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The Quarry review: thrills, chills, and only a few spills awaitTime to love the monster mash again
Time to love the monster mash again
This review mentions that you get three do-overs to save a character’s life. This is only available in your first play through in the deluxe version of the game, which I wasn’t aware I was reviewing. The feature unlocks in the standard version after you’ve completed a full play through.
I’m going to do my absolute best to tell you aboutThe Quarrywith no spoilers, but it will be hard because a lot of what marks it out as better and cleverer and funner than comparable horrorventure romps is all tangled up in the plot. It’s an interactive story you control with split-second decisions and quick time events; it ismostlyplot. Broadly, it is the story of a group of camp counselors, one night in a quarry-based summer camp, and how baffling organisational choice can lead to ruin.
The Quarry | Official Gameplay Overview Trailer | 2KWatch on YouTube
The Quarry | Official Gameplay Overview Trailer | 2K
The Quarry actually has a great sense of humour. The camp’s motto is ‘What doesn’t kill you will make you stronger’, which, in hindsight, is hilariously literal and I want to high five whoever came up with it. Tutorials are separate saftey tip videos, the music choices for different moments are very on point, and your results round up is basically the end of Animal House but the freeze frames say stuff like “had head torn off”.
Perhaps the greater achievement is that I had several deaths that I just let ride, because they were so good, so implausible and needlessly graphic in that retro slasher way that leans close to being actually funny. The Quarry plays with horror tropes and vibes much more freely than the Dark Pictures games since Until Dawn, and twists them in fun ways. There are a couple of big switcheroos in the plot in general, but it is, for example, likely that the character spending most of their time running around the forest in their pants is going to be a dude, and in any situation it’s usually a girl that leads from the front and takes charge. This does apply to almost every woman in the game, and it becomes a bit exhausting watching them all Girlboss at once sometimes, like all the Deadpool variations strutting around a Comic-Con crowd, but I’ll take it.
Less successful is your between-chapters guide, a mysterious old woman for whom you’re collecting hidden tarot cards, and, related to her, an element of plot connected to a travelling sideshow. The Quarryalmostdefies your expectations and avoids the tired tropes there, but not quite (and heads up for a couple of uses of a word I know in the US is considered a slur for the GRT community, though it isn’t in the UK).
