The Quarry

I can’t believe how long it took me to finish The Quarry. It’s been weeks. It hasn’t been due to lack of interest, but being tired and wanting to enjoy it properly. And this weekend, I finally did it!

Over the last few weeks, I have been talking about the type of story The Quarry is and general impressions. Little of that has changed. As I was getting ready to play the final chapter, a new patch was ready to download. I was hoping this would fix up a bug I encountered with the life system.

Spoiler – it didn’t. In fact, it caused a loop that killed one of the councillors and crashed when trying to use the feature. I preferred the old bug where Ma just disappeared!

Do I want to try a Platinum run for The Quarry? Similar to the Dark Pictures Anthology, I don’t think so. Not quickly anyway. I have played ‘my’ story and seen it to the end. Spookedshibe wants to give it a try, so I might play a multiplayer run with her like Man of Medan. I don’t know when or how that will happen though.

I will say there is one aspect of The Quarry that concerned me more than normal. Looking to movies for proper firearm handling techniques is like looking at fast food for healthy nutrition guidelines. I can almost give the ‘dumb kids’ a pass because they have no training. I don’t think a lack of understanding of dangerous items should be glorified, but I can understand it in the story context.

Having ‘experienced hunters’ walk up to someone with a shotgun and try and pull it towards themselves is basically suicide. And yet we still see this kind of action shown as the hero move. People do try and replicate what they see, and removing this kind of bad decision should be a priority.

Rant over though. Bottom line, I enjoyed The Quarry very much, and I may play a bit more next week. Stray doesn’t come out for a couple of weeks, and I could try some Movie Mode. Now is the time to try one more run, because I don’t want to pick up a new game before Stray. At least I can put The Quarry down without any guilt.

No matter how it works out, I have finished this run of The Quarry. Two councillors down, one by misstep and cemented by a bug. What bug? Well, you will have to watch the YouTube channel to see what happened!

I tried to get into The Quarry again this week but couldn’t bring myself to do it. This entry will probably end up sounding a bit negative, for which I apologise in advance. Anything negative reflects how I feel playing The Quarry at the moment, not on the game itself.

First off, I missed a single Tarot card. Collecting them all is a trophy, so I thought I would use the now unlocked chapter select to tidy up the last card. Once I had that, I thought I would flick forward and try for an ‘everyone lives’ playthrough. The Quarry had other ideas though.

Chapter select acts like a new save, so you have everything up to that point and nothing from further in the game. Once you start a chapter select game, the option is no longer available until you finish The Quarry again. This feels like a forced way to have you playing longer. Until Dawn’s butterfly points was a lot better for quickly jumping in and out of story paths!

So I decided to try Movie Mode in case that would allow some manipulation of the story points. You can choose ‘everyone lives’, ‘everyone dies’ or what I assume is a make-your-own ending path.

Movie Mode is very well named though – you get to watch The Quarry play itself, built up to a set outcome. Finding this by chance on Saturday morning wasn’t how I planned to spend the morning.

It might be a good choice to have on for background noise during the day, but I haven’t explored any of it properly yet. I might put The Quarry on my PS4 and let it run during a work day, but I wouldn’t wait for more information on Movie Mode.

So it looks like Until Dawn is the only Supermassive Games title that I wanted to Platinum. The Quarry and most of the Dark Pictures Anthology have been too much of a grind. But as an experience, I enjoyed it, and look forward to more titles.

Now that Wolf Pack mode (online multiplayer) is available, The Quarry is even better to play with friends!