’The Quarry’ and ’Evil Dead: The Game’ Lure You Into a Scary Movie

The Quarry, the latest release from horror game studio Supermassive Games, opens with a truck driving along a winding forest road in the dead of night. Between overhead shots of the vehicle’s headlights cutting through its inky surroundings, the camera cuts to speed along the edge of the woods, fast and low to the ground, from the perspective of some presumably supernatural hunter.

This shot replicates the famous “shaky cam” effect employed in Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead films, mimicking the point of view of the movie’s demon as it scans the woodlands for victims to terrorize and possess. Later in The Quarry, a character’s hand will be severed above the wrist with a chainsaw that has “Groovy” written on one edge. Horrible secrets lie beneath creaky wooden trapdoors. Ted Raimi shows up as a character. Supermassive is pretty clearly a fan of Raimi’s work.

In a timely coincidence, Evil Dead: The Game—a release that, as its name implies, provides the latest Kandarian dagger stab at a playable version of the movies—was launched less than a month before The Quarry. These two games may proudly wear their love of late-1970s to mid-1990s horror (and Evil Dead specifically) on their bloodstained sleeves, but their paths toward making the genre playable represent different approaches in games’ long-running attempts to translate cinematic scares to another medium.

The Quarry doesn’t hide that it aims to turn the feeling of watching a late 20th century horror movie into an interactive experience. From its premise—a group of camp counselors desperately trying to survive the seemingly unstoppable threat hunting them in the woods—to its explosions of gore, VHS-inspired user interface, and winking, drive-in movie tone, it’s obvious that the game wants to capture the spirit of a schlock slasher. (It even boasts a “movie mode” that strips most of the player’s input away so they can concentrate on watching everything play out without needing to push too many buttons.)

This is accomplished mostly by injecting choose-your-own-adventure decision points into a CGI genre movie. Players spend a lot of The Quarry watching the hapless counselors navigate their increasingly bloody predicament. They also occasionally move the characters around rooms where they can pick up and discover clues, or, more frequently, push timed button prompts to avoid injury or tilt a stick left or right to choose between, say, running or hiding from a threat when the option appears. The route toward the game’s conclusion may differ greatly depending on how players make decisions (or how quickly they can respond to flashing onscreen icons), but the scenes that lead to The Quarry’s end have been constructed with intent.

Evil Dead: The Game, on the other hand, ignores the careful choreographies of scripted plotting, opting instead for the structured chaos of a multiplayer experience that casts online players as either one of four “survivor” characters or the demon out to swallow their souls. Though players work toward a predetermined goal of collecting the necessary items to vanquish evil, or, alternately, killing every human before they can reach that objective, Evil Dead takes place within a set of loose design guidelines that allow the experience to spiral off into results far less directed than those found in The Quarry. A series of bungled combat encounters with homicidal Deadites, with the player controlling the demon possessing each survivor in turn as the gauge measuring their fear tops out, may turn into a kind of blood-soaked slapstick. A coordinated group that manages to overcome their opponents in the nick of time, emerging battered and just barely alive onto the victory screen, captures the feeling of watching the few surviving characters in a slasher movie stumble into the morning light to realize they’ve made it through their nightmare intact.