The Quarry - REVIEW.
INTRO.
Took about 15 hours and all, but I finished up The Quarry, which is in current $12 Humble Choice for this October. Really enjoyed it.
If you're not a fan of cinematic-style adventure games like anything from David Cage and Quantic Dream (Fahrenheit, Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls, Detroit: Become Human, etc), Telltale's games (Telltale's The Walking Dead games, Telltale's Batman games, The Wolf Among Us, etc.) and likely anything else from SuperMassive (Dark Pictures Anthology of games & Until Dawn) - I don't think this is going to convert anyone over to this genre of adventure games.
If you like and want a very-well voice-acted & very well-written B-movie inspired horror-movie type of cinematic-game - which I think is obviously purposely hammy, campy & funny b/c this is a game with an 80's to 90's Jason film (i.e. the Friday The 13th movies) - you will probably like this. The story is down-right bonkers, loaded with twists, turns, revelations, and whatnot in the story - and if you care about story & character development more anything, this is going to be for you. If you like movies and/or TV shows - absolutely, this is for you, as most of the time you'll be chilling and watching the story unfold...after you've likely interacted to make decisions & shape the story.
GAMEPLAY.
For gameplay - yes, when it happens - most of this game you'll be doing certain things here, like you'd normally do in this type of game. You will be interacting w/ the game-world & finding things like in most adventure games (or taking items like Lore, Tarot Cards, objects, etc.). You will be taking on QTE's (Quick-Time Events) where you need to slam certain buttons, keys, directions, or whatever on your game-pad or keyboard-mouse during intense cut-scenes & action sequences. I should note here, that I mostly played with a PC gamepad here - either my USB-based and wired Logitech F310 or Xbox 360 Gamepad. More so than anything here, you'll be making decisions that'll be shaping this entire journey of this 10-15 hour story here and its final permutations.
STORY.
So, what's the story here? A bunch of people are at a Summer Camp (Jason/Friday The 13th vibes here!) and all kinds of stuff is hitting the fan basically. This isn't even the half of it here, as there's a Family that has a history to this place & land, monster movie type of stuff here, and more. You, the player, will be bouncing between numerous characters in this big ensemble piece of a story, as you'll be trying to hopefully save as many important characters in this story, so that they'll be alive by the end. You have police man, a fortune teller/tarot card reader, some camp counselors, and more here - whose fates are all intertwined here in, in this horror flick of a video game. I don't want to give too much away here, as there's a ton of stuff going on here. And likely, most players won't be having the same outcome & could be replaying this game a crazy amount of times, as even IGN has said there's around at least 180+ variations here! And also when you talk with other players, there's going to be a good chance your playthrough is going to differ from the next person's playthrough.
GRAPHICS & PERFORMANCE.
The character models and their animations look fantastic. In terms of voice-actors here - likely motion-captured, I'd bet - to look this much like their real-life selves in game, is absolutely uncanny. Absolutely outstanding on this stuff. These are some of the best-looking character models that I've ever seen in a game, for them to look like their real-life counterparts. Ariel Winter, Lance Henrikson, Brenda Song, and Halston Sage look so much like their real-selves here...and it's astonishing how good this game got them down.
The game performed best on my desktop loaded with a 10700KF, 16gb RAM, multiple SSD's & HDD's, and 8gb RTX 3070, with most stuff cranked-up on High settings w/ a few tweaks and changes to the setting to customize it for myself. On my laptop with R5 5600H, 16gb RAM, 1 TB SSD, and 6gb RTX 3060 - well, I had it at mostly Medium settings with some other stuff customized a bit up to suit me. I aim for 1080p60fps, but it wasn't always at 60fps. Sometimes, got performance hits and drops - more so on the laptop than desktop. Regardless, I did have area transition stutters here & there - yes, more so on laptop than desktop. Regardless, the game looked great to me and also so did the environments & lighting here, which so fit the monster movie vibe & Summer Camp vibe here - but the characters models here, more so than anything, took the cake here with their graphics quality on the technical side of things.
OUTRO.
Regardless, I finished-up The Quarry and as a fan of 1980's and 90's horror movies especially & actually these type of cinematic-adventure games (like Quantic Dream's games & Telltale's games), I can add SuperMassive to this list of games of this type that I'll have to play. This game was a blast and given how replay-able this game is, with it's well known that this game has numerous different journeys and conclusions/permutations, I know I'm going to have to give this one another run-through. After my 15 hours or so with this, I can say: this "game" was a total blast and I really enjoyed this one. Yes, I enjoyed it A LOT.
It was my first Tales back in 2009 and got me hooked. Great group of characters, skits (banter between party members) are well done, lots of content. It does, in my opinion, take a bit for combat to really open up. It starts very basic and you'll slowly learn skills that add more moves, allow more attacks, etc. Most of the games are self-contained in terms of story, although Zestiria is a prequel of sorts to Berseria.
