After the first two entries in The Dark Pictures Anthology I was skeptical, but still hopeful about the whole concept. Sure, I don’t particularly like games which heavily rely on QTEs, but that wasn’t my problem with the first games. Rather, they suffered from poor narrative and storytelling decisions, which is pretty important in an “interactive movie”-type game. I’m happy to say that third time’s a charm and House of Ashes is a genuinely entertaining horror themed interactive story.
Just like the previous entries, this is a very Quantic Dream-like QTE-heavy “interactive movie” with choices and consequences. The story progresses in “scenes”, rather than “levels”, so you’re usually exploring a very limited space. If you’re exploring at all, since the scene might consist only of dialogue choices or QTEs. The series still wants you to play in coop, with the other player choices affecting the outcome of each scene. But you can still “Play Alone”. And, supposedly, the Curator Cut mode will be added for singleplayer experience of the coop viewpoint, though it wasn’t yet added at the time of me writing this.
This is still a completely separate story, the series being a horror anthology, and this time it works like an action horror about monstrous creatures. And perhaps most importantly, this time around there’s no real “surprise twist” to the story, which was the main downfall of the previous entries as they simply didn’t know how to do it well. The game just commits to being a good monster story. But to heighten the drama, sets the story during the 2003 invasion of Iraq with the characters involved in the story being from the opposing sides of the conflict.
I don’t know if it’s the more simple approach, that still has some fun twists and nuances to it, that makes the narrative considerably more enjoyable here, or the fact that the story in general is just handled better. But it’s really fun. Yes, the characters, as they tend to be in these games, are somewhat lacking in dimensions, even though they’re not completely one-dimentional for the most part. And yes, the game is still too long for the story it tells and instead of being 6 hours it could easily be 4 or less, with no value lost. Oh and it is becoming somewhat distracting, that the “virtual actors” in the Anthology are reused between games, especially when you see an “all American professor dad” from Little Hope now being a patriotic and gun-ho Iraqi captain in this game. Getting very Kenji Eno here. Also, I really don’t get why Supermassive seems to adore the 1995 The Outer Limits-type endings as those are very hard to pull off without the viewer hating the writer. But all of it wasn’t enough to make me like the game less.
Neither were the usual issues of the Anthology. The bizarre cuts between shots. Repetition of some dialogue lines. Scenes that suddenly lack a character that is present in the preceding and a succeeding scene. Strange facial expression cycles or slightly inconsistent behavior. All of this is clearly a result of many possible permutations of the scenes, so I can understand why this happens. I can’t, though, understand why the QTEs are so obnoxious in many cases, appearing in completely random parts of the screen, often blending with the scene behind it, yet at the same time requiring an insanely quick reaction from the players. It genuinely seems unreasonable, but at least you can customize a lot of that in the Accessibility menu (and I did).
I’m glad that House of Ashes turned out to be not just a good entry in the so far disappointing The Dark Pictures Anthology, but a very solid horror themed interactive movie adventure. Plenty of fun moments. Fun takes on some established monster concepts and genre ideas. And it looks really good. It’s definitely worth checking out if you’re into this sort of thing.