The Quarry’s Hackett Family are the star attraction

If QuarryOnce the game begins, the player finds themselves locked in their quest by the horrible decisions made by an entire group of teenage hormone-using teens. Hackett’s Quarry is the site of a summer camp, and the young Hacketteers have all packed up and gone home. Now, it’s night, and the counselors are stranded in the quarry along with gore-soaked monsters, ominous hunters, and mysterious dead bodies. It’s a great formula for a campy horror story full of chills and thrills. But the real draw isn’t the teen counselors — it’s the much more interesting adult cast.

Warning: Warning! Quarry.

QuarryIt all starts with some very stupid decisions. It’s quite similar to watching a protagonist slowly descend into the dark basement in a horror movie; you Know it’s a bad call, but you can’t StopNone of it. Jacob, an insecure counselor at camp, makes plans to stop them from leaving in an effort to have an extra night without any adult supervision and to try to romance a girl. Things quickly turn horribly sour.

You control the teens while they make an epic bonfire, endure a few attacks and plan for escape from the quarry. But there’s more to the foreboding monster attacks than it first appears. The Hacketts are the core of the story, it turns out. And these characters — brothers Chris (David Arquette) and Travis (Ted Raimi) and the family’s matriarch Constance (Lin Shaye) and patriarch Jedediah (Lance Henriksen) — are the best part of the game.

Image from Supermassive Games/2K Games

Hackett’s Quarry, you see, is cursed. The family is hiding a big werewolf problem, and the Hacketts don’t particularly want anyone else to get hurt. The summer camp isn’t a trick or trap; it was established as a legitimate endeavor, and leader Chris Hackett is horrified when he realizes that the kids will be staying for an extra night during the full moon. The teen counselors have no idea what’s going on — they’re more interested in their love interests and personal drama.

Travis Hackett (the local sheriff) has been interfering with camp and operations. Travis unlawfully jailed Max and Laura, two of their counselors who showed up at camp early to discover the secret. As the teens begin to unravel the quarry’s secrets, it seems like the Hacketts are the game’s antagonists, and they kind of are — they’ve definitely made a lot of bad choices!

But in their own way, they’re just the victims of bad choices made by stupid kids years ago. Chris’ two kids were the first werewolves infected, and it’s since spread throughout the family, who are determined, in turn, to protect them from the outside world and anyone who would hurt them.

Image from Supermassive Games/2K Games

There are seven main counselors for players to control, and much of the game’s early groundwork is dedicated to building them up. But as someone who’s 31 and pays taxes, I was much more invested in the adult cast. Even though they are cursed, there are little scenes that make them humane. There are complex family dynamics at play, the type that can only really develop when you have responsibilities and duties more pressing than “updating Instagram” and “getting into college.”

You can choose to make different choices about the fate of the Hacketts depending on your choice. There’s no clean ending where they make it out happy with no consequences; this is a family that has kept their skeletons well hidden, and when they finally come tumbling out of the closet, there’s no clean resolution.

Ted Raimi plays Travis Hackett with a vengeance. He’s the first Hackett who really shows up to play a sizable role in the story; while Chris Hackett is familiar with the teens, he’s mysterious to the player. Travis, on the other hand, is in the game’s intro and reappears as soon as the horror really gets started. His authority is that of a cop, but he has a lot more. Too much comfort, and he’s grown casually cruel as his family’s curse wears on him.

If you were turned off by early scenes of teens gossiping and wanting to kiss, Quarry, it’s worth returning for the game’s grown-up cast. They’re much less flippant, and their compelling performances are what really drew me into the mysteries of Hackett’s Quarry.