For better or worse the Dark anthology series and Supermassive games as a whole is something I certainly have.... opinions about. House of Ashes though is the bloody worst of them all, by a long shot.
The lingering feeling of having missed or got an input wrong in previous games is here turned up to the max where frequently there seemingly is no correlation between what you try to achieve and what you actually get out of the game, unless what you wanted to achieve was meaningless walking and meandering looking for clues, collectibles and any semblance of having your actions as a player matter to the outcome of the story.
And by the Lord, do we have a story here. Little over a month since the end of the Afghan war, House of Ashes delights us with one of the most tone deaf presentations of the war in the middle East that was ever given in fiction. And that's just the thematic surface because below that we have a wide array of cinematic references to cult classic horror sci-fi movies such as Alien, and Aliens, or Alien³, and Alien Resurrection, Alien vs Predator and, sometimes, it will spice things up by bringing in Prometheus and Alien Covenant. And it will always, categorically, refuse to do anything interesting with any of its inspirations and rather just give us the barebone experience of boring military dudes stuck in a midly interesting situation and you have to just take the controller maybe a couple of times because this is an interactive movie and apparently that's how we do horror today.
Too bad all this series has been so far is covering for annoying cliches and taking what could amount to a bad hour and a half long movie and stretch it to a four to five hours slog, which isn't made better by playing it with your friends. At all. Watching horror movies with your friends is fun, at best they can be deeply engaging, visceral, camp even, but playing one of these pile of manure even with company is just passing around the controller to give inputs to meaningless chores, like picking up paper documents and opening doors and fucking breathing of all things, while a movie devoid of personality and character plays, diserargind pacing, enjoyment or any semblance of quality narrative.
To hell with all this.
The lingering feeling of having missed or got an input wrong in previous games is here turned up to the max where frequently there seemingly is no correlation between what you try to achieve and what you actually get out of the game, unless what you wanted to achieve was meaningless walking and meandering looking for clues, collectibles and any semblance of having your actions as a player matter to the outcome of the story.
And by the Lord, do we have a story here. Little over a month since the end of the Afghan war, House of Ashes delights us with one of the most tone deaf presentations of the war in the middle East that was ever given in fiction. And that's just the thematic surface because below that we have a wide array of cinematic references to cult classic horror sci-fi movies such as Alien, and Aliens, or Alien³, and Alien Resurrection, Alien vs Predator and, sometimes, it will spice things up by bringing in Prometheus and Alien Covenant. And it will always, categorically, refuse to do anything interesting with any of its inspirations and rather just give us the barebone experience of boring military dudes stuck in a midly interesting situation and you have to just take the controller maybe a couple of times because this is an interactive movie and apparently that's how we do horror today.
Too bad all this series has been so far is covering for annoying cliches and taking what could amount to a bad hour and a half long movie and stretch it to a four to five hours slog, which isn't made better by playing it with your friends. At all. Watching horror movies with your friends is fun, at best they can be deeply engaging, visceral, camp even, but playing one of these pile of manure even with company is just passing around the controller to give inputs to meaningless chores, like picking up paper documents and opening doors and fucking breathing of all things, while a movie devoid of personality and character plays, diserargind pacing, enjoyment or any semblance of quality narrative.
To hell with all this.