The Quarry

The Quarry is a narrative horror game that sticks closely to Supermassive Games’ signature formula: cinematic presentation, a cast featuring well-known personalities from the world of TV and film, characters created entirely through motion capture, and a clever blend of decisions based on multiple-choice dialogue, QTEs, and exploration segments. If you’ve played Until Dawn or any of the titles in The Dark Pictures Anthology series, you’ll be right at home.

The plot of draws inspiration from slasher movies of the 1980s and 1990s. The game is set in Hackett’s Quarry, a remote summer camp deep in the North American forests. Campers have left after two intense months during which the counselors had their hands full. To make the most of their last moments together, the nine counselors decide to stay one more night at the camp to party before returning to their daily routine. Without giving away what happens next, you can probably guess that this decision is likely to prove fatal—unless you make the right choices at the right time.

The place is, in fact, far from being as peaceful as it seems and is home to owners who are, to put it mildly, misanthropic. Drawing inspiration from Friday the 13th, The Cabin in the Woods, and Summer Camp Massacre, The Quarry fully embraces its influences and features a stellar cast, whose actors seem to take great delight in playing with the conventions of the genre. Among them are David Arquette (Scream), Lin Shaye (Insidious), Ted Raimi (Evil Dead), Lance Henriksen (Aliens), and Ariel Winter (Modern Family). The lot is directed by Will Byles, who previously directed Until Dawn, and who once again has fun with jump scares, close-ups, and oppressive tracking shots.

In The Quarry, you'll spend more time watching cutscenes than actually interacting with the controller buttons. An interactive horror film at its core, the game invites you to switch between the camp’s various counselors during a third-person adventure that blends exploration and storytelling. As you progress and gather clues, you’ll be faced with decisions that could have dramatic—or even fatal—consequences for the various camp members. Here, there are no health bars, no side quests, and not even an inventory to manage. Everything revolves around the story, the constant tension, and the player’s choices.

Compared to its previous titles, Supermassive Games has added two particularly interesting features. The first, Cinema Mode, lets you enjoy the game without having to touch the controller. This allows you to watch the various sequences like a real movie, choosing from three outcomes: make everyone die, make everyone survive, or customize the events yourself.

The second option unlocks after you’ve completed the game for the first time. It takes the form of three extra lives, which you can use after making a fatal choice. This feature allows you to undo three decisions during the adventure and change the course of your characters’ stories without having to restart the entire game. Pretty handy! 

The eight-player multiplayer mode is still available and lets you take turns playing as each character. There’s also an online mode that supports up to seven players, in which each participant can vote to collectively influence the various choices that shape the story.

The Quarry is a paid game that follows the traditional model of the most ambitious titles available on PC and consoles. The game is available in three editions, each offering different bonus content. Since its release a few years ago, it’s regularly available at attractive prices, especially during sales. So be sure to keep an eye out for promotions on Steam and other digital stores to get the best price.

The Quarry is a multiplatform that you can download on current-generation consoles as well as previous-generation consoles. It is available on Windows PCs via Steam or the Epic Games Store, as well as on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and Xbox One. Of course, the most powerful devices offer 4K graphics, and built-in SSDs provide nearly instantaneous load times.

It’s simply impossible to talk about The Quarry without mentioning its spiritual predecessor, Until Dawn, which was released in 2015 on PlayStation 4. The game laid the groundwork for many of Supermassive Games’ productions, combining motion capture with real actors, gameplay that blends exploration and storytelling, jarring jump scares, and butterfly effects—all directly influenced by the player’s choices. For its release, Until Dawn also featured a particularly star-studded cast, including the excellent Rami Malek, the late Hayden Panettiere, and Peter Stormare. Conceived as a true interactive Hollywood blockbuster, the game made a huge splash upon its release and quickly established itself as a benchmark for the genre. Today, you can still experience this adventure in an enhanced version, available on Windows PC and PlayStation 5.

With Directive 8020, Supermassive Games goes sci-fi and immerses the player in an atmosphere straight out of Alien. Aboard the colonization ship Cassiopeia, the crew must reach Tau Ceti f, a planet presented as one of the last hopes for a humanity on the brink of extinction. Unfortunately, the mission doesn’t go as planned: an alien entity is hiding among the crew members, creating an atmosphere of paranoia. Supermassive Games’ signature formula remains intact: multiple-choice dialogue, QTEs, and cinematic presentation. Nevertheless, Directive 8020 introduces some interesting new features, including full-fledged stealth sequences, segments where the player must interact with various objects, and a system that allows you to revisit certain key decisions without having to restart the game from the beginning. It’s a particularly engaging story, further enhanced by the presence of Lashana Lynch, best known for her roles in No Time to Die and Captain Marvel.

If you like Until Dawn, The Quarry, or Directive 2080, don’t miss The Dark Pictures Anthology, an episodic series from Supermassive Games. Its first season consists of four episodes: Man of Medan, which takes us aboard a ghost ship off the coast of Indonesia; Little Hope, set in a New England town haunted by witch trials; House of Ashes, which follows American soldiers in Iraq trapped inside a mysterious temple; and finally The Devil in Me, which tells the story of the hunt for a serial killer in a macabre hotel modeled after the “Murder Castle” built by H. H. Holmes, the infamous criminal who terrorized the 1890s. Although the format is shorter, each of these episodes incorporates all the hallmarks of the horror narrative genre: choices with multiple consequences, characters whose survival depends on your decisions, exploration, puzzles, and numerous suspenseful sequences. With four games, there’s plenty to keep you busy.