House of Ashes

The third installment in the Dark Pictures Anthology, House of Ashes, is a much-needed improvement over its predecessors, abandoning the psychological twists that so marred those narratives to instead offer a more basic, but effective horror adventure.

The story starts with an Akkadian king obsessed with blood sacrifices, and so deemed mad by his own general, facing an imminent invasion during an eclipse. The enemy charging the Akkadian temple seems fierce and unstoppable, but when the general flees through the temple’s catacombs alongside an escaped prisoner, he finds out there are even more horrible things waiting for him in the dark. We then jump a few years in time and the Akkadian Empire is now the country of Iraq. Ruled by Saddam Hussein, it’s facing a foreign invasion by the United States, which is in search of oil and more geopolitical power.

We follow a group of American soldiers led by the young and ambitious Lieutenant Colonel Eric King, who is hellbent on finding the fabled weapons of mass destruction held by Hussein before he’s pulled out of Iraq. It’s the final days of occupation and Eric’s last mission is to raid a village suspected of concealing an underground base, but as soon as the Iraqis retaliate and the ground shakes and gives up, making them fall into a lost Akkadian temple, the Americans discover that Iraq is home to a much worse problem than chemical weapons: vampires.

But before the monsters can hunt and kill the Americans, we are briefly introduced to this cast of main characters and their problems. Eric’s marriage with CIA officer Rachel, for example, has been in jeopardy since an accident that cost him his leg – she got them in a car crash, and he blamed her for it. So, after spending many months apart in their respective missions, the relationship withered. However, they have both found distinct ways to deal with growing distant from each other: while Rachel sought sexual solace with a marine named Nick, Eric decided to wear his wedding ring in a necklace to keep it closer to his heart.

Eric is as beloved a leader as he is a husband, with his authority being frequently challenged by those around him, who find the Lieutenant an insufferable douchebag. If Rachel’s betrayal pushes us to side with him, his usually arrogant demeanor pulls us back to Rachel’s side, making us understand where she’s coming from. Eric’s arc is all about his personal relationship with his wife – his career is just one element of it –, which reflects the importance she has on his life: while Rachel’s arc extends beyond Eric – being more about her ruthlessness as a person –, his always comes back to her, showing us how she’s everything to him, defining who he is. One of the main sources of tension in the story, then, arises precisely from how he will react to the affair – if with violence or melancholic resignation – and the game gives us some input on the matter.

For example, there’s a somewhat early scene that may paint Eric under a darker light if we so choose. After finding out about Nick – the exact point of discovery changes depending on our actions –, Eric finds himself desperately holding the rope that’s preventing Rachel from falling into an abyss. He doesn’t seem to be able to hold on to it for much longer and is starting to be dragged down with her, so the game gives us the choice to make Eric keep trying to pull her up or cut the rope and let his wife fall – either to save himself or to punish Rachel, or even for both reasons.

However, it’s important to note that Rachel falls into the abyss no matter how we make Eric act in this scene, which means the choice of cutting the rope or not is more about what the outcome means to the characters than the outcome itself. It may be an accident or an attempted murder, in other words, so is Rachel going to come back thankful that Eric didn’t let go of her or rightfully angry at him for cutting her rope? Choice and consequence in the Dark Pictures Anthology have always leaned more into this psychological side – probably to contain the number of possible branching paths and still offer plenty of choices to the player – and, when they are done right like this, we can use these moments to mold more complex and tragic figures.

The thematic core of House of Ashes, however, lies not with Eric and Rachel, but with the tension created between another pair, Jason and Samin. Jason is the type of marine who likes to paint himself as a fierce patriot, the one who is willing to do the hard thing to keep his country safe. In other words, the type that justifies war crimes as a necessary evil. He’s an American soldier in Iraq, so “the hard thing” for him is shooting down civilians because he’s afraid they might be carrying a bomb. Nick, Rachel’s lover, is haunted by such an event, but Jason seems to be unbothered by what happened: they’re in a war, so it had to be done. Casualties are inevitable, after all.  “We had to act in the moment. We had to make a call!” he says.

