Review #1254: The Quarry

  Gotta find your quarry in the quarry.

 Gotta give it to Supermassive Games, they found their niche and their passion and they rolled with it. The Quarry is their latest game, and it's yet another playable horror movie, like pretty much everything they've done lately, albeit one with a larger budget, more akin to Until Dawn. There's even a wooden lodge, much like Until Dawn's cabin!

 It's pretty much their Until Dawn round two, using everything they've learned from their newer games. You get all the accessibility options, to tailor QTEs to your liking, multiplayer modes to divide characters among players, and even a new Movie Mode, in which the game plays itself. You pick "Everyone Dies", "Everyone Lives" or mess with every character's personality to affect the choices that the AI will make for you. 

 The story, this time around, involves six camp counselors on their last day on camp, the kids are gone, and it's time to go, except that one of the teens wants one last night to try to win over his summer fling, so he sabotages the car. Just one more night quickly turns sour, as they don't heed the owner's advice to stay inside the lodge, and then it all goes downhill for the teenagers, as both monsters and what looks like redneck hunters are out to get them. All six teenagers are selfish and dumb, so it's hard to really root for anyone... but it works out pretty well for this kind of game! Unlike some of their game, the monsters in this game are completely real. Heck, a cabin in the mountains, now a lodge in the woods, the monsters in this game are similar to the Wendigos from Until Dawn, and you'll probably find many similarities between these cast of characters and the ones from UD, but there's one key difference... the pacing in this one is much better. The previous game had too many scare fake-outs, things that looked as if they were lethal or dangerous... but they weren't. In this one, the danger comes quickly and it doesn't let go.

 The game's formula is identical to the previous games, as the game is made up of segments in which you walk around, searching for evidence and clues if you want, and interact with objects, as well as less interactive segments in which you must make different choices, some that change nothing, while other choices could get somebody killed. And just like with every other game they've ever made, in-between chapters you get a mysterious character that talks directly to you, the player, and you can find useless 'visions of the future' that shows you potential deaths. 

 That said, just like with all their other releases... it's plagued with a ton of little issues. Very early on, the game soft-locked itself on an endless loading screen. Another time, after a character interaction, the camera bugged out uncontrollably for a few seconds, which I didn't know if it meant to scare me or not. It didn't, but it was funny! Whenever the game transitions into a new scene, the game freezes for a second or so, and some audio lines stutter or may play twice. This one happens ALL the time. There were some graphical issues, such as shiny blue lights flashing like crazy in some scenes, or blue, green and red reflections on the water out of nowhere. There's one scene in which Jacob and Emma meet up by the moats, when you go down, a fully clothed Emma is standing next to her clothes, on the floor, and then, suddenly, cutscene and she is fully undressed. A few seconds later, Jacob checks his BOXERS for an item, as if it had a pocket? There were a few other unconvincing transitions too. Oh, and during the last 2-3 chapters, the subtitles went completely out of whack, they were more distracting than anything else, as either they weren't synched or the character's didn't even say the lines. Did anyone test the final chapters? Oh, and the game crashed again during the final chapter, this time it was a hard crash.

 The Quarry is easily the best game SuperMassive Games have made so far. It has the best and most interesting story of them all, and it executed it the best too. Gameplay-wise, they brought everything they've learned, so it plays the best it could. It's also got a larger budget, and it shows, it has the best character models so far, and it's pretty lengthy too... which might be a bit of an annoyance in multiplayer, since 10 hours could be a big ask of your friends. That said, they are so close to something truly great, but they keep shipping their games with all of these tiny issues, and this, unlike the Dark Pictures Anthology, was a big release, they really should've waited a month before releasing it.

 7.5