Games Like The Quarry

I finished The Quarry on a humid June night with the air conditioner buzzing and a thunderstorm pressing on the horizon, and when the credits rolled I thought about Friday the 13th for the first time in maybe a decade. Not the movie. The summer camp the movie was set at. The camp my parents almost sent me to in 1995.

The Quarry’s whole pitch is that it’s a slasher set at a summer camp, and the genre baggage that brings is enormous. The slasher in American horror cinema is summer-camp-shaped. From Friday the 13th in 1980 forward, the formula has been: counselors, woods, a kill we earn for fifteen minutes of horniness, a final girl who survives because she pays attention. The Quarry honors that formula and bends it. The result is the most explicitly slasher-shaped cinematic horror game we’ve gotten.

If you finished The Quarry and you’re looking for the next thing — slasher-shaped, choice-driven, ideally summer-set — here’s where I’d go.

Until Dawn

Same studio, same DNA, mountain cabin instead of summer camp. Until Dawn is the slasher genre filtered through winter and isolation instead of summer and supervision. The Quarry is what Supermassive made with five more years of craft and a bigger production budget. Until Dawn is what they made when they were figuring out the genre. Both are essential.

If you only played The Quarry, Until Dawn will feel slower and a little more confident. The cast has more time to become people before the killer cuts the count.

Friday the 13th: The Game

Asymmetric multiplayer. Seven counselors versus one Jason. The game’s officially delisted now because of legal issues with the franchise, but you can still play it if you owned it. The genre commitment is total — the camp feels right, the running-through-cabins-with-bare-feet feels right. It’s a different kind of game than The Quarry (mechanical, not narrative) but it’s the closest thing to actually being inside a slasher.

If you can get it, it’s worth knowing the form.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (the asymmetric multiplayer one)

Sumo Nottingham, 2023. Same asymmetric formula — survivors versus the Slaughter family, three of them, including Leatherface. The game is meaner than Friday the 13th: The Game ever was. The family doesn’t have to play fair. The survivors don’t get a respawn. It’s the closest thing to actually being in the movie, and it’s the rare licensed horror game that respects the source material as much as it wants you to buy the cosmetic skins.

Dead by Daylight

I know, I know. But if you’re coming from The Quarry and you want the slasher fantasy from the killer side, Dead by Daylight is the thing. Eight years of content. Every horror IP they could license. The Casting of Frank Stone (also Supermassive) is set in this universe.

Play it for forty hours. Quit before you hit two hundred. That’s the law.

House of Ashes

Dark Pictures Anthology. Iraq War setting. Not a slasher by any common reading, but the cave geography does slasher work — you’re hunted, you can’t see far, the dark is bigger than your flashlight. If The Quarry’s third act was your favorite (the part where the cabin gets locked down and the QTEs get teeth), House of Ashes is what you want next.

Camp Mars

An indie I keep recommending and nobody plays. Tiny, weird, summer-camp-set, and meaner than its production values should let it be. About eight hours. Some janky controls. The setting goes places I won’t spoil. If you finished The Quarry and want something rough and indie that’s still recognizably in the lineage, this is the one.

The Casting of Frank Stone

Same Supermassive team, tighter format, Dead by Daylight universe but standalone. Six hours, dual timeline (1980 and present day), choices that bleed across. The 1980 sections in particular hit a slasher register that The Quarry was aiming at. If you bounced off The Devil in Me’s pacing, Frank Stone is the corrective.

As Dusk Falls

Different style but the closest thing to The Quarry’s “watch with friends” social mode. Up to eight players choosing together on couch or remote. Two families, decades apart. Not a slasher exactly, but the structural DNA is The Quarry’s — choices that span generations, characters who can die.

What’s in the lineage

What The Quarry is doing that nobody else is doing well: it’s the only modern game that treats the summer-camp slasher as a respectable genre worth honoring. The Friday the 13th franchise is in legal limbo. The Halloween franchise is being squeezed for sequels nobody wants. The slasher as a cinematic form has been folded into elevated horror or trauma horror, neither of which has the same teeth as a kid in a hockey mask cutting through a counselor cabin.

The Quarry remembers what the genre was for. The genre was for being scared together with a friend at 1am with the windows open.

Where I’m headed

I’m a solo developer working on The Bone Game, a cinematic horror game in this lineage. Six teenagers, a Friday night, a story told from a treehouse. Not a slasher exactly — more a frame narrative — but the same blood in the structure. The treehouse plays the role of the cabin. The teenagers play the role of teenagers, because that’s still what works.

If anything I wrote here resonated, you can put The Bone Game on your wishlist. The next post in this comparison ladder is Games Similar to Until Dawn if you want to keep going.