The Quarry Preview: A Chilling Teen Horror Throwback

The Quarry is another cinematic, interactive horror game from developer Supermassive Games and it already looks like it has the potential to be its best game since Until Dawn. Players control a group of summer camp counselors who spend one last night together after they send their campers back home. This is the last night they can admit their feelings to their crushes, the last chance to mend broken relationships, and more — but as one might expect, it’s interrupted by feral monsters and Deep South creeps who look like they’ve been pulled straight out of Deliverance.

This is the ’80s horror throwback we’ve all been missing. Recent movies like X scratch that itch, but not quite like how The Quarry is. It meshes the likes of Friday the 13th with something like The Hills Have Eyes and creates something that is both narratively strong and chilling. In the hands-on preview ComicBook.com was given access to, we played one chapter set early on in the game. It takes place as the characters are settling in for the night around a campfire and acting on their romantic impulses with games like Truth or Dare, before the chaos begins to unfold. The atmosphere is just right with the eerie sounds of nature at night, things lurking in the shadows creating questions over what you actually saw, and very moody fog. It all builds itself up into a feeling of ever present danger.

Something like this largely lives or dies based on the actors and the game’s surrounding tech. When creating such a cinematic experience, you have to have good technology to correctly translate the work the actors are putting in. If the performances themselves are rocky, it can create something that feels very jarring. Thankfully, most of the actors really pop in their role and feel right at home in a story like this. Brenda Song (The Social Network, The Suite Life of Zack and Cody) really gives her all as a bubbly, mildly cocky group leader. In some ways, this does a disservice to some of the weaker actors who feel like they’re mumbling through all of their lines. Although there are more good performances than bad ones, the strong contrast between the quality of them makes the bad ones stand out far more.

The facial capture technology really elevates the actors as well. It’s incredibly impressive how much detail was captured, from little facial quirks like eyebrow twitches to the fear in someone’s eyes. With that said, given the kind of game that this is, there are a lot of kisses exchanged between characters. The technology has not gotten to a point to convincingly sell a full blown make-out session and instead still feels like two dolls smashing their heads together, but Supermassive seems to know this and thankfully, doesn’t linger on close-up shots of this for too long.

Despite some of the awkwardness of the technical elements, The Quarry finds its groove in these kinds of intimate character moments, though. Supermassive has honed in on that uncomfortable feeling of not knowing what to say or do around people, giving you various choices on how to proceed without knowing the final outcome. Sometimes you succeed and impress the person opposite you, sometimes you get a subtle, but sharp stare of displeasure thrown back at you. It’s authentic and really helps sell all of the dynamic, evolving relationships in the game.

The stressful feelings that come from the choices within those quiet moments are amplified even further when it comes to fighting for your life. As is tradition with Supermassive’s games, any character can die if you make the wrong move and that was expertly displayed during this demo. At least three different characters were put in peril, some coming away with ghastly wounds that will no doubt impact their chances of survival later in the game. You can run, you can hide, and at times, you can try and fight back, but they all come with consequences. At one point, one of the characters was being chased through the woods, and I was given the option to climb a tree or keep running. Earlier in the game, I found a tarot card that featured someone falling from a tower. I didn’t know what it meant at the time and frankly, I still don’t, but I made the assumption that it was foreshadowing my demise if I climbed the tree.

It’s a game where you’re constantly measuring the risk versus reward, particularly in these sequences. At one point, you’re tasked with charging into the woods to go and save one of your friends from being abducted. You can either take the safest, but slowest path or take a dangerous shortcut that requires you to successfully pull off a very precise quick-time-event. If you make it in time, you’re presented with the choice of using a shotgun against someone who is dragging your friend away. One of the character’s warns you prior to this that the shotgun has a big spread, so I carefully chose my aim and gave a warning shot, allowing my friend to escape from the hands of the would-be kidnapper.

While this can often feel satisfying, the choices can sometimes be misleading. At one point, there was a section where a character began to hear someone calling out to them in the woods. The voice sounds weird, almost as if something supernatural is mimicking someone you know to trick you. If you choose not to respond back, which then sees your character move to hide behind a tree. The voice keeps calling and you’re presented with the option of going to follow the voice. If you choose this, your character will respond… completely making your previous choice redundant and giving yourself away instead of just quietly trying to find where the voice is coming from. It’s moments like these that could lead to the player being punished for something they didn’t mean to do at all and could ruin a playthrough depending on the consequences of that choice.

The Quarry is the spiritual successor to Until Dawn fans have been hoping for. Even with its flaws, it manages to establish a chilling atmospheric throwback to classic teen horror films like Friday the 13th that create ample levels of stress and authenticity with its characters. If the entire game can sustain what we were shown during our preview session, this could be a very special game for horror fans.

The Quarry releases on Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC on June 10th.