The game takes place in Iraq in 2003, near the beginning of the US occupation shortly after Saddam Hussein was deposed. We (mostly) play as a group of US military operatives searching for WMDs. However, during a skirmish with some Iraqi soldiers in a small village, a chasm in the ground opens up, causing members from both sides to fall into the ruins of a long-forgotten Sumerian temple. The former enemies will need to learn to work together to overcome the horrors of the ruins if they want to have any hope of returning to the surface....
Like the previous games in the series, House of Ashes is a narrative horror adventure game with a co-op focus where you rotate control through a cast of five playable characters. Your choices and performance in QTEs determines how the story plays out, and it’s possible for any character to die. I’ve already gone in-depth on The Dark Pictures Anthology gameplay in my reviews for the previous entries, so if you’re new to the party you can check those for more info.
While Man of Medan and Little Hope were highly atmospheric and relied on tension and dread, House of Ashes is much more heavily focused on action, which I think is the main secret to its success. It should be pretty obvious why it’s much harder to write a plot with proper foreshadowing, development, and payoff that can function within all permutations of player choice, including any combination of character death, than a scenario that just involves getting chased by monsters for five hours. That’s not to say that House of Ashes doesn’t have atmosphere or plot, because it does, but there’s no mystery or twist. Man of Medan and Little Hope aimed higher but landed lower.
Action sequences are naturally the most exciting scenes, so putting them in the spotlight is enough to keep the game engaging. While a more cerebral plot would likely be more satisfying if done well, simply overcoming the monsters in the end is sufficient payoff. Each scene in The Dark Pictures Anthology has a timestamp showing you the character you’re controlling, the location, and the time, but House of Ashes adds a depth tracker. It’s a minor change, but watching circumstances force the cast further and further from the surface naturally ramps up tension over the course of the game without any additional complications.
While House of Ashes might be the best Dark Pictures Anthology entry, that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. You can probably guess from my plot summary at the beginning, but the “point” of House of Ashes is about people putting aside smaller interpersonal issues to work together and overcome a greater external threat, but there are two issues that hamstring this message.
The first issue is that the difference in scale between the threats is so massive that cooperation feels like a foregone conclusion. Yeah, you’ve been separated from your husband for a year and just got thrust into the same squad as him so things are a little awkward, but it’s very easy to put that on hold when you’re being swarmed by a horde of cave monsters. One of the hallmarks of the horror genre is using the external horror as a metaphor or catalyst for internal or interpersonal issues, but, as I described earlier, doing any sort of high-level writing in this sort of interactive narrative structure is hard.
Granted, if this scenario played out in real life, the “soldiers from opposing armies in an ongoing war” thing probably would be difficult to (initially) get over, but that ties into the second problem: as players, we have no stakes in the characters’ interpersonal issues. The American characters don’t know what the Iraqi character will do when they first meet him, but as a player we know that we control the Iraqi character, and so the Iraqi character won’t betray the Americans or do anything dangerous (unless we choose to make him do so). One of the characters is racist, but does him getting over his prejudices mean anything when it only happens because I’m making him choose the nonracist dialogue options because I think that will improve the characters’ relationship values and be more likely to lead to a story outcome I want? (I actually think his character arc is written relatively well, despite the nagging feeling in the back of my head that his growth was all imposed by me as the player rather than earned by the character.)
I don’t remember who or where this was since it was years ago, but I once found comments by someone who tried Until Dawn but didn’t vibe with it until he got some advice from a friend. This person first approached Until Dawn in the way that most people probably do: as a player. He tried to keep everyone happy, alive, and on good terms, in pursuit of the “best” ending. But it just wasn’t doing it for him. The advice he received was to instead approach Until Dawn as if he were the director of a horror movie. Suddenly, he was free. Any outcome was fine, as long as it was interesting. Play up rivalries, don’t blindly trust everyone, let the jerk’s arrogance cause the death of his selfless girlfriend. It was fine if bad things happened, because this is a horror movie and bad things happen in horror movies. Creating conflict also makes it that much richer if we’re able to turn it around by the end, as compared to if we simply maintain parsimony for the entire runtime.
I think this mindset is helpful to carry over to The Dark Pictures Anthology, but it’s more difficult to implement in practice because these games are smaller than Until Dawn, both in plot length and cast size. If we choose to make one character a jerk, they may ruin their relationship with the entire rest of the cast and never get a chance at redemption or comeuppance. So, yes, as a player we can choose to play up the interpersonal dramas in House of Ashes, but I doubt that will be the natural impulse for most players, and even if a player does decide to do that, the threat of the monsters is obviously so much greater than any of the interpersonal problems that forcing the characters to harp on their issues makes them look petty, unreasonable, and stupid. Luckily for the game, the main monster plot is exciting enough that it can stand on its own without support from the character show, but it’s still a bit unfortunate that this element of the game fell short.
