The Quarry review

The Quarry sets the tone very quickly in the game. You will know this is your typical American cabin-in-the-woods-styled horror movie after the first few hours. It centres around a group of young horny adults who have character personalities that haven’t changed ever since the inception of such horror movies. 

Somehow, no matter how shallow the setup might seem at first, deep down there seems to be a very intriguing hook to pull you in. Although you’ll have to get through the first two or three hours for the story to start getting interesting enough. After which things go sideways and then the action ramps up for veteran gamers.. 

The Quarry handles its action sets with quick-time events. Moving the analog stick in the prompted direction or rapidly tapping the face buttons on your joystick to wiggle past the enemy makes the interaction gameplay easy even for non-veteran gamers. There are also instances where the game prompts you to hold down a button till the timer is depleted and the intended takeaway is that the character is holding their breath till the bad folks walk away. There’s very little room for error here which makes the whole scene feel silly rather than frightening.

The story frequently switches between long dialogue scenes and action-packed scenes. All of which demand a certain amount of attention so you can make narrative-shifting choices that you feel are correct. The good thing about these choices is that they’re not padded faff. It impacts the way your story progresses and how many of your survivors manage to see the light of day. The choices themselves are not as straightforward as night and day, there’s some grey area and wiggle room which forced us to wear our thinking hat and participate in the doom and gloom of all these characters.

There are some really big names here. From Brenda Song who is widely recognized as one of the first Disney stars to Ariel Winter from Modern Family. Even Justice Smith from Detective Pikachu is here. They also lend their faces to the game characters, making this very familiar for folks who are into movies and TV shows. The Netflix and chill denizens, remember? Needless to say, the voice acting is immaculate. For a game that relies on close-up shots of its characters and a cinematic approach to body language and scene composition, it pretty much manages to entice both sides of the crowd.

The whole game takes place throughout a night where seven camp counsellors are forced to stay over at the camp for an extra night because of one fellow’s horny ambitions. The way the story progresses is a spoiler so we’ll stop here. There are multiple endings and multiple dialogue options that you will only get after a couple of playthroughs. The Quarry is replayable. We shared notes with our colleagues who had completely different cutscenes and character interactions. So you can revisit the game more than once and if you have a partner, it’s also nice to watch them play and see how their choices change the narrative.

Games that try to wrestle with emotion and conflict through action gameplay usually suffer from Ludonarrative dissonance no matter how pretty the graphics get or how well motion capture tries to sell us its realism. The Last of Us 2 is a great example. The Quarry doesn’t have that problem to some extent because its gameplay and game progression is simple. However, the graphics and facial expressions could’ve been better here.

It is decent, but sometimes, the character’s eyes droop down weirdly and the lips move like muppets. In comparison, PlayStation’s Horizon Forbidden West had immaculate facial expressions and motion capture. Even Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart was very close to a Disney movie. Things you see with Marvel and other blockbuster CGI and animation-based movies. If The Quarry had a game engine that could rival the top dogs of motion capture, it would’ve been a force to reckon with.

Our love for the game has only grown as we play more of it but for some reason, it’s hard to recommend The Quarry to everyone. Mostly because the story takes its own sweet time to get interesting and also because the story itself isn’t as unique as we’d like it to be. It’s an easy-to-digest story with few unique elements in the narrative script. Other than the fact that it has multiple endings and multiple options to drive its narrative gameplay, much of the game’s main plot is pretty much like a Zoya Akthar movie. Simple and sweet but nothing groundbreaking.

After our first playthrough, we want to pass on the controller to our loved ones who are not so eager to game but don’t mind dipping a few inches into the shallow end. The Quarry serves as a great casual game but also a long movie night for everyone — battle-hardened gamers and non-gamers.