The Haunted Hoard: The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes (PS5)

Many horror stories like to keep their human characters vulnerable to better raise the stakes of the situation. A villain certainly seems much more imposing when their victims are almost helpless to fight back against them, and even if they do get some weapon to fight back with, they’re often not very good at using them against their supernatural foe. For the third entry in their horror game series, Supermassive Games decide to deliberately subvert this common genre trend, The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes starring a coordinated U.S. military team who ends up uncovering an ancient evil while still having the machine guns and group tactics that make them competent in a skirmish. Even with these advantages though, they find that their supernatural opposition won’t be easily put down with their regular tactics.

 

There are many interesting directions taken with House of Ashes’s plot, one of the first ones being that it takes place in 2003 during the middle of the Iraq War. While the opening prologue shows us a brief look at a lost Akkadian kingdom as they have their first brush with the same creatures that will terrorize the people of the present, the story then shows us a group of characters who are actually involved in the efforts to find the chemical weapons the U.S. believed Saddam Hussein was manufacturing. The four playable characters from the U.S. military all have different roles within it and different attitudes, but an important aspect of the plot is that they do work together as a unit and even have a few non-playable characters alongside them whose fate can be influenced. When things begin to go south and the team uncovers the Akkadian ruins the ancient beasts still reside in it becomes possible for the player to influence who lives or dies with their decisions and character interactions. While this group does get to bring their assault rifles down below the surface in the dark tunnels beneath the desert, the fearsome beasts they face are only pushed back by bullet fire. As such, there are moments where a creature can very well kill a character if you respond poorly to the current action or make the wrong choices.

Character dynamics are at the core of the experience as not only can they influence the course of the story’s events but during key moments a person may automatically make a choice based on how well they’ve got along with others based on how you’ve had them behave in the past. It’s hard to say if there’s a main character as the game does do a good job of giving each person a strong spotlight even if some can be removed from the story earlier by an untimely death, but there’s two strong character dynamics in play worth examining. Rachel, played by Ashley Tisdale, has been having an affair with a man named Nick while serving in the military, but for the specific operation the game centers around before everyone falls into the ruins below, her husband Eric shows up to provide his technical expertise. This love triangle won’t cause any over the top drama if you don’t want it to but it does influence the interactions between Nick, Rachel, and Eric during quieter moments, the player able to guide this to the resolution they prefer based on the dialogue options they decide on for each character. This narrative game lets you mold characters as you like, so if you want to make Eric into a hard line military guy who emphasizes his control over the group you can and you can have Nick lean more into his personable friendly nature or make him more reactive and inflammatory. Rachel certainly seems the most fluid as she can be rather independent or lean more towards Eric or Nick based on certain emotional interactions, but that military discipline means there won’t be any corny moment where characters betray each other and leave them to the monsters below just over their romantic interests. Still, a character may not be willing to share their medkit if they haven’t been getting along, the game still able to keep the personal relationships relevant without being frustrating. Admittedly though, some of the side characters who are part of the squad but aren’t playable can be a bit one note or grating, making them a bit harder to miss if they do meet an unfortunate end.

 

The two remaining playable characters perhaps have the most interesting relationship in the game though because they are on opposing sides of the war. While you get to play as four U.S. troops in the main story, you also have an Iraqi Lieutenant named Salim join the group as being trapped underground forces potential cooperation just to survive. Salim is a family man who seems to be roped into the war mostly to protect them rather than having any true belief in the cause, although his willingness to fight can be influenced by you as well. Still, he is a sympathetic character and the game doesn’t dance around the idea that people following the September 11th World Trade Center attacks had a lot of built in prejudices against people from the Middle East. Jason Kolchek is a Marine Lieutenant who ends up spending a fair bit of time interacting with Salim, Jason very much a picture of a soldier who is happy to serve and usually unafraid to fire his weapon because his country told him to. The two actually first meet on the opposite sides of a skirmish near the start before the ground gives out and brings everyone below, but Jason and Salim allow the game to address some of the underlying racial issues and nationalistic discussions that would have come up if members of the two opposing militaries were made to work together at the time. The player being able to guide how much they trust each other makes for a satisfyingly realistic approach to the idea of former enemies being made to work together, especially with other complicating factors in play like another Iraqi soldier named Dar who is much less willing to make nice despite the situation.

