Google was apparently behind two of this month’s hottest games at one point.
It might seem laughable these days, but there was a point when Google was hyping-up Stadia as something that could rival the popularity of any PlayStation or Xbox console. That still hasn’t happened and probably never will after the closure of several gaming studios at Google. However, the company had a significant role in bringing two of June’s hottest titles into fruition.
According to Axios, Supermassive’s supernatural thriller The Quarry and High on Life, the bizarre first-person shooter from Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland, were original Google Stadia exclusives. The report claims that following Google’s decision to downsize its gaming divisions, both titles found publishing deals elsewhere.
It’s worth noting that neither game is slated for release on Stadia. The Quarry came out on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC last week, with Take-Two Interactive taking on publishing duties. A company spokesperson told Axios that Supermassive “was looking for a publishing partner as the project came to completion,” and the publisher was happy to help. Meanwhile, High on Life isn’t coming out until this fall but, thus far, is only for PC and Xbox platforms.
It’s wild how these projects sometimes begin, especially in The Quarry‘s case, considering its popularity. If you’re interested in finding out what the hype is all about, check out GLHF‘s review.
I’m always a sucker for a game that has a specific thing it wants to be the best at and succeeds. The Quarry is on track for that.
It’s been seven years since Until Dawn, Supermassive Games’ breakthrough horror play, which came after a few years of making LittleBigPlanet DLC. It was far better than anyone bet on, including Sony and Supermassive themselves. We embraced the horror movie schlock it had to offer, and a recognizable cast with just a touch of over-acting, some gory deaths, and a few surprises kept things fresh. It proved difficult to follow-up, though Supermassive’s own commitment to playing with new technologies and ideas – VR, group voting games – were to blame more than a lack of ability.
The Quarry has been sold as a spiritual successor to Until Dawn. The chronological follow-up, The Dark Pictures Anthology, has a different tone, with very different stories. Other developers haven’t picked up the Until Dawn ball and ran with it, likely fearing the combination of required high-quality graphics and animation, expensive mo-cap from at least somewhat-known actors, combined with horror gameplay some find off-putting and a lack of straight action to appeal to a wide audience. These are, simply, not cheap games to make, and not ones that are going to get their cash back easily.
It is fascinating, then, to see how close this game lands to its predecessor, and how things have changed since. Make no mistake, this is an improved Until Dawn in all but name, setting, and a graphical upgrade. Everyone in it is hot, horny, and an a-hole. They’re all positive they’re the best but indescribably bad at everything. They don’t recognize their friend’s voices in dark forests at night, they trip over at the worst possible time, they play truth or dare, and they get really mad about kissing. I cannot get enough of these little gits and will watch with glee as they suffer over the rest of the run time when the full game releases.
The Quarry cast is less recognizable than Until Dawn’s fairly impressive list of TV stars, though you’ll likely know a name or two from somewhere. The drastic leap forward in graphics quality – believe me, Until Dawn doesn’t look as nice as you remember it – is as impressive as the little touches made. There are some great accessibility options, including a straight movie mode where you set personalities for normally controllable characters and watch it all go wrong. While this wasn’t playable in our short, 45 minute demo from chapters two and three, it’ll prove a hit with the majority of that Until Dawn audience that simply enjoyed watching it.
Our crew of late-teen, anxiety-laden, hormone-leaking protagonists are a future-shifted version of all the classic tropes – the promiscuous girl is some sort of influencer, the competent girl is good with a gun and likes taking pictures on her smartphone, the foreign student is an Australian guy flirting with the nerdy one… it goes on. The aesthetics of everything from the menu and VHS filter options to their clothing, acting, dialogue, and named locations such as ‘North Kill’ is a lovely mix of Friday the 13th through Scream. It’s not quite Cabin in the Woods, but what is?
Gameplay itself is a little less positive. It isn’t bad, but there are a lot of choose-the-options and quicktime events, not so much third-person wandering. Until Dawn certainly felt like it had more, and games like Detroit: Become Human do too. Detroit is probably the biggest competitor The Quarry faces, in terms of games that are purely about the decisions you make and the consequences they cause for the characters, while still being major triple-A productions. This preview demo didn’t convince me that The Quarry has the complexity to stand up to that, but with such a different style, goal, and setting, it does have its own unique appeal.
As for the impact of your decision making, the illusion of endlessly branching paths continues to be difficult to maintain. The Quarry, and its obvious inspirations like the various Telltale games, live in a horrible half-way house where they don’t want to just be a visual novel with a distinct start and end, gameplay inbetween or not. Similarly, however, they simply cannot feature endless amounts of variable content – in the same way a traditional game level has to have walls to stop you getting out somewhere, the plot of The Quarry must move onwards at some point.
