The Quarry Review

It seats eight people on one controller. The online mode does not let them play.

Short verdict: if you have a room of people and one pad between them, The Quarry is the best purchase on this site for that exact night - eight players, one copy, an official mode that hands each person a character and tells you when to pass the controller. If your group is spread across different houses, read the Wolf Pack section below before you buy anything, because the online mode is a voting feature, not multiplayer, and every person you invite still needs their own copy of the game.

The Quarry is Supermassive Games' 2022 teen-slasher, published by 2K, and PlayStation lists its release as June 10, 2022. You play nine camp counselors on the last night of summer camp at Hackett's Quarry, and, as Steam's own description puts it, "any character can be the star of the show - or die before daylight comes". The cast is film and television actors rather than game voice talent - David Arquette, Ariel Winter, Brenda Song, Justice Smith, Halston Sage, Lance Henriksen, Lin Shaye and Ted Raimi among them - and that matters more than it sounds, because the whole pitch is that a group watches this the way it would watch a horror film, with one person's hands on the controller at a time.

Game director Will Byles told SegmentNext that "depending on the player, a single playthrough of The Quarry can take about ten hours". That is one evening for a committed group, or two shorter ones - not a campaign you commit a season to.

The couch co-op, in specifics

This is the reason the game is on this site at all, and 2K's own FAQ is unusually plain about it: you play "with up to seven other companions in local couch co-op with each player controlling a counselor's actions". That is eight people total. Xbox's store listing states the same ceiling from the other direction - "Xbox local co-op (2-8)" - and PlayStation lists the game as "1 - 8 players".

Mechanically it works like a reading assignment. Before the story starts, each person in the room claims one or more of the nine counselors. When a scene belongs to your character, the controller comes to you, and every decision that character makes - including the ones that get someone killed - is yours. The game prompts the handover, so nobody has to referee it. That structure is the difference between this and the dozens of "play it together" recommendations that are really just a single-player game with an audience, which is the trap our pass and play PS5 games page exists to call out.

One copy covers the whole room. Nobody needs a second controller, nobody needs a second account, and nobody needs a subscription - it is all offline. For eight people that makes it, per head, one of the cheapest things you can put on a television, which is why it sits on our one copy, two playerslist alongside the Friend's Pass games.

Wolf Pack online, in specifics - read this part twice

The Quarry has an online mode called Wolf Pack, and it is the single most misunderstood thing about the game. 2K describes it as "an invite-only mode where the host can invite up to seven friends with access to the game to vote on key decisions to create a story shaped by the whole group". Steam says the same thing in plainer words: "invited players watch along and vote on key decisions".

So: the host plays. Everyone else watches a stream of the host's game and votes on branch points, and the host can either follow the vote or overrule it. Nobody else gets a character, nobody else moves anything. If your group's idea of a co-op night is eight people actually controlling something, Wolf Pack is not that, and a page telling you otherwise has not read the store listing.

Two more restrictions decide whether it is even available to you. 2K states the mode is "only available on the same generation and platform", so there is no crossplay here at all - a PS5 host cannot invite an Xbox friend, and a PS5 host cannot invite a PS4 friend either. And on PlayStation, the store page is explicit that "PS Plus [is] required for online play", so the host is paying a subscription on top of the game. Our games without crossplay page covers how often this catches groups out.

Three costs nobody puts on the box

Every online participant needs the game.2K's wording is "seven friends with access to the game". This is the opposite of the Friend's Pass model used by It Takes Two and Split Fiction, where one purchase covers two players. A full eight-person Wolf Pack session means eight copies bought, to give seven of those people a vote. On the couch, one copy. Online, eight. That gap is the whole buying decision for a long-distance group.

It is rated Mature, and the descriptors are not decorative.Xbox lists the game as "MATURE 17+" with "Blood and Gore, Mild Sexual Themes, Strong Language, Intense Violence". This is a slasher with practical-effects-style gore and jump scares. It is the wrong pick for a family room, and if that is the room you are buying for, games to play with family is the page you want instead.

Somebody is going to sit out. With eight players and nine counselors, an individual character can be offscreen for a long stretch while another thread of the story runs. That is a property of the writing, not a bug, and it is why we would seat five or six people rather than the full eight if you have the choice. A group of ten is over the cap entirely - party games for large groups covers what scales past that.

How long it lasts, and what makes a second run worth it

A first playthrough is around ten hours on the director's own estimate, and it ends - this is a finished story, not a live-service commitment. Replay value comes from the branching: Byles also said the game "is designed to be highly replayable, as we think many will want to go down alternate paths and make different choices". In practice a group replays to save the counselor it lost, which is a much stronger hook than it sounds at 1am.

Two features change the shape of a session and are worth knowing before the night starts. Death Rewind, once unlocked, gives three opportunities per playthrough to reverse a playable character's death - agree in advance whether the room is allowed to use them, because a group that rewinds every mistake is watching a film, not playing a game. And Movie Mode lets you set the story running and watch it play out, which Steam pitches for when "you prefer to watch rather than play". Movie Mode is the reason this works as the second half of a game night when half the room has stopped participating.

What we cannot tell you

We do not run a lab and we have not sat eight people down with a stopwatch - our methodology pagesays so plainly. Everything above is taken from 2K's official FAQ, the PlayStation and Xbox store listings, the Steam page and an on-record interview with the game's director, and it is all checkable in a couple of clicks. What we will not do is invent a play session we did not have.

One thing that is worth checking yourself before you buy: the Steam listing carries the "Shared/Split Screen Co-op" tag but not Remote Play Together, so you cannot stream the couch mode to a friend's machine the way you can with some other local-only games. On PC the couch mode means an actual couch.

Buy it, or buy one of these instead

Buy The Quarry if the room is between four and eight people, everyone is an adult, and you want one purchase to carry an entire evening. Nothing else on this site seats eight on a single controller with an official mode built for it. On PC in particular it is frequently discounted far below its console list price, so check the Steam page as well as the buy button above - the price you see there is often the real answer.

Buy Directive 8020 insteadif your group has already played this one and wants the newest version of the same idea. It is Supermassive's 2026 sci-fi horror, PlayStation lists it as a 1-5 player game, and it runs the same Movie Night pass-the-pad structure aboard a starship. It is the most expensive option here, the disc often lists above the digital edition, and five is a hard cap - so it is a downgrade on capacity and a premium on price, bought for freshness.

Buy The Dark Pictures: House of Ashes insteadif the budget is the constraint and the group is five or fewer. The Dark Pictures site describes Movie Night as an offline mode "for 2-5 players who share the couch together", and there are four games in that anthology running the same structure, so a group that likes the format has somewhere to go next. Buying note: Amazon's US listing for it is unavailable, so buy it from the console store rather than hunting a disc.

Buy Dead by Daylight instead if what you actually wanted was horror where everyone plays at once and the group is not in one room. Four survivors, one player-controlled killer, full crossplay across every platform - the exact thing Wolf Pack is not. It is the top pick on our online horror games page for that reason.

Buy The Jackbox Party Pack instead if you are not confident the whole room wants a slasher. Only the host buys it, everyone else joins from a phone browser with a room code, and it works over a screen share - so it covers both the in-person group and the remote one, which is something The Quarry genuinely cannot do.

Where this sits on the site

The Quarry is the number one pick on pass and play PS5 games and appears on gaming gifts under $25, where it is usually the most game per dollar on the list. For the wider category start at party games or party games for adults; if the group wants to be scared together from different houses, horror games to play online is the right page; and if the real problem is that only one person has a controller, the second controller guide is a cheaper fix than a new game.