The Quarry's shlocky horror roots make for great game design
After the surprise smash success of 2015's teen horror survival story Until Dawn, developer Supermassive Games spent a few years wandering through other ends of the horror genre. Through games like Man of Medan, Little Hope, and House of Ashes, the studio's Dark Pictures Anthology showed off gripping tales of psychological horror, ghost stories, and ancient mythical monstrosities.
But for its latest game The Quarry, Supermassive swung right back to familiar territory: a group of teens unaware of exactly how memorable their trip would be. Teen slasher movie plot staples like underage drinking, ill-advised skinny dipping, and brutal, gruesome kills on the shores of Hackett's Quarry Summer Camp punish the characters for their hubris. It's a love letter to teen horror, and with familiar genre faces like David Arquette, Lance Hendrickson, Ted Raimi, and Lin Shaye, The Quarry goes out of its way to cash in on player expectations about the genre.
Expectations about horror have been ripe for riffing in the world of horror films (see the Scream film series, which stars Arquette). In plenty of other genres, familiarity and expectations might be weaknesses. But according to game director Will Byles, the genre itself is partly what makes Until Dawn and now The Quarry so dang compelling.
In a genre defined by bad choices, inviting players to figure out which choices will help them survive the night, and which ones will get them impaled on a stick is a brilliant move. But as Byles told Game Developer, having to build that game in a pandemic, when you need to film real actors on a motion capture stage, turned into a horror film of its own.
To talk about the power of teen horror in video games, Byles had to start with the raw mechanics of
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