After waiting a month Post-Launch for the multiplayer to come live before many people have started playing, it appears to be a case of bait-n-switch tactics and misleading advertising. With the precedent of the 3 current Dark Pictures games under this studio's belt and promises of being able to 'share the horror with your friends' in similar fashion, it stands to reason that the expectation would be for this one to follow suit and provide the same experience, no?

Apparently the co-op mode that we've all been waiting for is some dumb Twitch-play style affair in which you invite people (Who also require the complete full priced game, no less) to merely *watch* you play solo, at which point they can 'vote' on decisions or perhaps provide commentary..

The devs had all the time in the world to clarify and make clear what this was and what it wasn't, yet they chose to remain tight lipped until well beyond the point of Steam's two-week refund window.
Class act.

Kind of jaded at the moment of being lied to, maybe I'll change this knee-jerk review after actually playing it after I've already wasted a needless month waiting.
Maybe not.

We'll see.

I did enjoy parts of this game, but ultimately, the Quarry fails to be a good choose your own adventure game and fails to tell a compelling story.

-As a choose your own adventure game, it really isn't worth it. 97% of the decisions you make are worthless and do not change anything, even if it gives the illusion that your choice here will matter. Your choices don't really matter until chapter 6 out of 10, and some of the choices that do matter are are shallow decisions. Ultimately, the biggest problem is that the choices don't actually change the story. On an extremely rare occasion, a choice may affect whether a person lives or dies, but your choice will never change who goes where and what the group decides to do as a whole. You will always go to the cabin, you will always decide to have a bonfire rather than stay inside, you will always lose the rotar arm, one major character will always be infected, the car will never be fixed despite the efforts of the group, the radio signal will always be a waste of time, the same people always group up to do the same overarching objectives.

-You would think that because the game fails to be a good choose your own adventure game, it would at least be a good story. In some respects, it is a fun B movie teen horror flick. Some of the licensed music picks are nice and give the game a cinematic feel. And some of the situations are genuinely funny or entertaining. However, the most interesting characters, the prologue characters, are sidelined for 80% of the game, and you are stuck with extremely obnoxious teens. That does fit the teen horror stereotypes, and some of the characters do get partial arcs, but some important characters just do not get an arc and are completely forgotten about. Which brings me to the worst thing about Supermassive games, the endings. No matter what you do, a lot of the characters will not have a fulfilling or satisfying ending, live or die. If a character dies, people immediately forget about it and joke around. If a character dies, it isn't because the characters failed to overcome a character flaw that would make them satisfying, its because you chose to go left rather than right. If a character lives, they don't overcome some character flaw to do it. One character decides to just sit in the forest and cry until morning rather than redeem himself for causing the whole ordeal and helping the others, and there is no choice to change that. One character decides to just stay in a room while others fight the monster as their ending regardless of the choice. The love interests aren't shown to reconcile or separate. One character can kill their love interest as a monster, but they aren't shown to grapple with what they did in the ending or epilogue. The epilogue just gives worded descriptions that each character survived or failed to survive the night. What happened to the guilty parties? You get a PNG of a front page newspaper in the credits saying whether they were arrested or not. And the evidence you were collecting all game to prevent you from being arrested at the end, the only thing it changes is the PNG at the end and allows annoying podcastors to talk about it over the credit sequence. None of this is satisfying in any respect.

-Also I want to note that a lot of the dialogue is bizarre, on top of being cringe, and does not really line up logically. A lot of the lines don't really feel well acted either.

Ultimately, Supermassive has refused to fix the flaws in their previous games, and seem content to put out the same stuff. The game fails to be a good choose your own adventure or tell a fulfilling story. This may be a fun enough game as a popcorn flick on sale, but it definitely is not worth full price.

Since the launchers were removed from 2K products towards the end of 2024, this has of course had a significant impact on the connections made by each product, making the review itself essentially obsolete.

Those interested can still read the original in the Archive of the Penguin Domination.

Various services such as Sentry, graphics, UTM trackers, and unnecessary server callbacks from the Launcher-Google Chrome Engine or Microsoft have been removed since then.

All in all, it has improved for consumers.

What remains are the "core" connections: one for presenting the in-game EULA, another for account linking and a third for telemetry. The rest runs through Valve's Datagram Relay (SDR). Backend is Amazon AWS EC2.

2K

2K is a label of the publisher Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc.

