The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes is a new game from the Supermassive studio known for the horror films Until Dawn, Man of Medan, and Little Hope.
What Is The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes?
The Dark Pictures: House of Ashes is the third installment in The Dark Pictures Anthology, an interactive horror anthology. Many cutscenes distinguish all games in this series, but the gameplay in them is slightly less – and almost all gameplay episodes come down to QTE when the player needs to press the buttons marked on the screen in time. Sometimes, however, the goal is different – to wander a little around a tiny location (it is unreal to get lost on it), read notes with plot details, look for collectible items and choose an answer option in the dialogue between the characters.
Projects like House of Ashes are sometimes referred to by players as interactive cinema – precisely because of the emphasis on the cinematography and the abundance of in-game cutscenes. The connection with cinema is also in the fact that in such games, the appearance and voice of the heroes are often presented by real actors – Hollywood and not only. For example, Ashley Tisdale (Scary Movie 5) played one of the key characters in House of Ashes, and Shawn Ashmore (X-Men) and Will Poulter (Solstice) appeared in the previous parts of the series.
Another feature of anthology games is non-linearity. Each is a short story that takes about five hours, but the two playthroughs can be quite different from each other. During dialogues and story-critical scenes, players are often presented with a choice of how to proceed – and this always influences further events. Sometimes in a positive way, sometimes in a negative way. For example, the death of one of the main characters due to bad decisions is typical for The Dark Pictures Anthology.
Staginess, cinematography, ease of use, and lack of complex gameplay episodes make House of Ashes and other parts of the series a great option for beginners and those who play poorly in games. Plus, The Dark Pictures Anthology is excellent entertainment for any party. The anthology authors are well aware of this, so their games have a local multiplayer mode, in which players can choose their characters and then, passing a controller to each other, play only for their favorites.
The games in The Dark Pictures Anthology series are not related in any way to each other. The first part, Man of Medan, was devoted to the eerie events on the ghost ship – the story was based on the legend of the ship Ourang Medan, whose entire crew died under mysterious circumstances. The second game, Little Hope, told about a mysterious empty town in the American wilderness: several centuries ago, people who were considered witches and wizards were persecuted and tried in these places, but nowadays, something extremely strange is happening in Little Hope.
House of Ashes is a story about a group of American military personnel. They tried to find chemical weapons in Iraq, but during the operation, they sank underground and ended up on the territory of an ancient Sumerian temple. Now their goal is to get to the surface and survive when they encounter mysterious monsters living in ruins.
What Movies and Books Is House of Ashes Inspired by?
The most obvious source of inspiration is the horror film The Descent by Neil Marshall (2005), which focuses on the survival of extreme sports fans in deep caves. House of Ashes has a similar leitmotif: the heroes go deep underground, face the unknown, and try to survive. True, this is what the new part of The Dark Pictures Anthology has on the surface – at the very beginning appear hints that with references to popular works here everything is not so simple, and by the middle of the game, it becomes completely obvious that Descent had the least impact on the House of Ashes developers.
Apart from The Descent, the game creators named Aliens by James Cameron (1986) and Predator by John McTiernan (1987), as well as the works of American writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Images of characters have moved into the game from the films mentioned: if you remember ordinary Janette Vasquez from Aliens, you will immediately understand who of the team of American warriors is more like her. As in Predator, the monsters in House of Ashes are practically invulnerable to human weapons, and you need to show cunning to defeat them. Lovecraft’s works, perhaps, had the greatest influence on the game developers – so, in the last third installment of House of Ashes, almost nothing remains of The Descent, but a lot refers to the Ridges of Madness.
Will the Players’ Expectations Be Met?
Supermassive did not promise to do anything fundamentally new for House of Ashes, but the authors noted that after each part of The Dark Pictures Anthology, they try to process as much feedback from players as possible and change some points for the better in the next game.
So, in House of Ashes, in the episodes with the exploration of levels, the camera became freer – that is, the hero can be controlled, as in any third-person action game. The camera was most often fixed in the two previous parts and not always conveniently located. Now there are fewer problems with this, although House of Ashes still has not become a full-fledged action game. The camera angle is just a matter of convenience.
In addition, in the new game, there are much fewer notes, documents, and newspaper clippings that hide the details of the plot and backstory from the player. And with those that remained, they acted amusingly. A piece of scrap paper is just a small text that can be read quickly. Another part – pages from the diary of one of the members of the expedition during the Second World War, and viewing these pages activates a short video with a flashback. Again, all for the convenience of the player.
