When Until Dawn launched on the PS4 back in 2015, it gained acclaim for managing to capture the old school feel of slasher movies wherein a group of young adults have to survive the night at a mountain retreat. At a time when big budget horror games were slowly being phased out, Until Dawn felt like a breath of fresh air and a way to keep the genre alive using the cinematic aspirations that AAA gaming loves.
Supermassive has been busy with the Dark Pictures anthology series, but their next standalone title, The Quarry, is intended as a true spiritual sequel to Dawn. Players will swap between nine different characters Hackett’s Quarry summer camp, where the teen counselors are throwing a party to celebrate their final night together. But things soon go bad, and the counselors have to survive the night. Like with Dawn, players will swap between each character, and the choices made will affect who makes it to the credits and who gets a gruesome end.
The vibe is very much in the vein of those old school slasher movies like Friday the 13th, but director Will Byles teased to IGN that the game’s influences include that iconic film, admitting that there’s a “certain expectation” that comes with a horror movie involving teens at a summer camp. But you’ll be able to see how nastier monster flicks like Evil Dead and The Thing have influenced the game, along with a little bit of Scream’s DNA. “It’s a lot lighter, it’s got a lot of that weird self-referential thing where we all know the rules,” he said.
Speaking of Scream: David Arquette headlines the game’s cast, which also includes Justice Smith (Detective Pikachu), Ethan Suplee (My Name is Earl), Ariel Winter (Modern Family), Brenda Song (Dollface), Lin Shaye (Insidious), Evan Evagora (Star Trek: Picard), and Ted Raimi (Evil Dead). Byles also gleefully informed Entertainment Weekly that each character can potentially die up to a dozen different ways, which is morbid, but keeps in with the slasher movie theme, for those who watch those movies for the gnarly kills.
For those who want a social horror movie viewing experience, you can play the game with friends: in local co-op, another player will control a different counselor, while online allows players to watch playthroughs and vote on decisions. According to Byers, this feature is something Supermassive wanted to include following the surge of makeshift couch co-op that players implemented with Until Dawn. There’s also a Movie Mode, wherein the game can be played like an interactive movie and the game parts — like quicktime events or controlling characters during gunfights, even the traits of the playable characters — are turned off or tweaked to the player’s liking. “You can turn off everything until it becomes literally a movie…You can go, I wanna get a movie with a happy ending where everyone’s alive or a bad ending or, my favourite, a gore fest where everything gets messy.”
The Quarry will release on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC on June 10.
Editor’s Note: Release dates within this article are based in the U.S., but will be updated with local Australian dates as soon as we know more.