House of Ashes is the third game in the Dark Pictures anthology series. It stars a team of American military members who are looking for an underground weapons silo. As you may expect, they get a lot more than they signed up for. The game uses a combination of speedy decision-making, quick-time events, and collectable items to bring this world to life for the players. Before you dive into this adventure, we're going to detail how long House of Ashes will actually take to play.
Time Required For One Playthrough Of House Of Ashes
If you're plowing through the game without pausing for the secrets and pictures, one run of the game will take approximately 5 and a half hours according to HowLongToBeat.com. This site gathers self-reported player data on playtimes. However, plenty of players will spend time searching for the collectable items as they go. We'd say that, depending on your choices and how thoroughly you look for secrets, your run of the game will take between 5 and 10 hours.
Time Required To Fully Complete House Of Ashes
Of course, the joy of a decision-based game like House Of Ashes is that there are hundreds of different outcomes to discover depending on which characters survive the story, how long they survive, and what decisions you make while playing. Dedicated players are bound to do more than one run of the campaign. There are secrets and pictures to be found which you probably won't catch on your first run. If you do manage to find all the collectables you missed when you do your second playthrough (and you don't care about seeing every ending) you're looking at between 10 and 20 hours of gameplay. Unfortunately, since the game is 80% cutscenes, they're unskippable and you'll probably spend a similar amount of time on the second run as you did on the first.
Meanwhile, if you're an achievement hunter, you'll have to do three or more playthroughs at least because several of the achievements are awarded for completing particular endings of the game. And that's even assuming that you know the right decisions to make in order to unlock the particular achievements! This will bring your runtime up to between 20 and 30 hours or more.