Again, Detroit did a good job with this – each scene would give you a breakdown at the end showing your path and various options you could have taken. It made replaying a part of the challenge, if you wanted. Similarly, visual novels that use choice as a major part of the gameplay – The Nonary Games series, for example – also make it a major part of the story. The Quarry’s Souls-like ‘PATH CHOSEN’ message and collectible UI for major choices feel a touch behind.
That said, many of the little decisions do lead to fairly different scenes. It usually loops around to the same thing – whether you have a snog in the forest or talk about your childhood doesn’t stop the monster showing up – but they reveal some interesting things about the characters. It was actually rather fun coming into the preview build with relatively little knowledge, only a two minute ‘what happened so far’ video from the publisher, and discovering which characters felt what about each other.
I wouldn’t ever encourage someone to replay one section of the game three times over to see how things change, and the game clearly isn’t built to support that. It does destroy that illusion that anything could happen next, making it clear which conflicts are necessary and deliberate, which relationships are inevitable. What impact the normal small messages – ‘x will remember this’, ‘y is getting tired of you’, ‘z doesn’t trust you’ – have, if any, wasn’t yet clear.
All that said, The Quarry does a great job of setting up a mystery, giving me characters I care about (even if I don’t care for them) and having believable dialogue and situations, within the context of it all being a horror movie send-up. I hope the three way conflict – our protagonists, some hick-looking hunters, and the monsters – doesn’t resolve predictably. With a game that so clearly understands what it’s creating a homage to, and does such a good job of it, it’s fair to hope it will nail that landing. I’m curious enough that what was a passing ‘maybe’ has jumped to something I’m actually looking forward to in the games-light summer coming up.
The combination of it all – a lovely indie soundtrack, a batch of arrogant teenagers in trouble, a doubtlessly wacky story – works as well as it always does. Bits of it are brilliant, the bits that aren’t are competent, and I’m always a sucker for a game that has a specific thing it wants to be the best at and succeeds. The Quarry is on track for that.
Supermassive’s spooky narrative-driven adventure will have no shortage of conclusions.
Everyone loves choose-your-own-adventure stories, right? Supermassive sure does, as The Quarry will have 186 endings in total.
During an interview with IGN, director Will Byles discussed The Quarry’s various branching paths and how each will lead to one of many conclusions.
“Writing a branching narrative is a really interesting exercise,” Byles said via IGN. “We write a full, hundred-page screenplay as if it were a movie. We develop our character styles, and once we’ve got that, then we can start looking at how we break that out into a full 10-hour experience.”
“Actors are used to, on a feature film, a hundred-page script,” Byles continues. “So when we send the actors the scripts they get very alarmed because they’re huge. The script for this is over a thousand pages. We have to shoot about 50 pages a day, which is unheard of. It’s just a mad amount of footage. But obviously a lot of what they’re learning is the same thing again and again and again, but a different branch.”
Summer camp is over. Your choices will shape the fates of 9 teenage counselors as they struggle to survive the night. Welcome to Hackett’s Quarry. You won’t believe what you’ll become.
1000 pages for one script is astounding, though totally believable given what The Quarry is more-or-less asking if you could survive a horror movie. In life-or-death scenarios, things can go south fast. Sure, we all laugh at goofy character decisions in classic films like Evil Dead or Friday the 13th, but going through it yourself is another matter entirely. Every choice you’ll make carries a degree of weight — some more than others.
“When it comes to branching it really is a mathematical nightmare,” Byles explains. “It’s just exponential. As soon as you branch, that’s two completely different routes. You branch again, and [it makes] two more and two more. By the time you’re 20 choices in, you’re in ridiculous amounts of data. We have to look at how we make a genuinely branching game without making it so ridiculously huge that it’s unplayable or even unmakeable.”
“The big choices we have are these things called Paths Chosen, and those will significantly affect the story,” Byles concludes. “We’ll announce it to you. You never know when that’s going to come up. You’re never warned about it, and it might seem trivial, but it’s a big, big deal.”
The Quarry is coming out June 10, 2022, for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. The cast list for this one is ridiculously stacked.
Supermassive’s spiritual successor to Until Dawn nails the pulpy horror vibes.
If you’re in dire need of some old-school pulpy scares, The Quarry’s newest gameplay trailer should do the trick.
On Wednesday, Supermassive released 30 minutes of gameplay footage from The Quarry. In the video, two camp counselors get lost while driving around a spine-chilling forest after sundown — you probably see where this is going. Ted Rami also makes an appearance, one of the many horror veterans in The Quarry’s impressive cast. There’s no point spoiling what happens beyond that; just know that anyone who loves slasher flicks is in for a treat.
Watch The Quarry’s 30-minute gameplay trailer for yourself below. Anyone squeamish should keep a set of lights on or prep that comfy blanket to dive under, as there is some good jump scares in this.