 

The evolving and often uneasy relationships between group members is definitely the most interesting guiding force in the plot, but the actual horrors can hold their own as well. One particularly effective choice is how the game handles the notes you can find hidden around areas when you’re given a brief moment to explore. Some notes are a bit dry and use military jargon admittedly, but a former expedition lead by Randolph Hodgson has its own narrative to be found by way of old journals he wrote, the story from the 1940s even presented like an old news serial when you find the paper so that it’s a bit more engaging than just reading words on paper. Similarly to previous games in The Dark Pictures Anthology you can also find objects that will give you a premonition of the future, the player able to see a situation that could unfold and oftentimes the result is an unfortunate end for a character you will now be trying to avoid. The dramatic irony can start to color your choices if you let it and can even inadvertently make those events unfold as you become too nervous in your efforts to avoid it, that also leaning into the interesting way the game handles some of the pivotal choices you’ll need to make during the adventure.

 

For the most part, this narrative-focused adventure has you guide the story by making dialogue decisions. Much of the game will have you watching cutscenes that are not interactive up until they point someone needs to give an answer or make a choice, the player presented with two options that are often clearly different in tone and intent. A single word will even describe the intended mood just in case it’s not clear enough from context alone, a helpful tool for when characters might be telling a joke or acting sarcastic and the text choice alone would make it odd to hear it spoken aloud without such a warning. You can opt to stay silent and it can sometimes be the less damaging choice, but at key points in the story you will need to pick from one of two pivotal decisions, the game usually giving you a bit more time to deliberate one how you want to proceed. Sometimes it can be something as dire as choosing who to try and save in a fight and you need to weigh up what you know about a character’s capabilities or even what they’re up against specifically as the subterranean creatures come in a few different forms and won’t always go for the kill if they have other purposes for you. It is easy to assume the creatures you face are a specific monster after getting some early information about them, but House of Ashes does build them into a more unique species that breaks from some traditions so they are thankfully not a shallow threat that loses its luster when you think you can put a name to them.

Those moments where you need to make an important choice can be incredibly tense on top of highly consequential. A character might be hanging from a rope on a cliff side and you’ll need to make the choice of cutting them free to save yourself or seeing if you can help them hang on even with an enemy looming nearby. What can make these moments more interesting is if you choose to play the game in multiplayer, each player getting assigned certain characters whether you play in the online mode where you can’t see the other player’s actions or in the Movie Night mode where you pass the controller to people playing with you in person when a character’s turn comes up. That rope cutting moment can become a lot more suspenseful when it’s not just two characters you control in a game but someone’s only character dangling down below, the social pressure and the danger adding a new nervous weight to the proceedings. One interesting direction that House of Ashes takes with its plot is that the feel-good decision isn’t always the right one either, so while you may be trying to go for the heroic route where everyone gets along, such things can backfire because this situation isn’t so straightforward. It can prey on your knowledge of horror tropes at times or reward you for going with your gut rather than being caught up in the emotion of a moment, but at the same time callous play will inevitably lead to your crew thinning down. Both side characters and main ones will end up in jeopardy based on how you treat them and whether you let logic or personal connections guide you in certain moments, but the game usually isn’t too cruel, making it pretty clear a character can die based on your choice but not outright giving you the right answer.

 

The horror definitely comes mostly from those moments of peril where you could very well lose a key member of the team or even a whole player if you’re playing in multiplayer, but the game’s plot also has some moments that play up the horror well. There are no pop scares this time around, The Dark Pictures Anthology making the interesting choice to not only give you weapons you’ll sometimes need to point and shoot to hold back enemies but also relying on better earned scares to keep you on edge. The monsters beneath the sand can start to lose their edge after the game stops hiding them from view, the full look at what you’re up against followed by them coming in big swarms that try to keep the mortal terror sustaining the horror until you can stumble into the darker and unsettling secrets that lie even deeper below. There can still be a sense of helplessness because the beasts come in such large numbers that your small group has to handle them with diminishing supplies and potentially even thinning ranks, but it does feel like the game is leaning more on a fear of loss rather than a fear of these specific creatures and how they behave.

 

One returning and contentious feature from The Dark Pictures Anthology is the inclusion of timed button presses during action scenes. During some scenes like when you’re choosing which particular foe to fire your gun at it’s just an interactive choice without any words to guide you, but at other times it can feel like a reaction challenge in a game that is mostly dependent on slower-paced decision making. You’ll have set time periods for making dialogue choices but the button presses require often quick and immediate action to nail them properly, the PlayStation 5 controller unfortunately making it a slightly worse option than other consoles might be. When the button you need to press appears on screen, you don’t have the same benefits you would with a PS4 or Xbox One controller, those buttons featuring color-coded symbols while the PS5 has made the backwards choice to have them all white and grey. For split second reactions with lives on the line, a greater difference in appearance between the buttons flashing on screen would be appreciated, but House of Ashes does have a way to soften this issue.

