Review: The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes Is a Purposeless Schlockfest

Nonsensical characterization is the order of the day throughout House of Ashes.

The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes
Photo: Bandai Namco Entertainment

After a pointless and racist prologue set some 4,000 years before the current events of The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes, a group of U.S. Marines fighting during the Iraq War assault a farm, trying to locate weapons of mass destruction. After finding none and potentially murdering innocent shepherds (a tasteless decision that this game allows the player to make), Iraqi insurgents appear on the scene. This sets off a bloody shootout that ends with the farm collapsing via an unrelated seismic event and the survivors falling into an underground cave system, where they’re hunted by monsters with an aversion to light.

Setting a game in Iraq during Bush II’s invasion of the country, just days after “Mission Accomplished” was declared in June of 2003, is risky business but conceivably meaningful, depending on the narrative direction and themes. Director Will Doyle has claimed that House of Ashes isn’t about the Iraq War and its politics, and that the team at Supermassive Games only chose this time and setting for story potential. That potential, though, is squandered for the vast majority of the game, which involves the various characters fumbling around dark caves, accomplishing little and occasionally being attacked in banal quick-time events.

In short, House of Ashes uses one of the greatest war crimes of the 21st century as set dressing for a subpar horror romp. The introduction to the characters superficially evokes James Cameron’s Aliens, which characterized its Marines with just a few lines of dialogue, efficiently making their humanity recognizable and their plights sympathetic. By contrast, House of Ashes is economical to a fault. As in the prior Dark Pictures Anthology games, each protagonist is introduced with two specific, and narrow, character traits on screen, after which the player is treated to some bickering and contrived drama preceding the main plot.

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In spite of possessing recognizable traits, just about every character here is unlikeable. First Lieutenant Jason Kolchek (Paul Zinno) cheerfully condemns the entire Middle East for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, while C.I.A. officer Rachel King (Ashley Tisdale) is casually cheating on her clueless husband, U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Eric King (Alex Gravenstein), with Sergeant Nick Kay (Moe Jeudy-Lamour). More sympathetic than any of them is the only playable Iraqi character, Salim Othman (Nick Tarabay), an ex-soldier who’s dragged unwillingly back into combat by his commander and then forced to ally with the Americans to survive—unless he inexplicably decides to turn on them, given that much is made of his pacificism, or they turn on him, regardless of whether they have any problem with him.

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That the player is given authorship of the characters’ behavior via branching decisions can lead to some truly incoherent outcomes. Consider that you can have Rachel leave her husband in order to be with her lover, only for her to suddenly decree that she’d die to avenge Eric if he’s accidentally killed. Nonsensical characterization is the order of the day throughout House of Ashes, a problem that becomes all the more exasperating given how the series’s gimmicks have been almost arbitrarily bolted onto the game’s narrative.

Among those are the collectible premonitions, or vague, context-free, and often brief flash-forwards to all sorts of nastiness to come. Chances are that you’ll reach the end of your playthrough never having seen more than a few of these moments in the context of the narrative, and if you want to see the rest, good luck summoning the courage to do multiple replays. Especially pointless is the gimmick of having your choices alter the “bearing” of the game. Throughout, a goofy graphical overlay indicates a shift in a character’s moral compass, with text indicating changes in the relationships between characters. But these all make little difference to the plot outcome, leading one to wonder why they’re even there in the first place.

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It doesn’t help that House of Ashes tends toward monotony. Much of the game is spent slowly exploring dark caves, sometimes the exact same ones, except with different characters. Too often you may find yourself trying to shake off tedium by trying to interact with something only to inadvertently activate a protagonist’s death. Or a jump scare might shake you out of it, but given how telegraphed they are, the game’s horror ends up being as ineffective as the story, which is given over to Aqua Teen Hunger Force-like levels of deranged non-sequitur plotting. While the prior games in this series never reached the heights of Until Dawn, they didn’t lack for disturbing and memorable imagery. By contrast, this game’s non-human baddies are so over-designed and uninspired that they never jangle the player’s nerves.

The game was reviewed using a review code provided by fortyseven communications.

Score: 
 Developer: Supermassive Games  Publisher: Bandai Namco Entertainment  Platform: PC  ESRB: M  ESRB Descriptions: Blood and Gore, Drug Reference, Intense Violence, Mild Sexual Themes, Strong Language  Buy: Game

Ryan Aston

Ryan Aston has been writing for Slant since 2011. He lives in Perth, Western Australia.

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