The developers at Supermassive Games and the publishers at 2K have recently announced The Quarry, a new horror game that has a confirmed release date in summer this year. And since the game is set at summer camp, that release timing makes perfect sense.
Coming to us from Will Byles, the director of Until Dawn, The Quarry will offer a somewhat similar experience to that modern horror gaming favourite, allowing the player to guide a cast of characters (played by famous faces such as David Arquette) through a gauntlet of scary situations that wouldn’t look out of place on the big screen.
Prior to the announcement, RadioTimes.com had a video call with Will Byles to talk through all of our big questions about the game, and from Byles’ answers we’ve pulled together the handy guide below. If you’re intrigued about The Quarry, then, read on to learn all about it!
What is The Quarry?
The official press release describes The Quarry as “an all-new teen-horror narrative game where your every choice, big or small, shapes your story and determines who lives to tell the tale”.
The story of The Quarry was teased in the announcement like so: “As the sun sets on the last day of summer camp, the teenage counselors of Hackett’s Quarry throw a party to celebrate. No kids. No adults. No rules.
“Things quickly take a turn for the worse. Hunted by blood-drenched locals and something far more sinister, the teens’ party plans unravel into an unpredictable night of horror. Friendly banter and flirtations give way to life-or-death decisions, as relationships build or break under the strain of unimaginable choices.
“Play as each of the nine camp counselors in a thrilling cinematic tale, where every choice shapes your unique story from a tangled web of possibilities. Any character can be the star of the show – or die before daylight comes. How will your story unfold?”
The Quarry gameplay will support local and online multiplayer where up to eight players can work together to control the imperilled characters.
The Quarry release date
The Quarry release date is 10th June 2022, the publishers from 2K have confirmed, with the game due to launch on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Steam for PC on that very date. There’s no word on a Nintendo Switch release at this stage, so don’t hold your breath on that front.
The Quarry trailer
The best way to wrap your head around The Quarry is to watch the first teaser trailer, which is available to watch right now:
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.
— David Arquette (@DavidArquette) March 16, 2022
TOMORROW, 9am PT at https://t.co/sfTi4cWUIZ pic.twitter.com/PzWB7QpH60
Byles said in our interview: “You can see from the trailer we’ve added in a layer of a great new genre title which I’d never heard of before – the Hick Flick, which is kind of like Deliverance or The Hills Have Eyes. There’s this supernatural stuff going on, and then there’s also a monster, so it’s really kind of dialled up Until Dawn to 11.”
The Quarry cast
One of the immediately impressive things about The Quarry is its star-studded cast of familiar faces and horror veterans, including David Arquette from Scream, Ariel Winter from Modern Family, Justice Smith from Detective Pikachu, Brenda Song from Dollface, Lance Henriksen from Aliens, Lin Shaye from A Nightmare on Elm Street, Ted Raimi of The Evil Dead and Grace Zabriskie from Twin Peaks.
What was it like for Byles to work with a horror legend like Arquette? Byles says: “He’s completely a lovely man. There’s a few people that you meet and you go, ‘Oh, yeah, no, you’re mad famous’. And so that was kind of a weird one with him.
“He was also talking about this whole thing he did, I don’t know if you’ve seen You Cannot Kill David Arquette – the documentary where he does the wrestling? It’s brilliant. It’s worth watching. But he was showing us this circular scar on his neck. And it’s where he was stabbed in the throat by somebody with a fluorescent broken thing in a wrestling match.
“Anyway, so he was lovely, but they all were. I mean Ted Raimi, you know, he’s out of Evil Dead and his brother is Sam Raimi, obviously, and so he’s there. And it’s like, he’s brilliant. And then Lin Shaye, who was in all the Insidious movies. Grace Zabriskie, who’s in Twin Peaks. Every time you turn around, it’s like, ‘Oh God, it’s you’.
“And it really adds something to the game, it really gives it a feel of like, ‘This is like a grown-up horror’. And they’re all part of that slight post-modern, self-referential aura. Scream, really, I think is when it first sort of came out, where the rules were set up. And we use that a lot, we use that as part of our choice-making systems, the understanding that people know the rules of horror.”
!["Scream]("https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2022/03/The-Quarry-cast-b8a6495.jpg?quality=90&resize=620%2C413" "\"The-Quarry-cast\"")
Is The Quarry a sequel to Until Dawn?
Given the structural similarities and the shared director, you might be wondering if The Quarry is a sequel to Until Dawn. According to Byles, though, it’s only a successor in the spiritual sense.
Byles told us: “This really, I suppose, is sort of the spiritual successor to [Until Dawn]. It’s still very much the same ilk as that – it’s a teen horror, it’s the same kind of number of characters. It’s actually got one more [character].
“Everyone can live, everyone can die, exactly the same as that, although we have got another state which I won’t go into too much because it’s a little bit of a spoiler.
“So there’s that, and it still has that same sort of lightness of touch, although we’ve probably gone a bit further in the archetype on this one. So for this, it’s definitely teen horror. We’ve really gone right back to its roots into the summer camp thing, you know, with Friday the 13th and Sleepaway Camp and those sorts of things.”
Why isn’t The Quarry in The Dark Pictures Anthology?
Another question you might be asking is this – why isn’t The Quarry being released as part of Supermassive Games’ ongoing series The Dark Pictures Anthology?
