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The Dark Pictures Anthology: House Of Ashes review – choose your own horror movie
The Dark Pictures Anthology: House Of Ashes key – you raided the wrong tomb (pic: Bandai Namco)
Supermassive Games’ new interactive horror movie overcomes a slow start to develop into an agreeably over-the-top gothic adventure.
There are plenty of gamers who would question whether the three titles that make up The Dark Pictures Anthology actually qualify as video games. They certainly aren’t action games, nor do they aspire to be, but the previous entries, and spiritual predecessor Until Dawn, also struggled to offer any genuine chills despite nominally being survival horrors. With House Of Ashes, the third and final instalment, it is more obvious than ever that in making the series, developer Supermassive Games is actually trying to craft a set of interactive horror films.
House Of Ashes achieves that aim much more successfully than its two predecessors, to the point where if it ditched the interactivity completely it would make a pretty decent horror film. And its gameplay, although still basic, offers more variety and excitement than you would expect from the preceding games.
There are still lots of Quick Time Events – in which you must show cat-like reflexes to press or mash a particular controller button – and objects to find and examine, but like the other Dark Pictures Anthology games the most important gameplay element is the stream of binary decisions the game throws at you, allowing you to determine the direction of dialogue by setting the emotional tone of your responses.
Unlike its predecessors there is a semblance of action this time, in which, under time pressure, you must aim a crosshair with the right stick and hit the right trigger. Which seems appropriate since House Of Ashes, in its early stages at least, resembles a mutant hybrid of Call Of Duty and Tomb Raider. Not in gameplay terms, obviously, but in its choice of subject matter.
Set in a remote part of Iraq in 2003, just after the Iraqi army surrendered and Saddam Hussein went into hiding, it charts a disastrous mission in which the American military believe they have found an underground silo containing Saddam’s famously non-existent weapons of mass destruction. As in the other Dark Pictures game, you control five characters at various times: marines Jason and Nick; Eric, a boffin-ish Lt Col. parachuted in to lead the mission; and Rachel (played by Ashley Tisdale), the local CIA field officer who was previously the marines’ commander.
Intriguingly, you also play Salim, an Iraqi reluctantly drafted into the Republican Guard. To add some soap opera style spice, Eric is Rachel’s estranged husband and Rachel has recently started an affair with Nick.
House Of Ashes’ story, like the backstories of its protagonists, initially feels like a preposterously tangled web. It starts with a flashback to 2237 BC, in which an Akkadian king’s lavish temple is sacked by what appear to be demon-like creatures. Next, the American military group head out to what they believe to be Saddam’s WMD silo, where they become enmeshed in a firefight with Salim’s division, led by a still-fanatical commander. The fighting causes a number of sinkholes to open and everyone falls into the temple seen in the flashback.
There, it becomes obvious that the temple was previously discovered by a British archaeological team in 1946, and that it is still inhabited by demon-like creatures. From which point the convoluted setup begins to make sense, as the story develops into a multi-genre horror epic, taking in a sort of vampire origin-myth, zombies, the demon Pazuzu (as made famous by The Exorcist films), and even a hint of ancient alien colonisation.
The problem with the sheer elaborateness of the narrative setup is that it gives House Of Ashes a rather slow start, with a large number of scene-setting cinematics and character interactions to get through before the five protagonists even fly out from their base. The Dark Pictures Anthology’s notorious Curator also pops up, as annoyingly hammy as ever.
But when everyone is unsafely installed in the underground temple, and the focus switches firmly to survival horror, the game becomes a lot more interesting. This time around, the interaction between the characters really works: all the Americans are suspicious of Salim, so he must gain their trust, and as Eric, Rachel, and Nick get together in various combinations, you must decide whether to reveal the affair between the latter two.
Other previously encountered characters – clearly doomed since they are non-playable – feed nicely into the mix and after the prosaic start the story becomes unexpectedly gothic. There’s even a bit more gore than the curiously PG tone of the previous games.
The Dark Pictures Anthology: House Of Ashes key – you don’t choose dialogue but an attitude (pic: Bandai Namco)
On a technical level House Of Ashes is decent if not outstanding: the level design is great and the virtual acting is pretty good, although occasionally you experience fleeting descents into the uncanny valley when characters’ facial expressions don’t quite match their actions. But the characters themselves are sufficiently well drawn to distract you from those momentary lapses and the enjoyably arcane storyline also helps in that respect.
If you’re wont to spend the odd night in watching horror movies with a partner or flatmate, House Of Ashes has two forms of co-operative play, in which two players can control a character each (most of the scenes in the game are two-handers) or up to four people can pass a single controller around if they are assembled in the same place. Both forms add an extra level of immersion to the pseudo-horror movie atmosphere, even if there’s still a lot of waiting around watching cut scenes.
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House of Ashes, happily, is much longer than a mere movie: the first playthrough will take at least six hours, after which you open up a new path through the game, entitled the Curator’s Cut, which lets you control different characters during the now-familiar events. That path is a bit shorter but still takes around five hours to complete.
As ever with a Dark Pictures game, House Of Ashes has a lot of replayability. Trying to complete the game with all five characters still alive at the end is not easy and we only managed two in the first playthrough and four in the second. Plus, the choices you make really do have an impact, taking the story in different directions and sometimes generating new flashbacks and cut scenes that didn’t crop up in previous playthroughs.
House Of Ashes won’t suit everyone: at heart, it’s a point ‘n’ click adventure game without the puzzles, so by definition it’s something of an acquired taste. But if the idea of a long, gothic horror movie in which you control the characters, and to some extent the story, appeals, you’ll likely be well satisfied. As long as you have the patience to weather the slow intro, that is, before the real horror starts to kick in.
The Dark Pictures Anthology: House Of Ashes review summary
In Short: Easily the best of the Dark Pictures Anthology series, which finally manages to serve up some interesting characters and effective horror scenes, with an appealingly gothic atmosphere.
Pros: Enjoyable, if convoluted, story with the most compelling cast of characters so far for the series. Effective horror elements and the co-op options remain innovatively unique.
Cons: There’s still little in the way of traditional gameplay and the facial animation has some issues. Story branching events can seem abrupt and unfair.
Score: 7/10
Formats: PlayStation 4 (reviewed), Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and PC
Price: £24.99
Publisher: Bandai Namco Entertainment
Developer: Supermassive Games
Release Date: 22nd September 2021
Age Rating: 18
By Steve Boxer
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