The Quarry review – digging for trouble

metro.co.uk:

The creators of Until Dawn and The Dark Pictures try to perfect their interactive horror movie formula with a return to 80s cheese.

Before the release of Until Dawn in 2015, British developer Supermassive Games was best known for making family friendly shtick like LittleBigPlanet DLC and Doctor Who games. As a horror themed interactive movie, Until Dawn was a major change of direction. It was a successful one too, with the game exceeding Sony’s expectations and leading to a number of spin-offs.

A few years later, Sony and Supermassive had a falling out and instead of a direct sequel Supermassive went on to create the conceptually similar The Dark Pictures Anthology series. There are three so far but only the most recent one, House Of Ashes, has come close to fulfilling the potential of the concept. Several more are planned for the future but The Quarry is something different… sort of.

Although all five games work in a very similar way, with an emphasis on making those big decisions you always scream at horror movie characters for getting wrong, it is only The Quarry which Supermassive considers to be the spiritual sequel to Until Dawn. That’s primarily due to the tone, which is purposefully cheesier than The Dark Pictures, and in most cases more entertaining.

The term interactive movie doesn’t get used a lot nowadays, but it used to refer to a very specific kind of game with minimal interaction and little or no action gameplay. They were relatively common when full motion video was a new thing but quickly fell out of fashion and games like Her Story, which still uses pre-recorded film clips instead of interactive graphics, are the only real modern equivalent.

Games like Until Dawn and The Quarry aren’t much further along the