It’s great that Supermassive is giving everyone a comprehensive look at The Quarry following the brief reveal. Everything from a gameplay standpoint looks top-notch, and even the acting is a step up from Until Dawn or The Dark Pictures Anthology.
Best of all, fans won’t be waiting long as The Quarry will release on June 10, 2022, for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
Favorites from across the horror genre are coming together for this one.
Several weeks ago, Supermassive announced The Quarry. This narrative-driven adventure title is a spiritual follow-up to Until Dawn of sorts, in that a group of idiotic teens is out in the woods, and something terrible wants to gut them like a fish. Anyone that’s seen 1980s horror flicks knows the drill.
The studio clearly understands that flavor of horror well since The Quarry’s cast is full of genre icons from films like Scream, Pumpkinhead, Insidious, The Grudge, Inland Empire, Evil Dead 2, and loads more. A veritable smorgasbord of shlock, and fans of all things spooky will gleefully dig in when The Quarry releases on June 10, 2022.
Summer camp is over. Your choices will shape the fates of 9 teenage counselors as they struggle to survive the night. Welcome to Hackett’s Quarry. You won’t believe what you’ll become.
Enough of the vague gesturing, though: let’s look at The Quarry’s cast and what each actor and actress is primarily known for in film and television. Some have closer ties to the horror genre than others, but you’ll likely recognize everyone all the same.
Scream, Aliens, and Evil Dead Alumni are coming together for a narrative-driven horror adventure.
Few games nail that wonderfully cheesy yet completely earnest appeal that many 1980s horror flicks have, but Until Dawn is one of them. Much to the delight of pulp enthusiasts everywhere, Supermassive Games wants to recapture that hokey magic with The Quarry.
The Quarry’s announcement came earlier this week, but the real reveal happened Thursday. It’s a narrative-driven horror game where nine teenagers attempt to survive the night at a summer camp with a gruesome history. Like Until Dawn, anyone can die, and there’ll be lots of branching paths and multiple endings. The best part is you can play the whole game in local or online co-op. One player will take control of a character while everyone else votes on decisions, similar to Until Dawn.
“That was almost like a game/movie experience and we definitely wanted to keep that going,” Will Byles, director on The Quarry, said via IGN. “We weren’t aware quite how social it got with other people sitting down.”
The reveal trailer sets the tone perfectly, so check that out below.
Summer camp is over. Your choices will shape the fates of 9 teenage counselors as they struggle to survive the night. Welcome to Hackett’s Quarry. You won’t believe what you’ll become.
— Supermassive Games 🔜 #TheQuarry (@SuperMGames) March 17, 2022
Any diehard horror fan likely noticed some familiar faces, and that’s because The Quarry’s cast is absolutely stacked. There’s
David Arquette (Scream), Lance Henriksen (Aliens, The Terminator),Ariel Winter (Modern Family), Ted Rami (Evil Dead 2, Xena: Warrior Princess), Justice Smith (Pokémon Detective Pikachu), Lin Shaye (Insidious), and Brenda Song (Dollface).
The Quarry will release on June 10, 2022, for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
Supermassive is back with a spooky new adventure called The Quarry.
The Quarry’s official reveal isn’t until Thursday, March 17 at 9 A.M. PDT // 12 P.M. EDT // 4 P.M. GMT, but 2K provided some interesting details ahead of time. Supermassive, the studio behind modern horror classics like Until Dawn and Dark Pictures, will be developing The Quarry. It’ll probably be some sort of choose-your-own-adventure title like Supermassive’s past games, though that’s pure speculation on my part.
There are some massive actors attached to this project, including David Arquette (Scream), Lance Henriksen (Aliens, The Terminator), Ted Rami (Evil Dead 2, Xena: Warrior Princess) and Ethan Suplee (My Name is Earl, American History X).
Check out the teaser video below.
"𝑾𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒅𝒐𝒆𝒔𝒏'𝒕 𝒌𝒊𝒍𝒍 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒘𝒊𝒍𝒍 𝒎𝒂𝒌𝒆 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒔𝒕𝒓𝒐𝒏𝒈𝒆𝒓." 🩸 Watch the reveal of #TheQuarry, our all-new horror experience published by @2K, coming this Summer.
— Supermassive Games 🔜 #TheQuarry reveal (@SuperMGames) March 16, 2022
Again, there are almost no details on The Quarry yet. However, that will undoubtedly change after Thursday’s reveal. As a lifelong horror fan, the idea of Ted Rami and David Arquette being in a game together is more exciting than I care to admit. Both actors even chimed in on social media about The Quarry.
Horror fans, mark your calendars. @2K and @SupermassiveGames are revealing their new project #TheQuarry featuring me as… well you’ll have to wait and see! ☠
If you thought summer camp was horrifying already, you ain't seen nothing yet! Tune in for the reveal of #TheQuarry, a new horror project I'm in from @2K and @SuperMGames.
