A nice break from the typical survival horror formula, this gaming style, which I first encountered with Until Dawn, continues to engross me. The Quarry was a blast for several reasons, making it perhaps my favorite cinematic horror game so far. For starters, the cast of voice actors and their likenesses is great. We get horror icons like Lin Shaye, Lance Henriksen, David Arquette, Ted Raimi, and newer, younger familiar faces, including Ariel Winter of Modern Family and Justice Smith of I Saw the TV Glow.
And speaking of, Justice’s character helps bring queer characters and content to the game, as does Miles Robbins of Daniel Isn’t Real. However, it depends on how you choose the character interaction options presented to you. The moment you can make these two queer guys become flirty love interests is during a game of Truth or Dare around a campfire. However, as much as I made sure to keep their interactions romantically interested, near the end of the game it feels like that is taken away a bit, and the bisexuality of Justice’s character seems to come out and redirect to a female character.
Compared to the previous games like this one that I’ve played, some of which were a challenge due to poor play mechanics, the designers for this one really seem to have listened to gamer complaints and beautifully streamlined the experience. Controller response is way better, and the rare instances of having to shoot a gun are much easier to control. This may have to do in part with the way you can adjust the settings, most notably in the “accessibility” section. In fact, it’s possible to change the settings to the point where you’re practically not playing and just watching the game as a movie. You can literally change challenge options to “always succeed”. Just like that. No panicking and button-mashing. Just sit back and watch. Interesting addition to the play options.
I didn’t play that way, but there are definitely some settings I made easier, like maximizing the time allotted for quick time events. I fucking hate quick time events.
The game is divided into a prologue, 10 chapters, and an epilogue. Just be warned that there is not much horror action in the first four chapters, which are basically focused on character building. You are given opportunities to make choices that develop each character and their relationships with each other. It’s a highly effective way to make you feel connected to them and get a better sense of how each one should react to particular situations. And naturally, any decision you make affects the outcome of the game, including getting a character killed. As always, one of the goals is to keep as many characters alive as possible.
The game begins with a couple almost hitting something on the road at night. When they get out to check, things go bad fast in a very suspenseful sequence that has you exploring the woods. Eek!
Then we meet a group of camp counselors in chapter 1. They are closing up shop at the end of the summer, but their van won’t start, so they end up stuck at the camp. You get to decide how they kill the time. Just as in a real horror movie, I and the friend I had by my side making decisions with me, threw caution to the wind and had the group go outside to party instead of staying in the lodge. Big mistake…but fully intentional. I mean, if characters didn’t make stupid decisions in horror movies, we wouldn’t have any story.
It didn’t take long at all to figure out what type of horror plot we’re dealing with here, and despite this being about camp counselors, it’s not a slasher. However, it is a goodie, with great creature designs and excellent suspense and atmosphere. And…plenty of pixel pecs.
The horror really picks up at about chapter 5, which is around the time the characters all split up. Doh!
While jumping between branching character stories, you must try to stay alive, uncover clues as to what is going on, and attempt to figure out a way to escape. While my friend and I were lucky if we kept two characters alive in previous games of this sort, I’m proud to say that in this one, we kept all but one alive for a majority of the game. Thank you, accessibility settings.
Paying attention to details and clues really helps make the safest decisions. In between chapters, you meet with a fortune teller, and she reads tarot cards you bring her. Here’s the trick. You have to find those tarot cards while exploring, and that doesn’t always happen. You can collect anywhere from 1 to 4 tarot cards per chapter by searching everywhere. If you come across one, the camera angle changes briefly, and you must quickly press the X button to claim the card, otherwise you lose your chance. Once you turn the cards you found over to the fortune teller, she explains what they mean, and then gives you the option to choose one card that lets you see a vision of the future. You then view a very quick clip of something that is going to occur in the next chapter, which you need to decipher to figure out what the best decision is to make when the action of that clip comes true. It’s sort of like a spoiler, but still cryptic enough to keep you guessing what the best move is to make when the moment arrives.
Aside from paying close attention in order to make smart decisions, I think another reason we did so well for a majority of this game is because we avoided using guns as much as possible. I absolutely suck at aiming guns in high pressure moments, so in previous games I absolutely screwed up shooting segments. In this game, you often get the option to hand the gun-toting off to other characters, which is exactly what I did. Awesome.
Except…when it wasn’t awesome. And this was at the very end. But there’s a reason. My friend and I began playing this game about 4 months ago. We got all the way to the final chapter when the weekend was coming to a close (she visits from out of state), so we decided we’d just finish the 10th chapter when she returned for Halloween weekend.
We jumped back into the game the day after Halloween with another friend present to give some decision input, and it turns out we only had about 30 minutes of game time left to play…and had only gotten one character killed up to that point! However, I warned my friends, “I totally forgot how to play this game already, and I’m going to end up getting everyone killed.”
All our characters had gotten separated throughout the course of the game, and we still had the gay guy alive (yay!), so we agreed that the goal was to make sure he remained alive if no one else. We almost immediately made a bad decision and got the girl he was with killed. Minutes later, another bad decision, and we got a guy who was all by himself killed.
Finally, we had three characters encounter the creature in the woods, we made a decision, then I thought the game was immediately giving me yet another decision as the timer bar started to shrink. I was waiting for my friends to hash out which decision we should make, but they were quiet. Suddenly I realized I wasn’t supposed to be making a decision. The screen prompts were telling me to aim and then shoot. I frantically aimed and pressed the shoot button…half a second after the timer ran out. We watched as the creature went down the line and smacked the heads right off the bodies of three characters we’d managed to keep alive through the entire game. As I’d predicted not 30 minutes before, I almost literally got every character killed. However, we did save the gay guy, so I would argue that we kicked ass.