Jason’s characterization is not subtle: he wears a baseball cap with a 9/11 inscription to “honor the dead” and suggests that Eric employ white phosphorus during the raid on the village. His “positive trait” is the one that’s very useful in soldiers: loyalty. Jason is always repeating the “Semper Fi” motto (it’s Latin for “always loyal”) and showing how he’s ready to give his life for any of his companions. But the rub with loyalty is that it disregards morality, dragging the loyal to the same muddy pit where the thing they’re loyal to operates in: loyalty may very well involve supporting injustice or even being part of it. Jason bats an eye to war crimes because he’s loyal to his country and this is what loyalty to the United States entails.

But alongside him, stuck in the underground temple, there’s Salim, a member of the Iraqi Republican Guard. Salim, however, is a “good foreigner”: his first scene is about family and his unwillingness to fight the Americans. It shows him at home, looking for his son, before he is dragged into the village raid by his commanding officer. So, House of Ashes pairs a patriotic American with a reluctant Iraqi to show them overcoming their differences to defeat a bigger foe – the vampires.

Despite the complete lack of subtlety in their characterization – maybe precisely because of it – Jason and Salim are great together. Salim’s unwillingness to fight, for example, functions as a counterpoint to Jason’s aggressiveness, even though the marine’s demeaning comments clearly get to Salim – the invaded always having to be the calm one, the civil one, to placate the hate of the invader. The vampires force Jason to see Salim as a person instead of a one-dimensional monster because they are the truly one-dimensional monsters set to kill them both. In an important scene, Jason talks to Salim about his 9/11 hat, explaining how his patriotic façade is just that: a mask that had the power to direct his frustrations and anger to a simple enemy, giving him a goal in life. His patriotism, then, is not honest, but a convenient excuse, and the fierceness of it is a way to conceal this fact.

But thematically, if the vampires work as this hellish monster that brings warring people together, they also pose an important question: would someone like Jason be a lost cause in a world without fabled creatures living in underground temples to serve as a stark counterpoint to Salim? If the counterpoint to work must be fantastical in nature, what can we do in real life? How to get to someone so lost in the military propaganda that they make it their whole personality? House of Ashes is content with its vampires and doesn’t dabble with these more complicated questions.

Nevertheless, the first scenes of the vampire attack, when the characters finally realize the nature of the trouble they’re in, are very successful in establishing how vicious and deadly the monsters are. The vampires quickly dispatch secondary characters, pulling them from the shadows or jumping at them from conspicuous holes in the underground temple.

Unlike the previous Dark Picture Anthology games, the monsters are there on the screen from the start, which makes a huge difference to the overall experience. Quick-time events, for example, become much more tense after we witness a soldier being ripped to pieces after a single slip. These games have plenty of scenes where a character has to hold their breath to not alert an enclosing threat – where we must press a button in the rhythm of their heartbeat to succeed –, but in Man of Medan and Little Hope, the threat usually remained concealed because the whole scene – due to the nature of those stories – was actually a fake-out: the thing making the noise was just a rat or another character approaching. Here, however, we see the vampires in all their monstrous glory, and so, with their brutality effectively established, we are now given reason to get properly tense with these sequences.

Finally, still speaking of the vampires, during its final hours, the game tries to pull away from the Orientalism that it seemed to fully embrace at first, but it goes only halfway. In House of Ashes, as in many other horror stories, characters discover that the Orient is home to the supernatural, that it’s a land that conceals dark secrets, that if fully “explored” by the West the Orient would reveal its most horrid truths. Later on, however, the story tries to veer away from the “home” status of the Orient, but it doesn’t commit to it: the locals still seem to revere that temple, after all, boasting its symbols, and teasing the Americans that they’re about to meet a terrible fate. In other words, it may not be technically home to the vampires, but the Orient in House of Ashes embraces them nonetheless.

The story only falters during its last set-piece, which seems tacked on after the proper climax that preceded it, a “one more thing” action sequence with little narrative existence to exist – and one that brings nothing but problems to the worldbuilding to deal with.

The structure of the Dark Pictures Anthology, with its many quick-time events in action scenes, has always catered more to a story with a real monster there to frighten the characters and make them try to escape. House of Ashes, however, is the first game in the anthology to try to delve into this type of horror, finally offering an engrossing experience to players.

September 05, 2024.