, you realise that they’re on a pretty strict set of tracks. Until Dawn will always end in the lodge with Mike and Sam still breathing, and similarly, The Quarry always keeps certain character alive right to the very end, because otherwise the story won’t happen. This is fine but it often feels somewhat unsatisfying, since in these instances you rarely feel quite in control more than once.It might sound like I’m trashing these games now, but rest assured that I still love them, and that comes down to the way these games deliver their narratives. Of course, there’s a story that is set in stone. In The Quarry’s case, you play as a group of camp counsellors, spending one more night at the summer camp before moving on with their lives, but their plans of partying are cut short by someone – or something – hunting them down, one by one. To say any more would be breaching into spoiler territory, but that’s the basic gist and it’s a solid foundation for what comes next. What The Quarry – and Until Dawn – does so beautifully is develop a mystery to uncover as the game progresses. However, that mystery cannot be fully understood unless you, the player, are able to find and collect the necessary clues and evidence, piecing together the mythology of Hackett’s Quarry and uncovering the truth behind your troubling circumstances. You do this during the game’s occasional exploration sequences, which allow you to roam a given area on the way to your next objective. In my opinion, this is where that “agency” I mentioned earlier is at its absolute best.

Choosing between a set of two binary options is a mechanically sound way to do things, and I can’t fault the game for operating in that way. However, engaging in that side of the game, I can’t help but feel a little detached from it all, because it feels so far removed from the direct inputs I use in exploration. It doesn’t feel like I’m in control of a character, but instead like I’m another actor entirely, separate from the dilemma presented to me. As such, I can’t help but feel a little cold sometimes when a choice like that results in a character’s death, because there’s a degree of separation present in the interaction. Finding clues and uncovering secrets in gameplay, however, feels a lot more personal. I don’t simply get to watch this group of teens solve a mystery together; I feel like I’m solving it right alongside them. The Quarry is often at its most engaging when it is reacting to choices it never directly asked you to make, because in doing so, it feels like you are taking an active role in making the game and the story more fun and interesting. Furthermore, when I sometimes miss clues and it leaves blanks in my arsenal of information, I’m much more likely to blame myself for it rather than the game, which makes for a more organic experience I think. The mystery at the heart of The Quarry is what makes it special, and what a mystery it is.

WARNING: I’m gonna dig into some spoilers now, so if you haven’t yet played The Quarry then I recommend that you do. It’s a great time and much better experienced as intended, rather than in the form of a synopsis written by a sleep-deprived dumbass ❤

Much like with Until Dawn, the machinations at play in The Quarry are far more complicated than first assumed. What begins as a fairly standard horror setup transforms until it becomes a complex tapestry of family curses and irreversible sins, which inevitably ensnares our teenage cast. It’s very easy to hate the Hacketts by a certain point in the game. As far as I could tell by the two-thirds mark, any and all bad things that had happened to me were a direct result of this family of weirdos afflicted with a werewolf curse, seemingly unwilling to fix it in any practical sense. However, the waters become increasingly muddied once the greatest Hackett secret is revealed: their werewolf curse is a consequence of their burning down of a Roma travelling show, wherein they attempted to save a boy trapped in a cage, Silas, who turned out to be a werewolf himself.It’s here that you must come to terms with the reality that there is no good or bad side in this situation. Obviously, arson attacking a caravan causing numerous deaths is really bad, but once you discover that it was one of the Hackett children who did it in an effort to save Silas from his conditions as a circus attraction (named “the Dog Boy” on various signs throughout the game), their situation becomes much more sympathetic. Make no mistake; the Hacketts are not okay. They’re a former trapping family who made their fortune during the Prohibition Era selling illegal booze, and their insistence on holding family above all else ultimately results in a number of deaths, perhaps including some of your own making during the game.

The Hag, mother of Silas and owner of the travelling circus, is no better. She appears to the player throughout the story in between chapters, and reads you your fortune based upon whatever tarot cards of hers you find throughout the world. However, just like the Hacketts, she has her own agenda; her own reasons for helping you. She reacts in real time to the ways in which you interact with the Hacketts, getting upset if you’re diplomatic with them. The only ending where she is satisfied is one in which every Hackett is dead. If you choose to kill her son by the end, she doesn’t appear particularly bothered by it, more so concerned with vengeance rather than her own flesh and blood. No matter what ending you get – no matter who lives and dies – she promises to haunt you for the rest of your days.The only true victim in all of this is Silas himself. Mostly absent from the game, he appears at the very start and right at the end, notably in the same place both times. When I approached him in his den during the ending I got, he appeared so…frail. Granted, he was recently run over by a car, but rather than lashing out or defending himself, he instead slunk away back to his safest space to lick his wounds. When you finally see him and salvation from the werewolf curse is just one trigger pull away, the boy can’t help but feel deeply pitiable. In the end, Silas was just a kid, caught in the middle of an awful situation. He didn’t deserve any of this, and yet he’s the one who has to die for this all to end.

If you choose not to shoot him, he panics, kills everyone present and escapes into the night. Choosing to shoot ends the werewolf curse, but ultimately it only stops at Silas. Who knows to what extent the curse carries on in the world, beyond the events of the game? There’s a palpable sense that in doing this, there is no victory. The fact that the game ends immediately following this action reinforces that feeling of incompleteness. It’s a bleak conclusion at the very end of this adventure, but I think it works beautifully in the narrative’s favour. Much like Silas, the playable characters are unwillingly caught in this unwinnable circumstance, and by restricting the player’s ability to feel satisfied by the end, it sends a strong message that even if the curse is ended and everybody lives to see another day, there is nothing joyful about the outcome. No matter what, innocent people have died for nothing at all. For a game about relaying the importance of consequences by reacting to your decisions in the story, it’s an incredibly bold move to remove that agency right at the death (pun not intended).

Compared to its predecessors, The Quarry carries itself with such confidence and if nothing else, it can be admired for that. While I don’t believe it quite lives up to its potential, and I wish the choices felt more organic in their execution, the game excels in its writing and storytelling, and allows the player to dictate their engagement in that story through discoverable secrets and collectibles which inform the lore and mythos of Hackett’s Quarry. I really hope Supermassive continue developing this format in new and exciting ways, because their voice is one which consistently delivers compelling horror stories in the gaming world.