The Dark Pictures Anthology is now the only annual release worth paying any attention to. Supermassive Games’ horror project does storytelling in a way that puts almost every other game to shame, and it’s only getting better with each new entry. House of Ashes overcomes the major narrative hurdles present in the first two adventures while evolving the gameplay formula in meaningful ways. It isn’t the most polished experience by any stretch, but House of Ashes has the most well constructed plot and satisfying conclusion this anthology has seen yet. Supermassive Games hasn’t lost its touch, and while I’d recommend waiting for a patch to iron out some of the more frustrating bugs, House of Ashes is an essential outing in what has quickly become the best horror series around.

House of Ashes is structurally the same style of cliched teen slasher as its predecessors - Man of Medan and Little Hope. While searching for WMDs in a rural Iraqi village, a group of American and Iraqi soldiers fall through a sink hole and find themselves lost amidst an ancient Sumerian temple. As they work together to escape, they’re picked off one by one by a horde of bat-like monsters that act (and can be killed) just like vampires. The soldiers are not nearly as ill-prepared to face these horrors as the students in Little Hope and Man of Medan, so it’s no surprise that House of Ashes is far more action-oriented - and less scary - than previous chapters. It’s closer to The Descent or Aliens than The Ring or It Follows; it’s tense and thrilling, but not nearly as nightmarish. I like to see Dark Pictures dabbling in different genres because it keeps things fresh. House of Ashes ends up being significantly more grounded and focused than its spookier siblings, which may ultimately make it a more approachable game when all is said and done.

Related: New World Review After 100 Hours, Or: Why Have I Cut Down 15,000 Trees?

Beyond the differences in genre, House of Ashes uses the same choice-based narrative system and quick-time events that we’re used to. Nothing seems to have changed here from previous entries, though, with the benefit of experience, I did feel like I had a greater understanding of the cause and effect of my choices this time around. The curator also returns to do his Crypt Keeper bit by recapping events and teasing story beats periodically between major story sequences. With each game I’m growing less certain that he actually improves the experience. His only contribution is to evaluate your performance based on who lives and dies, but keeping everyone alive isn’t necessarily the best way to play.. In fact, for narrative and thematic reasons I don’t want to spoil, I feel strongly that certain characters should be left behind and that the “best” ending is the one where only specific characters make it out alive. I think the story loses some thematic meaning when all five survive, but the curator will make you feel like you’ve played incorrectly if they don’t. If you’ve played The Dark Pictures before it likely won’t bother you to finish with some casualties, but I can see some people getting discouraged by the curator’s judgment.

Outside of interactive cutscenes, you’ll have the opportunity to explore the forbidden temple to find secrets and pieces of lore that help flesh out the plot. This time around, the camera has been unlocked so you can freely explore each cavernous environment. Unfortunately I found these sections to be more of a curse than a blessing thanks to the sheer size of these said areas combined with a painfully slow movement speed. On top of that, it sometimes takes five to ten seconds after pressing the interact buttons before your character finally picks up an item, and they often get stuck running in place next to tables and walls. Towards the end I found myself ignoring a lot of the secrets because I didn’t want to waste time walking over to them. Whenever you aren’t in a cutscene, the whole experience takes a massive step backward in quality. A sprint button would work wonders, but I think these explorative sections also need better puzzles to solve. Moving a coffee cup off of a stack of papers just isn’t particularly engaging and kills the pacing.

house of ashes 1

The actual cutscenes are fantastic. Despite a handful of bugs like missing audio, disappearing character models, and server disconnects, House of Ashes has the most visually stunning moments The Dark Pictures has boasted yet. Character animations are natural and the cinematography is movie-quality. There’s still an uncanny valley quality to some of the faces, particularly in Ashley Tisdale’s Rachel, but it’s hard to hold that against it when it’s doing so much right. Dialogue can bring these scenes down at times, which is fairly uneven and at times nonsensical. At one point, the characters find a shaft with a glowing green light emitting from it. One of the characters exclaims “This place is Jack-in-the-Box!” and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. There’s some strong interpersonal drama to be found and House of Ashes does well to avoid archetypes and character cliches, but some of the dialogue is just laughably bad.

house of ashes 3

My big concern going into House of Ashes was how Supermassive Games would handle such a setting. A horror game about US soldiers looking for WMDs in Iraq circa 2003 could have been unnecessary if not wholly problematic, but House of Ashes uses the Iraq War as more than just window dressing for its scares. Like Little Hope, it is interested in cycles of human behavior and the repetition of history. The story is about the consequences of war, broadly, but it's also about corrupt power, tribalism, and the dichotomy of invaders and the invaded. The characters and forces they represent are neither vilified nor glorified, not because HoA wants to vainly attempt to stay apolitical, but because its story is exploring something more universal and timeless about mankind. When it broaches racism, it does so in a way that serves the story and feels true to the characters without making it a spectacle or becoming racist itself, which seems to be a difficult line for a lot of games to walk. The message isn’t much deeper than “war bad” when all is said and done, but these themes fit together extraordinarily well and it concludes in a much more meaningful way than what came before.

house of ashes preview 1

The best thing I can say about House of Ashes is that its story didn’t make me feel betrayed in the end. There is no “it was all a dream” twist that creates a dozen plot holes, and it doesn’t pull away from the supernatural elements at the last second to reveal that the characters were hallucinating. Rather, it uses its monsters to connect together its themes and create a closed loop that only the best horror stories can effectively execute. For once it feels like The Dark Pictures bit off exactly as much as it can chew, and House of Ashes is so much better off for it. This is where I would recommend newcomers start with the series, and it's a great indicator that the anthology is just going to keep getting better.\

House of Ashes Review Card

Next: Gloomhaven Review: A Perfect Digital Recreation