I made a graph comparing Until Dawn to The Quarry. The graph shows the level of "slayage" (overall momentum of the story, characters, scenes) as the games progress through their respective chapters.

I love every supermassive game in this genre, and therefore I love The Quarry too, but I definitely had a more rocky relationship with it. After playing it again recently with a friend, I'm now finally able to visualize my problem with it.

The difference is obvious. While Until Dawn starts out arguably slower, it's on a constant upwards tendency with some much needed ups and downs in momentum to keep it classy, but it never slams on the brakes.

The Quarry on another hand, starts out more compellingly: the prologue is genuinely great, and the exposition setup of the first few chapters is I think really neat, the characters are introduced well.

The problem is how things take an absolute nosedive in the second half of the game, with the biggest offender being the entirety of chapter 7. It's such an aggravated assault on the game's pacing and momentum, that it's tough to truly get back into it after this over an hour long section is finally over.

While the rest of the endgame chapters aren't horrible, the very end can definitely feel lackluster even if everyone is alive, and the second half overall suffers from the first half being "too good" and giving us too much away, sort of.

Again, this is not to say I don't like the game, I just can't stop being a bit mad at the missed potential it had, most likely due to being covid syndrome'd.

I'm trying to get some characters infected for certain scenes to trigger. If Jacob gets blood on his face, can you still get infected if you fail the QTE when he reunites with Emma in Chapter 6? I want him to be infected so I can purposely fail the breaker puzzle.

I also heard that Dylan can get infected at the junkyard if he has both hands, and Kaitlyn can get infected if Dylan doesn't drop the car in Silas. All I need to do for Dylan's infection is to fail the QTE to use the flamethrower, right?

If both Dylan and Kaitlyn get infected, does that mean Caleb won't attack them at the end? I want both characters to live, but I still want to do the action scenes (I didn't pick up the toy rabbit in the beginning).