The Quarry is already regarded one of the best horror games of 2022, the developer of the title, SuperMassive Games is showing no intent to slow down. Since the launch of 2015’s Until Dawn, the output from the developer has been immense. 2016 saw the launch of Until Dawn: Rush Of Blood and Tumble VR for PSVR, Hidden Agenda for PS4’s Playlink in 2017, and The Inpatient, Bravo Team, and Shattered State in 2018. Since that point, the developer has been locked into an agreement with Bandai-Namco which has led to the release of three games (so far) in The Dark Pictures Anthology, 2019’s Man Of Medan, 2020’s Little Hope, and 2021’s House of Ashes. In 2022 the developer put out the aforementioned The Quarry for 2K, and is working on another entry in the Dark Pictures Anthology, The Devil In Me, coming November 18, 2022 (and there are more on the way). Now, with The Quarry fresh in the rear-vision mirror, it is Until Dawn and The Quarry‘s director that has begun to discuss what is next.
In an interview with Video Games Chronicle, the studio’s director Will Byles confirmed his intent to continue to create larger scale narrative adventures within the same genre. Speaking about the length of the games and the opportunity that the longer duration creates, Byles said “I do like the luxury of being able to really explore characters and you get that with a longer story… It annoys some people, because they get bored with it, but I really like the fact you can go in-depth with the characters and explore relationships in a way that’s harder on a shorter story.”
In terms of the size of the next game, Byles spoke about that too, albeit without touching on anything that might be considered spoilerish, “We’ve started working on [the next game], I can’t really tell you very much at all about it, but we have started. Again, it’s the same sort of horror genre, we’re sticking to that. It’s equivalent in size to The Quarry… and that’s about as much as I can say without giving too much away.” He does recognise that there may only be so much that the studio can do with the teen horror schtick though, “Potentially we might be a little bit like… I don’t know how far we can stretch the teen horror thing out further, because especially when we try to stir it up, the number of surprises you can add to that becomes limited. The Dark Pictures explores hundreds of variants of the horror genre. What we’re looking at now, and I can’t tell you exactly what it is, is a bit of a diversion away from that sort of standard, but it’s still very much classic horror.”
An interesting element in the mix for SuperMassive is their recent acquisition. Having world closely with PlayStation over many years, and then with Bandai-Namco on The Dark Pictures Anthology, and now with 2K on The Quarry, the pot is further stirred up by their acquisition by Nordisk. What this means for the future of their games remains unclear.