A gentle yelp: The Quarry

Supermassive Games’ most recent interactive horror The Quarry is a spindly spider on your arm, creeping and dainty like a ghost story. Its darkness relies on your imagination and your input. Though, if you want to up the ante and elicit some yelps from friends, you could always play the game as its welcome “gorefest” movie mode.

But in its standard form, you play a rotating member of a group of camp counselors, hurt often by their teenage hubris and misguided confidence in the dark. It is a dark game—playing it seems to spread mist across your room.

It’s moody, filled with hard choices made tougher by the fact that a decision that saves one of the characters you control might destroy another. Though bloodthirsty werewolves lurk through the entirety of The Quarry, the game is never, I think, outright scary. It is great, though, for melancholy, rainy October nights, settling into the night and shushing the voice inside you that asks…what was that sound? Outside your door, by the stairs?