House of Ashes also has no spatial cohesion of the setting. It doesn’t feel like there’s an actual layout to the ruins, it’s just a series of disjointed backdrops for each scene. Offscreen characters can pop up whenever and wherever the story demands them to. House of Ashes is certainly not uniquely guilty as this is how Man of Medan and Little Hope functioned as well, but it feels most jarring here. Man of Medan takes place on a ship, which was designed to be navigated in and traversed. In Little Hope the characters essentially just walk from one side to the other of a town that consists of a single road, so they’re all moving in the same direction down the same path, so meeting up felt fortunate but not incredulous.
But House of Ashes involves the characters consistently getting lost deeper and deeper in a sprawling cave system infested with aggressive and dangerous monsters. They also keep returning to a large, central chamber. Whenever a character shows back up in the central chamber, that means we last left them in an area with a passage to the central chamber... so why doesn’t the cast appear to find any of these passages when they first arrive at and explore the central chamber? Before I mentioned how the depth tracker helps add to the tension over the game, but both the depth and the monsters lose a lot of their bite when characters are able to ascend hundreds of feet off-screen without a problem.
As the cast explores the ruins, they discover that a group of British archaeologists had attempted to explore the caverns in the 1940s, and many of the game’s collectibles delve into that expedition’s fate. But this means that the entire cave system is strung up with functioning electric lights. In fairness to the game, this was probably the best option (the alternatives would basically have been to have let the ruins be dark and force you to rely on your flashlight the entire game, which would’ve been awful, have lighting that us the players can see even if there wasn’t any actual in-game light source, or just have in-game light sources without any explanation), but it still feels incredibly convenient, and clashes with the “ancient ruins” vibe.
Despite those missteps, I think House of Ashes did a lot more right than just focusing on the action. For instance, House of Ashes uses its secondary cast best out of any other Dark Pictures Anthology game. In the other entries, the secondary characters are just kind of there, but in House of Ashes they’re in the trenches with the main cast. In other words, they can be attacked (and even killed?) by the monsters, which establishes stakes and shows the danger of the monsters without needing to sacrifice a main cast member.
I don’t want to give too much away here, but I also loved the way the mechanics were utilized and integrated into the narrative. Usually QTEs are used merely as reaction checks, but in House of Ashes they are used as decisions, and require consideration of the situation rather than merely following on-screen prompts.
My friend and I thought that the premonitions in House of Ashes were more useful than usual... except, peeking behind the curtains after the fact, it turns out we misinterpreted basically every premonition we thought was helpful. So... mission failed successfully, I suppose?
House of Ashes has a great finale, which is especially welcome after Little Hope‘s was so lackluster. It’s not particularly surprising, but works so well, follows from everything that we’ve learned and experienced, and represents an actual culmination of the tension and danger that had mounted over the course of the game.
To be honest, House of Ashes was the Dark Pictures Anthology episode whose premise appealed to me the least (just a bunch of soldiers in a cave?) and in particular I thought the set sounded boring, but the Arabian aesthetic in the ruins was actually pretty cool. Near the end the games shifts to a secondary locale, and I don’t want to spoil what it is but I thought it was done well too.
This isn’t an element of the game itself, but I found is wildly entertaining that the lead character is “played” by Ashley Tisdale. Each entry in The Dark Pictures Anthology has one character who is based on and played by a Hollywood celebrity, and for House of Ashes they got Ashley Tisdale, which is hilarious just because it’s so different from the Disney Channel roles that launched Ashley Tisdale’s career.
(Also, if you’ve played Man of Medan and Little Hope, there is probably a certain concern you have for House of Ashes, and I am happy to report that that worry is completely unfounded.)
While not perfect, House of Ashes marks a high point for The Dark Pictures Anthology. By focusing on what the games are good at—creature features—and eschewing what they are not—complex plots—the game delivers the best experience so far. There isn’t anything more to the story than what’s on the tin, but that’s fine because watching a group with just enough dysfunction get chased by monsters is perfectly entertaining for a few hours, and on top of that the game elevates the experience by smartly employing its mechanics rather than merely relying on endless waves of jumpscares and fight scenes. Each game improves upon the mechanics and systems of the previous, so I do think that playing the Dark Pictures Anthology games in release order is probably, but if you only get one, House of Ashes is the easy pick.
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