Like many of developer Supermassive's previous games, The Quarry is clearly made both by and for people who love horror movies.
From the start it slowly builds tension and atmosphere and gets you invested by constantly asking you to make small decisions that will guide its teenage cast of potential murder victims.
Now by the time the blood starts a flying, you'll always feel like you are on the verge of disaster and that makes it nearly impossible to put down.
When you go back to replay it however, it's impossible to ignore just how non-interactive much of The Quarry actually is.
As a spiritual sequel to Until Dawn, it's a better movie but a worse game. You follow the story of nine camp counselors who end up stuck in the woods overnight at the end of summer with nothing to do but throw one last party before they go back to their lives.
Now there's something stalking them from the tree line because (of course there is) and your choices determine which if any of the Counselors will be able to survive the night.
This setup layers three fairly textbook horror plots on top of each other as you progress but you can tell that Supermassive Games had a lot of fun figuring out how to connect them together.
When you play, you may think you're in one type of horror movie but you're actually often in another.
Now the title location of The Quarry, is a summer camp in upstate New York package quarry that's slowly falling apart.
It's initially designed to look like the most postcard worthy version of itself backlit by warm sunlight and spread out across approximately a billion acres of natural splendor.
It's a Hollywood version of The Perfect Summer experience with colorful cinematography that makes the whole camp look like somebody's cherished memory.
Then the sun goes down, the woods get dangerously quiet, the rot gets more obvious and the nightmare starts.
You play as each of the nine camp Counselors controlling one at a time at various points in the roughly 10 hour campaign you can influence how its events play out through exploration scenes, conversation choices, quick time events, stealth, simple combat and Mass Effect style interruptions where you have a short window in which to make a sudden move.
There are a lot of accessibility options built into The Quarry that let you adjust the difficulty of all of these actions including a movie mode, that lets the story play out without any interactivity at all.
Now while you'll see most of what there is to see in movie mode, you will miss a couple of major events, many optional ones and a lot of story context that can only come from taking direct control.
Even without it, The Quarry's default settings make quick time events easy to pull off.
In fact, there are several scenes where failing doesn't necessarily have a bad outcome which makes them more like snap decisions rather than mechanical challenges.
The primary issue with The Quarry is that it's less of a game and more of a lightly interactive movie for most of its running time.
Now you can go for surprisingly long stretches without having to make a meaningful choice or take direct control of a character.
All you're asked to do is watch. In general one of the best parts of Until Dawn as well as the games in Supermassive's Dark Pictures Anthology was that it was at least as much of a mystery as it was a horror movie.
During the adventure game style exploration scenes, you had the chance to try and find crucial details about what was happening by discovering clues reading files, solving puzzles and occasionally, falling into what was, with the benefit of hindsight, a really obvious trap.
Now there isn't anywhere near as much of that in The Quarry. You do have the chance to unravel some of the weird history behind the cap and the area around it but it feels like a disappointing afterthought.
Another issue is that you can't skip past cutscenes or dialogue that you've already seen on repeat playthroughs and Until Dawn, that was a mild headache.
In The Quarry which is longer considerably less interactive, it's frustrating. There's a lot of fun and going back through it and deliberately making different decisions or even failing on purpose just to see what happens.
There are plenty of surprises to find and it's a testament to how absorbing this setting and story can actually be, that you may go back for a second or third playthrough to find them.
However, doing so would be a more entertaining process with a few important quality of life features that are missing. A better scene selector would be nice as well as a run button, a fast forward option or better labeled points of no return.
As it is, any attempt to replay The Quarry involves actual hours of dead time, where all you can do is sit and watch it play itself out again.
The Quarry is deliberately meant to have a lighter tone than Supermassive's other horror games in a way that its director compared to the scream movies which is made even clearer by the casting of David Arquette as Hackett's Quarry's weird head counselor.
Now it's very self-aware right from the start with a cast of characters who have all seen at least one horror movie before and are acting accordingly.
At the same time, The Quarry storyline feels like Supermassive's learned a lot from its past projects and is putting that experience to work here.
It feels more confident with a more solid coherent plot structure. There are still plenty of twists but they're carefully calculated and a few can take you by surprise. Now the cast of motion captured actors are a particular highlight.
A couple of them do still get relatively little to do and I'd hope to see more from Lance Henriksen's creepy backwoods hunter but most of the characters are genuinely likable and you're given plenty of time to get to know them.
Ariel Winter, Siobhan Williams and Justice Smith as Abigail, Laura and Ryan respectively are all particular standouts and Brenda Song as Kaitlyn somehow manages to end up as the biggest badass in the cast.
The characters in The Quarry don't actually act as if they're in a horror movie however, it goes further than that.
Many of them are operating on a level of ironic detachment that occasionally verges on self-parity especially if you're on a run where the body count is still fairly low.
You're running the sequences where characters are still talking earnestly about petty relationship drama despite being covered in someone else's blood.
No scene is dramatic enough that it can't be derailed by a half joke and no amount of recent personal horror is enough to keep someone from landing the perfect sick burn.
It doesn't come off as awareness of their medium as much as outright traumatic disassociation. Now in horror terms, if Supermassive games was aiming for scream it overshot and ended up with the cabin in the woods.
The Quarry is worth playing at least once but when compared to Until Dawn, it's one step forward and one step back.
It features a solid script performed by a great cast with a slow burn story that you can guide to a few different conclusions.
Now it's not very interactive though and that makes replaying it as intended, a chore. It's still a fun experience particularly on your first time through it but Supermassive Games formula could use some quality of life improvements.
