Better story, bigger bugs

The third Dark Pictures game has released and after the middling fanfare and glitches that Little Hope had to offer, expectations were high for me for House of Ashes. Can we get an experience that was better in both aspects? Well, no. But we did get some improvements to the storytelling in a few good ways.

As with all the Dark Pictures games, House of Ashes has players taking over as multiple characters as they go through a horror-themed experience making decisions and can change the outcome of certain things as well as making crucial button prompts that detail the actions playing out. It’s a formula pretty much everyone that has played a Supermassive game knows well. It’s never overly difficult but offers up enough tension not knowing if that one failed QTE really did seal the fate for a certain character.

Platforms: Xbox, PlayStation, PC
MSRP: $29.99
Price I’d pay: $29.99

Taking place in 2003, a group of Marines find themselves underneath the Iraqi desert in a series of caves and temples from an ancient civilization. In these tunnels and ruins are somethings in the dark that defy all reason. Now, both US and Iraqi soldiers are trapped in this nightmare together not knowing who to trust or how to actually fight off these evil entities.

Obviously, I’m not going any further with the story. Since this game is very spoiler-heavy and since this story is rather good, I want people to be able to experience it with fresh eyes. What I will say is that this story is probably the best one in the Dark Pictures series so far. There is a good tension both with the beings in the depths as well as the trust and struggles that come with being trapped with others that were originally the enemy. Sure, there are your run-of-the-mill annoying characters, but played right, even these hardened soldiers open up when sent into this situation.

What House of Ashes does well in its first two acts is set up situations as well as gameplay instances where it will suggest the player do a certain action. Much like in Until Dawn and Man of Medan especially, these actions sometimes won’t be the best thing for the characters in screen. Players will have to think on their feet as keep in mind the premonition tablets they find to figure what is the best thing to do in a situation. It plays off the players’ instincts of video game prompts and sometimes doing that the game tells you to do, isn’t what’s the best option. Doing nothing can also be very relevant.

While I enjoyed the story and setting of House of Ashes, what I didn’t enjoy were the glitches throughout my playthrough. I played both solo and in the online shared story co-op mode. Both had their fair share of issues like models not moving, or characters duplicating in the scene. That’s not game breaking but what is are the server disconnects. Towards the end of the story, my co-op partner and I dropped connection over 7 times. We would load back up, get back into the game, watching the exact same cutscene again, and have it disconnect yet again. We had no option but to reload a previous chapter to move forward. I could take this saved game to single player or have him host the game. It wasn’t our internet anyway since we were still in an Xbox Live chat lobby and were still able to talk to each other. This was obviously an in-game issue. There were a good number of glitches in Little Hope, but nothing like this.

Another thing with House of Ashes, it most certainly felt like a shorter experience overall. My co-op partner and I finished this one in two sittings with total play time probably being around three and a half hours. This is also due to the fact that towards the halfway point of the story, we found ourselves watching the majority of the game rather than playing it. There were multiple times we said to each other “Why are we not actually playing this?” It was like the game was making decisions and button presses for us when we could have been doing this ourselves.

At the end of the day, I still enjoyed my time with House of Ashes. It is the best story so far in the series and even with the issues I had with both the glitches and gameplay, this was a decent time overall. If you have played the series this far, you know what you’re getting into. If you want to give this one a shot to see what The Dark Pictures is all about, you can’t be this one’s story and premise. Just keep in mind, there will be some really strange bugs that come along with it.

Review copy of game provided by publisher.