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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 [...]
This review contains all the spoilers. All of them.
The second game in the Dark Pictures Anthology, the collection of short horror stories presented by a sinister entity called the Curator, Little Hope is a disappointing follow-up to the already mediocre Man of Medan, falling into the same narrative pitfalls that so marred the first game: it once again suffers from a deeply problematic ending that retroactively breaks the story, and from an overreliance on cheap jump scares that quickly overstay their welcome.
It all begins with a bus driver getting into an accident when he’s arriving at the town of Little Hope. Since it’s too dark inside the bus, we don’t see his [...]
The first game of The Dark Pictures Anthology, Man of Medan, has some good ideas up its sleeve, but they are ultimately wasted on a very problematic story. The game fails to develop interesting characters and build a horror atmosphere, especially on repeated playthroughs.
The story follows Alex, a young man who decides to go for a dive with his girlfriend, Julia, to explore underwater wrecks. Alex’s brother, Brad, has found a note talking of a “Manchurian Gold”, with some coordinates in the paper, and they decide to investigate the subject. However, they’re soon boarded by pirates, who take them to the coordinates, finding a ghost ship.
Man of Medan opens on a negative [...]