Here’s Why The Quarry Isn’t a Dark Pictures Anthology Game [IGN]

While these are all interactive horror games led by player choice, The Quarry director Will Byles said there are specific qualities that differentiate Dark Pictures games from Supermassive’s other releases.

“Dark Pictures is obviously an anthology and has gone down a shared story route and a shorter format with a higher cadence,” he explained. This means Supermassive has a lot more freedom and can pull from a wide range of genres: “It’s a lovely smorgasbord of horror”, Byles added.

This has certainly been the case so far. The first Dark Pictures game, Man of Medan, is about a group of friends searching for a mysterious shipwreck. It’s followed by Little Hope where a college bus gets trapped in a spooky town, and House of Ashes features an ancient temple full of vampires.

The Quarry, however, like Until Dawn, is a lengthy teen slasher turned creature feature that Byles said adheres to more traditional horror tropes. “For this teen horror, it’s not a set profile but there’s a certain expectation” he said.

“It’s a lot lighter. It’s got a lot of that weird self-referential thing like Scream where we all know the rules, and the rules are ‘don’t open the door’, or ‘when there’s a trap door with a noise behind it, leave it alone’.”

It seems that Supermassive will follow this format of releasing an occasional non-Dark Pictures game amid the anthology going forward, as it’s already announced the “season one finale” of the Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil in Me.

This comes on top of the other six Dark Pictures games trademarked, though there’s no guarantee that these will all be turned into full games.

IGN has given The Dark Pictures Anthology mixed reviews so far. We said Man of Medan was “good”, and “offers an unnerving horror adventure” with consequences directly linked to the player’s actions. Little Hope was “mediocre”, with “uninspired characters and relatively meaningless consequences,” but we thought House of Ashes was “great”, and the studio’s best since Until Dawn was released in 2015.

The Quarry will launch on June 10 for PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox Series and One, and PC via Steam, and you can find out everything we know about it here.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer who occasionally remembers to tweet @thelastdinsdale.