Content Rating: 20/20 The Quarry splits into ten chapters lasting about an hour each, totaling 10 hours of playtime for a single playthrough. Considering the game's structure, all its game modes, and collectibles, it's required but not necessary to complete it several times unless you want to experience everything the game offers. Depending on the circumstances, you're looking at up to 40 hours of playtime to go through everything the game offers. Gameplay Rating: 14/20 I'd describe the gameplay of The Quarry as an interactive feature film, which it does brilliantly. You control nine teenagers, each different from one another. The game presents you with meaningful quick time events either limited by time or presented by choice, and each of them shapes up the destiny of characters, with brief world explorations on the side to set up what follows in the story. Outside the QTEs, there's not much on offer besides a few interactive collectibles here and there that go along with the story itself. So, roaming around and interacting with infinite useless things is out of the question. The stuff you interact with outside of the main 'do or die' and 'this or that' events isn't overwhelming and adds meaningful detail to the story piece by piece as a puzzle. What matters the most is the interaction between the characters and their relationships, but not to the extent you might think. I wish the interactive object markers were more prominent, as they're weirdly rising from the ground the closer you get, meaning that you'll miss them unless you're looking at the floor to spot them at times due to the game's viewport cut-off by black bars at the top and bottom. The letterboxed perspective adds to the immersion, but the cut-off only makes sense during cutscenes. During gameplay, it's more of a distraction and a pain to deal with in some chapters. The user interface is nicely designed and fits together with the rest. Presentation Rating: 13/20 Let's first start with the bad. The motion blur in this game is horrendous, but there's a mod to force it off. The temporal anti-aliasing the game uses doesn't fare any better, and it leads to the constant shimmering of small objects and certain things like tree leaves disappearing as the camera moves away due to softening. The characters' hair breaks up constantly during close-ups, even at 4K resolution. Water splashes and fire effects run at bizarrely low framerate compared to the rest of the presentation. Certain characters look high at times, exhibiting weird eyelids and eye movements. Some textures are low in resolution, and generally, the high-quality characters look out of place at times as the rest of the presentation doesn't match in quality. For example, the clouds and the moon look like a flat texture glued to the sky, and the rocky terrain and some other environment pieces generally look out of place and unfitting with the rest. The indoor scenes are much better. Thankfully, depth of field and the darkness mask this very well, so the lack of detail is evident only when the camera pans around the world. As for the rest of the presentation, the lighting is generally okay, and the atmosphere matches what the director had in mind and wanted to get across. The soundtrack's few licensed tracks fit the narrative, and the sound design, in general, is more than decent. Considering this is an interactive movie, it plays like it and delivers on the premise of a feature film, both visually and auditory speaking. The voice acting and motion capture are great, though, as mentioned, there are some questionable animations. In the end, it's a very dark game, so it's hard to make out all these details but they're worth mentioning. Story Rating: 17/20 Set in the remote summer camp of Hackett's Quarry, the story revolves around a group of teenage counselors who decide to throw a final party on their last night at camp. However, their celebration quickly turns into a night of horror as they find themselves hunted by bloodthirsty locals and something far more sinister. The game blends traditional horror elements with modern storytelling, where every decision matters, and this pretty much sums it up. I thoroughly enjoyed the story, mostly because I love these stupid horror movies where the characters spit cringe dialogue and get picked off one by one in the most outlandish ways possible. That's not exactly the case here, as you're in control and ultimately decide the fate and the conversation between the characters, but you get the point. The characters you play with can make both stupid and good choices based on your input, meaning that you're the one deciding the faith of each of them, and it's what makes it so enjoyable for me. The podcast thing is also a great idea. The ending felt satisfying, and the whole story is tied up neatly outside of a few loose ends. Technicalities Rating: 12/20 The game is powered by Unreal Engine 4, alright? As expected, the game suffers heavily from stutters and inconsistent frame times, the same issues many other UE4 games do, including The Dark Pictures Anthology series, developed by Supermassive Games. Each scene cut introduces a stutter, and each new thing loading in introduces a stutter. Basically, whatever the game does introduces a brief stutter. It's much less noticeable playing with a gamepad as opposed to a keyboard and a mouse, and certain display technologies help with this, but it's a constant stutter-fest. As with many UE4-powered games, the graphics settings are bare bones, meaning you don't have much control over anything the game does visually besides the generic UE4 options. At least the loading times are fast, but for the visuals it outputs, it doesn't justify the hardware demand. Final Verdict Rating: 76/100 The Quarry is a less ambitious version of Until Dawn that anyone who likes an interactive narrative experience will enjoy and appreciate regardless. Outside a few performance and technical issues, it's a decent horror experience that gets more interesting with each chapter.
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