The Quarry – 5 Things You Need to Know
As you probably know, The Quarry is Supermassive Games’ latest interactive narrative-based horror game. It builds on the framework of 2015’s Until Dawn and improves it in just about every way. Better performance capture and expressive facial detail, more fully realized characters, an amazing cast, and so many choices to make that there are 186 different endings. While the game isn’t terribly complicated mechanically, there are some things to be aware of. With that in mind, here are 5 things you need to know about The Quarry.
How Long Is The Quarry?
The developers estimate that a full playthrough will be between seven and ten hours. The difference comes from the choices you make along the way. You can easily choose actions or botch the timing of a QuickTime event that leads to a character’s demise. That certainly shortens the game. I played through the story in Movie Mode, and it was slightly over ten hours, but my player-controlled run took around eight.
What is Movie Mode?
If you just want to experience the story, you can sit back and let the game play itself while you watch. The Quarry gives you three Movie Mode options. You can let all the characters live, you can let them all die, or you can use the Director option. This allows you to set behaviors for each main character, like being agile or clumsy, confident or hesitant in certain situations. The game then makes choices based on your selection. In my Movie Mode playthrough, several main characters died, a few lived, and the game’s Big Bad remained undefeated. Oh, and if you like lots of gore with your horror, be sure to turn on the Gorefest option.
There are Limited Do-Overs
The Quarry auto-saves frequently, but you can’t save the game manually. When you quit and reload it drops you at the start of the most recent segment. Because there are so many choices to make in actions and dialogue–not to mention some very precisely timed QTEs–it’s easy to kill off a character by mistake. After you play through the game once, you have the option in subsequent playthroughs to take back actions that caused a death. But this Death Rewind feature can only be used three times per playthrough, so choose wisely!
Be Meticulous and Find Everything
The Quarry has a lot of things to find in the environment. These include Tarot cards, survival items, clues to the story, and much more. Important items are marked by a glowing light, but it’s still easy to miss things. It doesn’t help that movement is a little janky, but take the time to investigate every nook and cranny the game allows you to. There’s no inventory to manage, so you don’t need to worry about missing things like ammo or healing items.
Be Open to Surprises
One of the pleasures of The Quarry is using your characters to figure out the story. The big narrative beats are usually pretty obvious, but depending on your choices, there may be surprises you could not predict. There are clues, references, hints, and warnings everywhere. The Quarry is definitely a game that rewards multiple playthroughs. And thanks to the excellent cast and writing, doing so is a pleasure.