Supermassive Games - 1 Farnham Road, Guildford, Surrey, UK
Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. - 110 W 44th St, New York, NY, USA
2K - 10 Hamilton Landing, Novato, CA 94949, USA
Amazon.com, Inc. - 410 Terry Ave N Seattle, WA, 98109-5210 USA

2K Services
Discovery (Service Initialization)

Single Sign-On (SSO) Service and Telemetry: ServiceID, service name, BaseURL, tags describing the service, schema, hostname, context path

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3152112510

Telemetry
EventID, player progress, SessionInstanceID, SaveID, GameplayMode (Singleplayer), PlayerType (ActivePlayer), number of players, NodeID and NodeActivity representing player actions, for example, NodeActivity (Choice) where the player selects answer A (NodeOutcome: ChoiceA) or for a reached checkpoint. When items are collected, they are categorized under CollectableType (Clue), CollectableName (Clue_BloodiedCollar), CollectablePreviouslyUnlocked (false). If players reach the end of the prologue and are in the movie sequence, this is listed under NodeActivity (NewChapter), NodeOutcome (PrologueTarot), etc.

This should suffice as examples. Essentially, all player data can be conveniently captured.

Single Sign-On (SSO) Service
Login function for linking an account with 2K includes your e-mail and password. Although the transmission is done via HTTPS, the login data (email and password e.g. ) is neither additionally encrypted nor encoded. This means that while HTTPS secures the transmission channel. The sensitive data itself is not protected beyond that layer.

Aside from this function, a regular heartbeat callback is sent approximately every 30 seconds.

Available on the shop page at The Quarry EULA

Depending on individual needs, all or only specific connections can be blocked. Co-op functionality uses Valve Corporation’s mentioned SDR service and runs via direct IP connections. It is not required for single-player mode, even though the service is active from the start.

2K’s own services are essentially limited to telemetry and login. If no account linking is performed, they can be fully blocked without affecting gameplay.

For additional details such as a connection overview for blocking connections and involved IPv4 addresses, company details, and a German version of the review, can be found as usual at https://gameindustry.eu/. If interested, join the Penguin Domination group to ensure you don't miss any reviews on Steam.

Let me make one thing clear right from the beginning: I absolutely love this game. It has great graphics and although the story is kind of stupid, I loved every second of it. But I cannot, with good conscience, recommend you to buy this game. Here's why:

1. The game is incredibly short. It only takes around an hour to finish each chapter when you are looking to find all collectibles, give or take. That means it only takes about 10 hours to finish the game with (almost, but we'll get to that later) all collectibles.

2. This game has horrible sound sync issues that need manual fixing by the player, and even that doesn't 100% work. It's incredibly distracting and annoying to hear the same line repeated five times before the game has even gotten to that part.

3. You cannot replay episodes individually, even after you have completed the game. The only option this game offers you is to replay your game starting with your chosen episode. Meaning that you can choose to replay Chapter 8, but it overwrites your previous file and you'll have to play Chapter 9 and Chapter 10 again, too. This is especially inconvenient when you are looking to find all collectibles--thanks to the fact that in Chapter 2, you lock yourself out of either two clues or one tarot card, depending on which path you choose to go with Abi, you cannot complete the game with both all clues and all tarot cards.

4. You cannot skip or speed up cutscenes. Even if you have completed the game before, you have to sit and rewatch every single cutscene and every single piece of dialogue. This makes the above problem even worse in my opinion and actively discourages the player from trying to collect all clues, evidence and tarot cards if you don't have another ten hours to spare.

This game is incredibly overpriced for the content it gives you. If you do want to try this game out, wait until there is a sale, otherwise I don't recommend buying it.

I loved this game but it has a few major issues:
1. a lot of characters mainly Nick and Max get sidelined pretty hard. Max only has 1 playable segment as far as I'm aware and Nick is practically written out of the game in the second half :/
2. and this is a massive one: the ending, or lack of. There is no conclusion really, no reunion between the survivors, no conclusion to the friendships and romances that the game has been building up which are made pointless by the fact that the game just ends. The "ending" was so abrupt and just left me feeling hollow and dissatisfied, I honestly couldn't believe there was no closure I really just sat there for a while wondering what kind of ending that was. This is the main thing I think is holding the game back and I really wish they could patch in a proper ending although I know it's probably a huge ask. As much as I enjoyed the game, I really can't recommend it because of this

The game itself is fine, more or less the same level as most Supermassive games. However, it suffers from severe performance issues. Some of the issues can be fixed by removing the useless 2K launcher but if you talk about that in discussions mods remove your threads/comments.

EDIT: The launcher has been officially removed but I'm still going to leave this review unchanged as a reminder to 2Ks crappy behaviour. Also, the game still runs quite poorly even after removal of Denuvo and the launcher.

I think more people should refuse to play or download 2k games purely based on their privacy policy. A game should not request this much information from their players.

