House Of Ashes treats post-9/11 Iraq like just another B-movie haunted house

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?

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William Hughes: There are few things you can set your watch to in modern gaming. Outside a handful of franchises—your Maddens and your Call Of Dutys, which roll off the assembly line every year like very expensive clockwork—games are usually too big, and too complicated, to hit any kind of annual schedule. (Especially if the studios in question have any interest in avoiding the horrors of developer burnout and crunch.)

The big exception, in recent years, has been The Dark Pictures Anthology. Developed by Supermassive Games—in an obvious attempt to craft something sustainable in the shadow of its massive, Oscar-winner-starring playable horror movie Until Dawn—the DPA franchise has deployed a new game every October for the last three years, inviting players to spend four or five hours fending off jump scares, moral choices, and quick-time events in order to guide a cast of unlikable assholes through Supermassive’s latest digital haunted house.

My colleague Alex McLevy and I are now veterans of the Dark Pictures beat, having previously played together through 2019’s “spooky boat” adventure Man Of Medan, and last year’s psychological witch-horror title Little Hope. And it says something about the appeal of this series, and the general rarity of those things that it gets really right, that I was genuinely excited at the thought of playing with Alex through the latest game, House Of Ashes, when it came out last week—despite finding both of the previous installments lackluster, and kind of conceptually cowardly.

Which: Say what you like about the near-overwhelming mess that is House Of Ashes, but at least it’s refreshing to see this series take some swings for once. Said dopey ambitions starts with a premise that makes it clear exactly how over-their-heads Supermassive has decided to go with this latest game: Instead of death-prone tourists or hapless college students, this third game sees you take on the role of a team of Marines and intelligence operatives on a mission in Iraq in 2003, attempting to find Saddam’s (wholly fictitious) WMDs.

House Of Ashes doesn’t shy away from the implications of that bizarrely confident choice, either. This a game that plays snippets of George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech. A character sports a hat with a 9/11 memorial scribbled on it, numbering the Iraqis he’s killed in retaliation for their (also wholly fictitious) participation in the attacks. Xenophobia and the cycle of revenge are a major theme. It is, on every level, about as far above this goofy horror franchise’s weight class as you could ever expect to see it punch.

And yet, I have to give it to House Of Ashes: It had the courage of its convictions, something that the previous two Dark Pictures games—which went way out of their way to step back from saying anything about anything—sorely lacked. What did you think, Alex? Does House Of Ashes earn its choices? How far can audacity take you?

Alex McLevy: The phrase “the audacity of nope” comes to mind, simply because every time this game tried to introduce some moral nuance or highlight the sociopolitical error of the scale of the Iraq war, it did so with all the wit and subtlety of… well, the two previous Dark Pictures games.

And yet that’s part of the fun, isn’t it? Just allowing yourself to laugh at the sheer chutzpah of what House Of Ashes attempts to tackle in its own lunkheaded way. When your game begins in 2331 B.C., solely in order to introduce the ravenous supernatural creatures who will soon be feasting upon the innards of your ill-fated soldiers, you have to admire the go-for-broke confidence of a series whose budget seems to dip a little with each passing installment.

Because the scope and scale are larger in every way than the previous iteration, I started to develop a feeling of “fuck it” glee as we descended further into the earth here, William. The game couldn’t stop introducing new wrinkles to its story, each more massive than the last. What initially seemed like it would be something akin to Alien soon turned into Aliens—which should tell any fan of that franchise just how big a shift transpires here. And that’s without even delving into a whole separate part of the mythology that makes the phrase “dead man walking” heartily applicable.

So once again, I find myself endorsing a game whose flaws are almost laughably glaring. But it was fun calling out those flaws with you as we played! And even when I found myself growing annoyed at the sometimes janky mechanics, the fact that any subsequent results fall under the umbrella of “Well, what are you gonna do?” in terms of outcome means my investment is so much less than a game in which I was actually committed to “winning,” in the traditional sense. Is any of this sounding familiar to you, Will? And more importantly: Was the lead character, played with glassy-eyed blankness by ex-High School Musical actor and musician Ashley Tisdale, as much of a charisma black hole as she was to me? (Whether that’s due to shitty budgets for mo-cap or her performance, I leave to the fates to decide.)

WH: If there’s one thing that the Dark Pictures games have legitimately improved on from the Until Dawn formula, it’s in channeling that game’s potent “Laugh at the B-movie” vibes into a playable mechanic. Having an online friend along to crack jokes with as the plot just gets sillier and sillier has become a major part of this series’ appeal.

As to Tisdale—who will always, and forever, be the unfortunate subject of Forrest McNeil’s romantic attentions in an especially cringe-inducing installment of Review to me—I spent significantly less time with her than you did, since the game’s arbitrary split of playable characters favored putting her in your control. That being said: They do not appear to have bothered capturing more than three facial expressions for her character, Rachel: Dull surprise, dull anger, and just plain dull.

But maybe that’s the fault of our choices, Alex, because it turns out we did a terrible job at keeping people alive while playing through House Of Ashes. During play, we assumed the game was a more railroaded affair than previous DPA games, killing characters off indiscriminately. But it turns out that we just suck; it’s totally possible to keep your whole crew alive as they have their underground adventure, provided you don’t do things like, say, ignore the very obvious prompts that dangling over a chasm while someone shoots at you is a bad idea. No wonder horror host The Curator (Pip Torrens, who is probably a very good actor in things that aren’t this) was so bored by our performance.

The worst thing you can say about House Of Ashes, I think—leaving aside its cynicism, its pretentions of deeper meaning, its infuriatingly difficult stealth sections, etc.—is that it goes on long enough to smear every individual scene into a sort of same-y paste. Even as the story goes completely off the rails in the final act, the sheer length of the damn thing starts to drag down the energy. There’s a reason more schlocky horror movies aren’t five hours long.

And yet, damn them and damn me, I’m still excited for the next game, The Devil In Me, which is being touted as the season finale for this Westeros-esque four-year “season.” At the very least, I’ll finally be able to definitively rank these damn things. How about you, Alex? Are you excited to see what final twists this series has in store?

AM: William, your comments here inspired me to go back and take another pass, and damned if you aren’t right—we did a terrible job protecting our folks. And sure, while it’s still very much a winnowing of the branching narrative, akin to last year’s Little Hope (where the roster of characters rarely changed the number of sequences you went through, only the order in which you did them), that’s not nothing.

So yes, I’m looking forward to the finale: In part because these stupid things are an annual Halloween bon mot of so-bad-it’s-good entertainment, but also because I’m curious what the hell they think ties this “season” together. I’m guessing the Curator retires—and by the lackluster enthusiasm he showed our most recent outing, I think he’s excited to claim his pension and get the hell out.