After the success of their interactive horror story game Until Dawn, developer Supermassive Games decided to make a series of smaller games of the same type, wrapped up under the guise of them being part of an anthology. This was always something I liked in theory more than in execution, while all have amazing graphics, first game, The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan was fun if forgettable, while the follow up, The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope almost verged on tedium due to long periods of not really doing anything other than walking down long empty roads. Seeing the penultimate game in 'season one' of the anthology series on sale I decide to pick it up, and I am very glad I did as The Dark Pictures: House of Ashes is by far the best of the lot, even eclipsing the full price games of Until Dawn and The Quarry. I finally understand what the developer is attempting to do with these games and I am well up for it.
This takes place in 2003 with the American army in Iraq as part of their response to the events of 9/11. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Eric King (voiced by Alex Gravenstein - Moonfall, X-Men: Dark Phoenix) has been working on specialist technology designed to be able to scan underground in order to locate Saddam Hussein's alleged chemical weapons, which are believed to be hidden in an underground facility. Convinced he has pinpointed the location, he leads a small squad of soldiers, who include among them King's estranged wife, C.I.A officer Rachel King (Scary Movie 5), her new love interest, Nick (Moe Jeudy-Lamour - X-Men: Days of Future Past), his squad leader, all American good boy Jason (Paul Zinno) among a few others to the apparent site. Ambushed by the Iraqi army, a firefight ensures, resulting in a series of large sinkholes appearing which sucks both sides beneath the sands, where they find themselves confronted not with a secret chemical lab, but instead with the ancient ruins of a vast Akkadian temple from 2231 BC. Trapped underground with no apparent way out, the survivors decide to head deeper down into the Earth, hoping to find an alternate exit, but instead stumbling into the resting grounds for a group of monstrous and near indestructible creatures.
I have found myself struggling to properly explain to people what these games are like. They are essentially an interactive CG movie, with much of the choices you make affecting other characters opinions of you, or whether you survive the numerous quick time events (which require you to quickly press a button that appears on screen in order to avoid negative consequences such as tripping over a rock while running away from something). There are also more interactive sections where you have agency to explore various locations, looking at items that provide more clues as to what has gone on.
As I said in my intro, these games have never really clicked that well for me. They are meant to feel like horror movies changed into a game, but with so much downtime (especially with Little Hope) they have suffered from bad pacing. That is not the case here, if House of Ashes was a film, it would be a wild creature feature, the claustrophobia of The Descent mixed with the high action of Aliens, with a little bit of Lovecraftian cosmic terror swirled into the mix. From the thrilling prologue that takes place in 2231 BC, all the way up to the action filled finale, this just didn't drop the ball in term of constant excitement, there was barely any sense of downtime throughout. That was really impressive that this remained so exciting and focussed over the six or seven hour playtime.
Previous games have not really had memorable characters, and while the cast of House of Ashes are arguably stereotypes, that more than anything really cemented the feeling of playing through a wild B-movie horror film. A part of these games is shaping characters into the type of people you want them to be. I had two firm favourites here, firstly, Jason was a character I grew to love, initially my version of him was a bit of a xenophobe, but the bromance that can develop between him and Iraqi soldier Salim (Nick E. Tarabay - Pacific Rim: Uprising) was wonderful to see play out. On the subject of Salim, I thought it was a really good decision to not only include an Iraqi soldier as one of the playable characters, but to make him such a good person. Salim is a badass who is not only reasonable, but has the most noblest of aims, wanting to escape so that he can get back to his child who he is a single parent to. I loved the agency it felt like I had been given to mold these characters to what I believed them to be. In one of the cheesy (yet great) scenes towards the end you can choose whether to go back for Salim (who had gotten separated) or continue forward, with Jason stating to the question of why he would go back to assist an enemy something along the lines of (paraphrasing) "After all we have been through I see him as one of us. We never leave a soldier behind!".
I've been skirting around the antagonist monsters of the game, and while I won't go into too much detail, they are a spin on a traditional movie monster, and they are a constant threat. The world building was excellent for this, not only with its insight as to what happened to the ancient civilisation who once existed there, but also with regards to an ill fated expedition to the temple in the 1940's. The later is represented later on with a series of fun black and white flashback sequences that reveal what happened to them. Being set almost entirely underground there were plenty of memorable locations. Sure, you get lots of caverns, but you also get lots and lots of temple, and the late game reveal that takes you to a cosmic nightmare that wouldn't be out of place in a H.P Lovecraft story.
With The Quarry one complaint I had was how easy the quick time events were to pass, here there are so many, and some have such tight time limits that I failed a fair few. Luckily none of the ones I failed led to anyone dying, I didn't survive the game with everyone intact, but only due to purposely killing off one or two due to feeling like it would have been appropriate times for them to die if this had been a film I was watching.
If House of Ashes had been a movie I would have loved it, and getting to take these mostly interesting characters through their ordeal was a huge amount of fun. That this managed to even end on a good note was impressive, as mild spoilers, the previous anthology games had late twists that suggested things really were not as they had appeared, but this one commits to the events playing out in a way that was satisfying to see. I thought The Dark Pictures: House of Ashes was a fantastic horror game, and hopefully this is the series finally reaching its potential.
SCORE:
No comments:
Post a Comment