The Dark Pictures: House of Ashes

The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes is a survival horror interactive drama video game developed by Supermassive Games and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment. It is the third of eight planned instalments in The Dark Pictures Anthology series, following 2019's Man of Medan and 2020's Little Hope.

After playing the first game in this series, Man of Medan, despite some issues I enjoyed the game and was looking forward to where the story would go next. Little Hope, however, was rather disappointing, taking an interesting turn in the series but a rather dull result overall.

House of Ashes however has restored my hope in the series, the story is better, the characters are more fleshed out and interesting and there is a lot more action in an interesting and creepy environment. Visually the game is stunning, with detailed creatures and a realistic setting. Paired with great voice acting and a stellar performance from Ashley Tisdale.

Overall, I found this game to be the best so far in the series. And the next game looks promising too. Hopefully, it's onwards and upwards for this horror anthology.

After two installments that did not convince, House of Ashes makes the anthology start to get interesting, since it makes its story, characters, location, script and gameplay the main component of its good opinions. What I liked is that this time the threat is real, and not "it's all in your head", and with this he even manages to pay tribute to Until Dawn. This will be for me and for all the first game in the series going forward. Surely thanks to all this you will be able to calmly enjoy the previous two with another opportunity, as here everything is real and the previous ones are not, it is not to complain. I already hope next year the fourth game "The Devil in Me" because it will be very brutal and bloody.

House Of Ashes is personally my favourite installment to derive from the Dark Pictures Anthology. It cleverly crafts its daunting antagonists, but also offers its five central characters depth and exploration. Like previous installments from the franchise, choices and actions determine your story, which the game extends on remarkibly, adding bigger want for replayibility. On the other hand, due to these decisions, some characters will never equally recieve the same likeability as others in one playthrough, resulting in desinterest for few players. As for the story, it has vastly inproved and contains great engagement into its chilling atmosphere even despite the odd campy dialogue scattered throughout. There is area for improvement, which I hope the next installment, 'The Devil In Me', follows through with. Either way, House Of Ashes is an 8/10 from me.

This game is very solid. Good characters good locations good story good monsters. A decent run time of about 6 hours. Personally I've beat it 3 times since I'm working on the trophies which are fun to do btw. Don't listen to these haters on here. This game is well worth the 30$ price tag.

THE DARK PICTURES ANTHOLOGY: HOUSE OF ASHES (2021) is a really great installment to the series. I personally enjoyed this one more than Man of Medan.

The characters are all pretty interesting and some were compelling enough. They all had original personalities and back stories and I appreciated the (Non- Western / American) story of Salim as well, giving more depth to the geographic region the story takes place in.

"A group of American marines comes across an underground nest of pure, ancient evil while trekking through the Arabian desert."

As per my usual, I played this game with a group of friends and it thoroughly entertained us. While not super scary, it certainly held tension and offers a very cool story (and creature). Fun trying to make split second decisions and keep your characters alive. A great installment in the series!