Bandai Namco and the developer team Supermassive Games are back with the third episode of The Dark Pictures Anthology titled House of Ashes. Like the previous episodes, this episode tells a whole new story with its own cast of characters and it’s time to introduce you to it through this review.
The story takes us to Iraq and puts us in the role of a group of US army soldiers who are assigned an urgent mission to control a weapons store, but it turns out that their destination was not in the right direction, and after a sudden earthquake, the soldiers fall with a group of Iraqi army soldiers underground to find themselves in a strange temple that compensates for the Sumerian civilization But they are not the only ones in this dimension, it is full of fearsome and ferocious monsters and here the enemy of my enemy becomes my friend! The story in this version is the best among the episodes that were released in our opinion, as it provided answers to some questions while keeping some other details vague with some unexpected events.
The story is not without some of the flaws that we encountered in previous versions, as there are many superficial dialogues that could have been abandoned, and the team deliberately made some characters take illogical and often very stupid decisions to create a dramatic situation no more, which is something we were bored of in previous versions And it happens so intensely in this version, one of the things we liked about this episode is the presentation of a number of short recordings that you will see when collecting documents and checking the evidence provided by the surrounding environment, and these recordings give an idea of where the events are taking place in an excellent way that encourages you to search for These documents are to discover more details, unlike the crew of the previous episodes, we found the crew of this version very interesting, and although it is the same crew that the military films will present in its traditional structure, there is enough depth to distinguish each character from the other.
On the graphic level, the game offers a graphic level similar to the previous two versions, but with a better refinement of the designs of the characters whose quality varied between the scenes in the last version, but they are excellent in this version and the environment designs are accurate and beautiful as usual, the features of the characters and the movement of the faces look a little better, but they still look rigid And it needs a lot of work, on the audio front, as the game offers tense and sometimes enthusiastic music in action-packed scenes which is well done in the various episodes.
We have to devote a few lines to talking about the voice acting, one of the main characters that you will control is a character in the Iraqi army and there are many scenes in the game in which that character and other characters will speak in Arabic, but the voice acting is in the Egyptian dialect, not the Iraqi! We do not know how such a fatal error was committed and how it was not realized by the development team, as there are a number of texts that appear to be literally translated from English, resulting in some strange texts.
The control system gets some changes in this version. The camera is now free to move, unlike the fixed camera in previous versions, which is a good decision and allows you to see all aspects of the environment you are going through and helps you notice evidence and documents better, all characters now have a source of light such as a flashlight that can be activated While navigating in dark areas and one of the excellent changes in this version is the change in the nature of the QTE scenes which you had to try to survive in previous versions but this version makes many of these problems a moral dilemma or an option to risk a personal life to save another character and there was Unexpected results for these scenes, which made us immerse ourselves more in the experience while thinking carefully about whether pressing the appropriate button is the right choice or not.
The last difference that we will mention in this review is the introduction of the game to three difficulty modes, easy, medium and hard, but with the game’s own names, which is an excellent decision and affects the speed of the QTE scenes no more, but it is an excellent decision. Which gives you more than enough time to press the appropriate button or make the decision that suits you in some scenes.
Besides the single-player mode, the game offers the same multiplayer modes from the previous episodes. You have the Movie Night mode in which you choose each of the five characters and who will play with them to give the console to your companion who chose that character when it’s his turn, and there is the Shared Story mode in which you play Experiment with another player through the network in an experiment in which you choose your own decisions in some scenes while the other player will go through parallel scenes to make his decisions.
We finished the experiment within 5 hours on the first attempt and about 4 hours on the second attempt. We found a greater diversity of possible possibilities in this episode than in the previous episode (which was frustrating). It is possible to choose many decisions similar to the first attempt, but a small change in the decisions changes the course of the events are greatly, and although some of the consequences are not justified, the largest percentage is directly related to your decisions. House of Ashes is not ideal and still suffers from some of the problems that the previous episodes suffered from, but it is considered the best in this series of episodes so far, and this time it succeeded in Presenting an exciting story with thoughtful decisions and some good gameplay tweaks.
This game was revised for the PlayStation 4.