The Quarry

[Neon Ignition]

I caved and picked up the PC version of the game, I'm aiming at doing a chapter per night so as yet I've worked my way through the prologue and first two chapters. Out the gate the game is very nice looking as you would expect given the track record of Supermassive. Characters can still sometimes have an odd look about their facial expressions and the more characterful an actors appearance is the better they translate across. Some of the camp councilors look a tad bland whereas the likes of Ted Raimi are insanely high quality and on point in performance capture.

The game leans heavily into the slasher territory which means out the gate the level of horror suspension is much lower than some of their past works. The structure of the gameplay is the same as usual though, all cutscenes with the occasional walking or QTE and dialogue options. With Until Dawn the game left a strong sense that you made critical decisions that turned out in the end to have only minor changes to the way events unfolded. Progressing onto the Dark Picture Anthology games, due to their shorter nature, things move faster but there it feels like your decisions are more restricted to just character interactions and who survives.

With the chapters so far in Quarry it's the opposite of Until Dawn. You'll approach a major decision and prepare for it only to regularly discover you were given sway over a minor dialogue exchange prior but come the main event you have no say at all. This could change as the game goes on and the fates of the characters come more into play but it feels telling that there's such a strong air about the game over what you're not permitted to decide rather than what you are. It's giving me the sense that in an effort to make the storylines make sense the devs have slipped into the mistake of limiting the player too much and it's when you lose the sense of involvement that these games tip away from being engaging story based games and instead become rubbish films instead. The chapter I'm on next should be where the events begin to properly start to unfold so we'll see whether that feeling persists.

[wakka]

Interesting impressions thanks. As you know I always play these games too and you’re spot on about the sense of meaningful choice being critical. Even though a second partial play through of Until Dawn exposed the illusory nature of many of those choices, it’s still one of my favourite gaming experiences, and I do think it’s head and shoulders over the Dark Anthology entries.

Looking forward to giving this one a try to see how I fare.

[Neon Ignition]

I've done up to the start of Chapter 8 now, someone at work is playing this too so we've been comparing decisions and have only just reached a point where a meaningful difference has occurred. The game is bad... really bad at presenting you with choices only to then disregard what you've chosen. I'm broadly enjoying following the story but regardless of their claims there's very blatantly little to no reason to try different branches once done with the game. We've made different decisions along the way but end up with the same story as it just ignores what you've chosen. My co-worker has just had one character killed at a point where they survived in my game but the lack of influence on the story is without doubt stronger here than in other Supermassive games.

[Neon Ignition]

Finished it last night. It definitely feels like a longer version of what they're doing with the DPA titles and it never shook the very clear impression that your decisions held little sway until the latter end where single decisions affected who survived.

Only two of my characters died in the end, one intentionally and the other not. Overall I did enjoy the game but there's nothing here that evolves the experience in any way so with the smaller DPA entries releasing each year I'd be happy if these more expensive standalone entries were no more unless Supermassive opts to be much more ambitious with them in future.

[BaronSqwelch]

Thanks for the write up, has completely put me off buying it though 😅
The lack of impact your choices make is big deal for me.

[Neon Ignition]

Yep, on console it's a lot of money to put down on something that is pretty much just more of the Dark Pictures Anthology. The person at work playing it should finish up this weekend so I'll be finding out how their outcome compares, should highlight where the game branches as we've often picked opposite outcomes but so far with little real difference in result

[Yakumo]

Bit of a boosted thread. Finished this a few times now. At the moment I'm going through the movie mode with settings set to everyone gets killed. Some nasty scenes for sure. But I'm still amazed at how good some of the realtime character models are.
These are from the Series X version.