Examples of Narm in The Quarry
- The animation can be unintentionally hilarious at times, whether by Special Effects Failure or Unintentional Uncanny Valley. Special mention goes to Abigail getting thrown around like a very stiff ragdoll by an infected Nick and Emma's bizarre mouth movements in the close-up shots.
- When it's time to make a dialogue option, the camera will zoom incredibly close into the character's face, sometimes leaving the player staring at an awkward, dopey smile, with Dylan being a notable offender early on.
- The picture of Chris and his kids can lead to this if you notice it's using a real image of David Arquette between digitalized characters, which a lot of players did.
- The way werewolves transform is pretty silly looking. Rather than a slow shift with them developing wolf-like traits before finally transforming, they just...explode their skin off and are werewolves underneath. This is likely an attempt to save time by not animating an actual "werewolf transformation", similar to how characters change clothes off-screen so as to cover for the fact they just replace the character model, but the speed at which the transformation happens is jarring. It's likely meant to be horrifying, but it comes off as instead darkly comedic at how absurd the transformation is.
- A number of Jacob's optional deaths are actually quite comedic. Firstly he can basically drown himself trying to retrieve a part of the van he took after dropping it in the lake, or he can die by sneaking back to the campfire through the bushes and get himself shot to death by Ryannote , while another death has him running getting his ankle stuck in a beartrap and tripping, crushing his face in another. In these cases, nobody ever even realises he's dead as they never find his body. Though every death in-game is intended as a Player Punch, Jacob's come off as darkly funny because of how trivial the deaths are, how they're completely self-induced, and how they more-or-less have nothing to do with the werewolvesnote .
- As noted above, when a character changes their appearance (such as when changing clothes), the game handles this by just swapping the character model with another, usually with a cutaway to hide the transition. This makes things like Jacob getting changed for the nighttime swim with Emma weirdly comical as it appears he completely strips off all his clothes in seconds, which given the whole story is triggered by his desperation to get with her again, it creates the mental image of him quickly tearing off his clothes to go swimming with her.
- The "Don't Breathe" event where Kaitlyn manages to hide from Bobby in the lodge by just hunching down in the corner of a stairwell he's at the top of, completely in his line of sight. Either this scene features a nasty case of Hollywood Darkness, or Bobby has really bad eyesight.
- Max's self censorship when he hurts his foot kicking his cell bars. Unlike when Emma does the same thing after hurting her foot trying to kick a door in, she's been around little kids for the last three months, so her censoring herself would be a force of habit, while Max just comes across as forced.
- Laura's "distraction" to save Ryan is too ridiculous to take seriously. With Ryan held at knifepoint, she decides to make a weird, high-pitched squeal like a dolphin. Somehow, this gives Ryan the chance to get away from his captor (after sustaining a knife wound) and slowly run to safety in a laundry chute while everyone else just stands there. If you don't spit on Constance following this scene, Laura will try to do this again for some reason, which will get her shot in the head by an annoyed Constance. At this point, it's almost impossible not to laugh.Constance: She was annoying the shit outta me.
- Constance's potential death in Chapter 9 is rather darkly comical due to how she turns off a nearby lamp to hide in the shadows, and then re-emerges to grab Laura's shotgun with the barrel pointed upwards. It predictably blows her face off should the player complete the QTE event, which is then followed by Jedidiah rushing up to her faceless corpse to perform CPR, of all things. This makes Jedidiah's Villainous Breakdown shortly afterwards a lot harder to swallow for some.
