The Quarry is an interactive horror game released by Supermassive Games in 2022. Fans of Until Dawn will recognise the style of gameplay and the kind of decisions that you need to make in the game. It received such positive reviews, that many people are wondering if The Quarry 2 release date is on the cards.
There are a lot of stories left to discover about Hacketts Quarry. We still don't know much about Silas and what happened that night in the travelling show! These adventure games have a very unique feel to them. This formula has proven to be very successful, both in terms of units sold and audience reception. It would be great to see Supermassive Games build on this in The Quarry 2, and push the game to its full potential.
For more on the first game, we have a guide on how long to expect your playthrough of The Quarry to be, as well as an explanation of how the Death Rewind mechanic works.
The Quarry 2 news
Currently, there is no news about a sequel to The Quarry being released any time soon.
In an interview with VGC, Studio Director Will Byles said that he wasn’t sure “how far [the team] could stretch the teen horror thing out further”, but that they have plans for at least one more game in this format. We’re likely to hear news about this release in 2025. They have also stressed that it’s going to be a game similar to The Quarry, rather than an addition to The Dark Pictures Anthology.
In February 2022, Supermassive Games filed trademarks for six further entries in The Dark Pictures Anthology series. So far, two titles have been officially announced. Switchback VR will be a rollercoaster on-rails shooter spin-off game for the Playstation VR2, and not much is known about Directive 8020 yet.
We will make sure to keep you updated as soon as any information is announced about The Quarry 2.
What we’d love to see in The Quarry 2
click to enlarge
+ 3Changes to the Hold Your Breath mechanic
When the Hold Your Breath mechanic was introduced in the games, it was presented as something you really had to pay attention to. Your character would be hiding from something, and you have to pick the right moment to run and save yourself. Unfortunately, this mechanic became far too simple in practice.
In all of the encounters, you just have to hold down a mouse button until the bar is nearly finished. At the very end of your breath countdown, the enemy would just happen to leave, and always give you a chance to escape. This ruins all of the tension from the gameplay.
In order to make this a better system, there needs to be an opportunity during a different point of the countdown to flee. There needs to be an actual choice for the player to make in a segment like this. If players know they just need to wait until the end, then they’ll get bored and know that it’s going to be a guaranteed success.
The developers could even be really mean and make it so there are some instances where there just isn’t a right moment to go. This could make for some interesting and well-hidden scripted fail-states. If this happened, it would make it far tenser. You’d never know if you were actually going to get away or not.
More outcomes for characters
Supermassive Games boast that The Quarry has 186 different possible endings for players to explore. This of course depends on the combination of survivors who make it to the end, and which NPCs get killed too. All of these possible endings sound great in theory. However, once you play the game you realise that this is drastically overselling it. There are around 12 major endings that can be achieved, each of them variants of the main characters being killed off or not.
It’s great that the writers focused on telling one great story, but it would’ve been nice to see some more varied outcomes. For example, five of these possible major endings take place in the same area in the woods at the end of the game. The fate of these characters almost exclusively depends on which QTEs you succeed in the space of a few minutes. It would’ve added a lot of replayability to have fewer endings to the story, but ones with more impact.
This is perhaps due to the fact that the developers couldn’t handle the large cast of characters they made for themselves. While it’s understandable that some characters will take more of the spotlight than others, some of them are very harshly sidelined.
Max and Nick are huge driving points when it comes to the story. They provide the motive for most of the characters to resolve what’s going on. However, Nick disappears from the game halfway through, and Max has no influence on the story whatsoever.
Either of them could’ve made for great villains for the rest of the group to have to deal with. This would’ve made for some really unique situations where you have to make sure everyone gets out alive, even when some of them are trying to attack the survivors. Nick and Max also only have one very underwhelming possible death each, which is a shame considering how much they affect the story.
click to enlarge + 3Keep the map, and a way to explain the premonitions
The map in The Quarry was a surprisingly useful feature that many players have overlooked. It has very little influence over the story itself, or even which decisions characters should make. That being said, it was a great tool that could be used to check where all of the characters were at any given point.
This was a very subtle way to remind you of what exactly was going on in the story, without breaking the immersion by simply telling you. For example, if you check the map and see that Emma and Jacob are at the lake, then you remember the scene beforehand where you played as Jacob while you explored the boathouse. This was especially great when you’d return to the game after taking a break, and needed a quick catch-up of the events that happened the last time you played.
This wasn’t the only way that Supermassive put the effort into not breaking the immersion. In The Dark Pictures Anthology, you would touch a weirdly out-of-place item in a scene in order to gain a premonition. This was a very gamified way of implementing this feature, that they finally got right in The Quarry. You could find tarot cards and take them to a lady in between chapters. She would then read them in order to tell you your fate. It was a small change that made a big difference when you played it.
The game modes
If The Quarry excels at anything, then it’s the way that the developers handled the accessibility options. Almost everything is customisable, from disabling QTEs to being able to watch the story as a Movie Night - and picking what kind of outcome you’d want to see from the story!
The Quarry also has a couch co-op mode, where you can pass the controller to up to seven different people to control their own characters. That’s not all though, as the accessibility options can be tailored for each of the individual players. This means that one player can alter how much help they have, without it altering the gameplay of anyone else.
Accessibility options are becoming more mainstream, which is always a really positive thing to see. Hopefully, these are something we see continued in The Quarry 2, as these interactive stories are the perfect style of game for people who don’t want a high-input action experience.
click to enlarge + 3But also, the game modes
However, The Quarry did have one major downgrade when compared to The Dark Pictures Anthology games. They have one particular game mode called Shared Story, which allows players to control multiple characters in the same scene. This helps to keep the story a little more interactive when playing with friends, as you’re not simply waiting until it’s your turn again. It makes it a little bit more of a cohesive co-op experience, which could benefit The Quarry 2 greatly when it’s released.
The online multiplayer in The Quarry was also criticised as soon as it was released in an update. The controversial Wolfpack Mode lets you make a lobby for up to seven friends to watch the playthrough as it happens. They can vote on decisions, but only the host can actually move the character around and interact with the world. This is a great shame considering how well implemented the offline couch co-op was.
It would be great to see a better multiplayer experience created for The Quarry 2. For many fans who have enjoyed playing the rest of the games with their friends, this was a great disappointment that seems pretty straightforward for the studio to fix.
That's it for our look at The Quarry 2! For more hubs on potential game releases, check out our Max Payne 4 hub and Genshin Impact 2 hub.
For more articles like this, take a look at our Hubs and The Quarry page.