 

In all versions of the game there is a difficulty setting that will let you pick how you want these button prompts presented. The time you are given to press the button can be variable, the easiest setting still not lingering too long so it is still a challenge, but the difficulty naming convention can push players away from the helpful indicators that will prepare you for incoming button prompts. In The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope, a little symbol appeared to prepare you for the kind of action you’re about to engage in, making the player ready to react. House of Ashes has this only appear in the easiest difficulty option unfortunately despite it helping the player avoid moments that can feel unfair, characters sometimes receiving debilitating injuries or outright dying if you fail certain button presses. The difficulty options are a good compromise in some ways and the game does sometimes justify these moments like when you can choose an easier or harder path to influence an outcome with more button prompts on the harder one, but the more meaningful guiding of your fate will still be from the concrete choices rather than if you can press a button at the right time. The game does let you go back and retry story segments to change your story path though as another way to ease the potential annoying influence these can hold, although the game may have softened the segments where you need to rhythmically press a button while hiding to avoid detection too much to the point they’re barely present and not very tense.

THE VERDICT: The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes makes effective use of its Iraq War setting to create the incredibly interesting dynamic between U.S. Marine Jason Kolchek and Iraqi Lieutenant Salim Othman while also giving its other three main playable characters a love triangle that influences behaviors without being a corny intrusion during the horror. The character interactions can make up for the moments the main monsters start to lose their luster before they become more compelling near the end, but most of the game manages to nail a feeling of mortal peril even when your characters are well-armed and experienced troops. The choices you make in dialogue and action segments do have an appreciable impact on their personalities and fates and the game has you make some hard calls made even more intense if you play in multiplayer, and while this series still struggles with how to handle timed button presses and their consequences, it does find a middle ground with some difficulty options and clearer messaging on when someone’s life is in jeopardy.

 

And so, I give The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes for PlayStation 5…

A GOOD rating. While it didn’t impact the rating I will lead with suggesting the versions on other consoles first and foremost as the lack of color-coding on the PS5’s controller buttons is an unnecessary complication to one of the game’s weaker areas, but the timed button presses usually won’t ruin the experience thanks to some of the safety nets you can enable. The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes already does a good job of creating fear just with how it manages to evoke mortal peril despite giving your characters the tools that could normally repel such dangerous creatures that it’s not too much of an issue that these monsters aren’t as compelling in concept as they could have been, although the late game reveals definitely help them contribute something more than a bestial danger to the game’s setting and tone.  Jason and Salim are definitely the best part of the experience though and it is quite a shame that some players might not see their relationship evolve if certain events rob you of one of those characters too soon, but also the fact you have a hand in guiding these two to potentially see eye to eye better makes it more than just the expected course of the story. Your influence on how those two and the three characters involved in their love triangle interact both when making active choices and in how those shape their personalities makes the story interesting from a human drama angle, and while I haven’t emphasized other dynamics too much, characters like Nick and Jason do have moments together that draw from a shared trauma to make the cast more interconnected even if the plot likes to separate the group frequently. The moments where you need to decide which action to take with your inputs like who to aim at do feel better than just pressing a button to avoid tripping when it comes to influencing if a character lives or dies and probably should have been the primary focus in design, although moments like picking the tricky path or clearer one are also fine ways to contextualize those presses without it feeling frustrating if you fail and someone meets a grisly end for it.

 

The capable military team that finds themselves in this horrible situation certainly don’t hold The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes back from providing a quality horror story, although its the character interactions and relationships that perhaps keep the story engaging more than the foes they’re up against. The game can up the stakes to avoid those monsters losing their edge at least and it is those very same stakes that make the adventure terrifying at parts, especially in a multiplayer setting where everyone is working together to survive and can very well be removed from play by a bad choice. The variation in how you should make your decisions gives it a greater strength than a story that tries to remove blind feel-good heroism while also not indulging in some cynical idea of selfish action, the measured look at a controversial period in time and how it should impact these characters also handled rather well. The creatures do feel a little disconnected from the characters though, perhaps a more personal or allegorical horror what this game needed to push itself and its characters to greater heights, but it’s still an enjoyable and effective horror experience that makes use of some elements that could have easily gone awry in less skilled hands.