Said anthology has housed a number of horror games in recent years – Man of Medan, House of Ashes and Little Hope have been released under that banner so far, with The Devil in Me being the next entry expected – but The Quarry is being separated out as its own product, to such an extent that 2K is publishing it instead of Bandai Namco, the publishers of The Dark Pictures Anthology.
We put this question to Byles and this is what he said: “So The Dark Pictures has a real kind of drive of its own – it’s two-player, or shared stories as it’s called. They’re shorter, they’re about five hours long, as opposed to this, which is sort of seven to 10 hours. It has a very different number of playable characters.
“And the biggest difference, I really think, is tone more than anything else. The tone of this is sort of slightly more Buffy, slightly more Supernatural, it doesn’t take itself very seriously. It’s very much the postmodern horror and very self-referential, whereas The Dark Pictures is definitely more of a [straight up] horror. And it’s able, because it’s an anthology, to go, ‘OK, we’re gonna do that, and now we’re gonna do that, and then we’re gonna do that’, and it needs that kind of separation.
“So that’s, I suppose, the biggest thing really. It’s really, I think, it comes down to that more than anything else – it’s just a different style. It’s like an old film studio really, you just have different sorts of different tones for different things.”
!["Detective]("https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2022/03/The-Quarry-graphics-2f7c293.jpg?quality=90&resize=620%2C413" "\"The-Quarry-graphics\"")
The Quarry endings
In the years since Until Dawn released, you could argue that players and the public at large have become more accustomed to interactive stories with multiple endings. Has this given Byles and his team from Supermassive the confidence to try bigger and bolder branching narratives?
Byles agrees that “a straight linear story from A to B with a single protagonist is fine” for audiences seeking interactivity in this day and age. “And in fact, Charlie Brooker has done that really well with [Black Mirror’s] Bandersnatch and stuff.
“The difficulty with that is that anytime you kill or stop that character, it stops the story, it’s truncated. So we have this multitude of protagonists, and that gives us this kind of spoked wheel of a story.
“So if somebody dies an hour in, the rest of the structure is still there, all those little other spokes are all still headed down towards this sort of ending. So that gives us a structure there. And of those nine stories going in, there’s 186 endings just of those.” When we laughed at the prospect of that many endings, Byles added: “I know, it’s mental, isn’t it?”
The Quarry graphics
One thing you’ll notice from The Quarry trailer is its incredible graphics, with stars like Arquette being instantly recognisable in digital form. How did Byles make them look so real? Have there been massive tech advancements since Until Dawn?
Byles explained: “I went to see Digital Domain, the guys who did Thanos for the Avengers [movies]. And they’ve been working on all this – the Digital Human Group, they’re called, and their stuff is amazing. It’s just amazing, but it’s for film. We were talking and they’ve been doing some stuff in Unreal [Engine, a popular tool for game development]. And it was like, ‘Do you know what, if we could get this into a game, it would be a game changer, literally’.
“And so we we started working on it, we started doing some tests with them. We started with Grace Zabriskie, we did a test with her and it was just like, ‘This is fantastic’. So everything you see in that trailer is in-game, it’s the runtime version, there’s no kind of captured or rendered videos, it’s just literally running in the game. And that’s all the way through.
“So that’s the biggest thing, the performances, and they are actually fully performance-captured, and their bodies were all captured as well. Both scale and size and musculature and everything. Because of that you can get a subtlety of performance that we couldn’t do earlier.
“We could get good performances before – and I love Until Dawn, I’m not knocking it – but the subtlety you can get now, you can see the nuance, and you can see regret in people’s eyes when they’ve made a choice, which is a hard thing to do. As you know, as humans, we 100 per cent know this stuff and you can catch it from people. But to catch that on a digital runtime avatar effectively is really unusual. And so that’s the biggest jump forward.”
The Quarry difficulty options
Players that are worried about getting their favourite characters killed will be glad to hear that The Quarry does have difficulty options.
“We wanted to get really accessible,” Byles said. “So if you’re not great or particularly fluent with a controller, and you don’t like Quick Time Events or something like that, because they stress you out. Or just, you know, you don’t want to have an accidental story change, then we could just turn that off.
“And we could do that all the way through every single level of interaction until you end up with literally just a movie. And then with that movie, also, you can then go, ‘OK, I just want to have a happy ending movie, or I want to have a gore fest movie’, or whatever. There’s a whole bunch of different sort of endings or styles.
“And you can even then go into all the characters and just go, ‘OK, I’ve got a whole bunch of options for this character. I want to make them particularly clumsy, I want to make them slightly irascible’, or whatever those characteristics are. And you could do that for every one of those playable characters, and then just hit play and just see what happens with that. So you kind of get that range.
“We’ve also added in, for the deluxe version, and also once you’ve played it through once, three lives. So if you do something that’s just like, ‘Ah, that’s really annoying’, you’ve got a little rewind. It’s three, so it’s not a major thing – you know, there’s hundreds of deaths in the game, so the three doesn’t really make a tangible difference to your story. But it does give you that little bit of a, ‘OK, I’ve got maybe a bit of a breather, if I just did something, or I just missed something, and it was like, really? That seems so mean.'”
This will be music to the ears of gamers that hate getting characters killed, of course. And as we hear more about The Quarry as its release date nears, we’ll be sure to keep you informed!
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