The type of information we collect depends on how you use the Services. Generally, we collect the following information:

* Identifiers / Contact Information: Name, user name, gamertag, postal and email address, phone number, unique IDs, mobile device ID, platform ID, gaming service ID, advertising ID (IDFA, Android ID) and IP address

This snippet was pulled from https://accounts.2k.com/en-US/legal/privacy and I recommend more people take a look. All of my playtime was reading the policies. The game might actually be fun but it asks players for too much information.

The Quarry, was pretty ♥♥♥♥.

Pros.
Great Graphics
Hilarious Moments and Characters
Great Voice Acting compared to previous supermassive titles
Great cast of character personalities
Great opening
Max is the best
Strong Story until chapter 7

Cons.
Horrible story ending, the first 7 chapters were amazing then nose dived so hard
Poor and Easy Gameplay
Small moments of freezing and audio issues
Choices not mattering, (there is literally one ending and a few switches if characters lived or died)
Characters being bland and not changing at all
The water graphics were bad lol
Weak monsters and villains, we saw coming a mile away
Lots of tropes and copied elements of until dawn
Tried to fit in too many plots. (hacket family, camp history, monster history, freakshow history)
Characters that you cant save.
Characters not reacting correctly to events ex. hand being cut off, "yo what happened to your hand?" "oh nuffin."
One specific relationship that is thrown to the side and forgotten about.
CHARACTERS LITERALLY NOT IMPORTANT TO THE STORY AND DOING NOTHING, CHARACTERS THAT JUST SIT AROUND.

Overall I'd say, get the game on sale, like a biiiiig sale. No way is it worth 60 bucks.

*Get's the option to shout at the bushes*
*Selects don't do it*
*SHOUTS AT BUSHES 5 SECONDS LATER*
Story driven based on decisions my ass...

Pros:
- Characters are well written; some characters you will love, others you will hate. Either way, you won't really feel "on the fence" about any of them.
- Plenty of options on how to play; whether you want to have complete control (making every decision, being fully responsible for QTEs), partial control (making decisions but having QTEs automatically succeed), or no control (movie mode where you make no decisions whatsoever).
- Captivating buildup; keeps you guessing what may be important later, and wondering what exactly is hunting you and when it could strike.
- Keeps you thinking; sometimes it's best to wait the event timer out. Taking action isn't always the best option. It's good that this game capitalises on this, it gives you more to think about, in turn making each decision more difficult.

Cons:
- Short story; considering you're paying £55, 10 hours of content is not even close to being worth it. Even if this game was polished.
- Rushed, disappointing ending; the initially very captivating story is ruined by the rushed ending. I can't really say much without spoiling it, but I can confidently guarantee you will be left saying "that was it?"
- Fairly linear story; your choices only determine who lives or dies, or what state a character ends up in. The ending remains the same. Again, I can't say much more without spoiling anything. But you will realise at the end how little impact your choices had with regards to the actual story.
- QTEs are buggy; I don't hear many people discussing this but it's important. For mouse and keyboard, I found the mouse QTEs were very 'give or take'. Sometimes they would work, other times they would say you got the QTE wrong. After googling this, thinking it was a problem on my end, it seems other people have this issue. In Chapter 10, EVERY SINGLE QTE failed. I replayed after and it continued to fail, despite me doing everything properly. This made the already disappointing ending even worse, since I didn't end it my way.
- Poor conclusion; usually these "multiple endings" games will go back and explain what happens after the story, and why it happened that way. This just explains everything we already know. For example; "Sam: Deceased. Got shot by John". That is just an example, there's no "Sam" or "John" in this game. But that's literally all you get before the credits roll.
- Collectables are worthless; Whether it's tarot cards, clues, or evidence, none have any real significance. The game makes you think the evidence is important, however the only time you ever hear about it is during the end game credits, and it literally makes no impact on the story. The tarot cards are ok for those who like riddles, however a lot of them are pretty useless and only one (in my experience) gave a significant impact on saving a character. Clues are ok, but merely help you understand the story a bit more. They have no real significance.
- Annoying controls; not much else to say. I found myself fighting the camera angles and controls more than the actual "creatures".


As much as I enjoyed the first 8 hours, due to the developer's greedy price tag, I can in no way, shape or form recommend this game. Even on sale at £25 this game isn't really worth it. I played with a friend and we both agree that it was fairly disappointing in those last couple of hours. And they didn't even spend money on it.
If money doesn't matter to you, go for it. It is fun for the first 3/4 of the story. But be prepared to be disappointed.

6/10
- A small indie developer could bring you a better result for a much cheaper price.